Many independent artists struggle with social media marketing. It’s not easy to know what exactly to post to break through the noise, get your music heard and reach new potential fans.

I put together a case study based on a recent album campaign I did to show you that it’s not as complicated as it seems to gain traction on social media.

This album rollout campaign resulted in 3 videos I created to promote singles for an artist going viral. This led to Snoop Dogg reposting one of these videos to his 80 million Instagram followers and Erykah Badu sharing another video to her Instagram Stories.

The organic reach for these viral videos spread well outside our network where random, high-profile artists, comedians and celebrities even engaged with the videos. This was my first time experiencing something like this so it was quite interesting to see it unfold.

During the 3 month campaign that started with the first single release on 8/8/24:

• We accumulated over 10 million views for the videos promoting the singles across all platforms (Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube Shorts). The videos were shared over 120k times.
• Spotify monthly listeners increased by over 35,000 (25% increase)
• Instagram followers increased by over 4x
• TikTok followers increased by over 17x
• One song from the new album, What Dreams Are Made Of, was added to a Spotify editorial playlist with 241k followers and brought over 80k streams during this period.
• On Spotify, the songs on the new album accumulated over 288k streams, 90k listeners, 28k saves, and 15k playlist adds within these 3 months.

Although we didn’t go mega-viral, these numbers were still impactful for a middle-class, independent artist seeing success on social media for the first time, with numbers exceeding well beyond the norm of what we were used to seeing.

What can other artists learn from this experience to build traction on social media?

In this blog, I will share the full breakdown and timeline of this album campaign, how we tried to capitalize on these viral moments and key takeaways that you can apply to your next campaign.
 

Before The Viral Campaign

 
Before getting into the full details, I want to share some context on how things led up to this album campaign that I feel many musicians can relate to.

However, if you just want to dive into the next section, the key to our viral success was posting short-form performance videos on socials (Spoiler Alert). I wrote an entire blog on this that you can check out.

Like many artists, even those in the music industry for decades, we struggled to find organic success posting on social media and remain a victim to the all-mighty algorithm. We were stuck at around 20k followers on Instagram and 1.4k followers on TikTok.

For previous album rollouts, we kept things relatively traditional with long-form music videos and bits of behind-the-scenes content here and there. When it came to views and reach, our measure of success was reaching views over 10k on Instagram and 800 on TikTok. These are not high standards, but that was the struggle we faced.

As a millennial marketer, I’ll be honest and say I’ve been avoiding TikTok and short-form content for many years despite being aware of its impact. All the artists I work with are already established to some degree, so it took time to figure out a content angle that would make sense for them.

The inherent problem with our marketing efforts has been focusing more on activating/engaging current fans and hoping they would be the ones to lead new potential fans into our marketing funnel through word-of-mouth tactics (i.e. sharing traditional music videos on social media, using songs in their Instagram Stories or playing songs for friends). In other words, not being more intentional with how to market to new fans with how technology and consumer behavior have evolved.

Over the years, I have found this to be an extremely common problem for established and seasoned artists. The discovery potential with the algorithms on these platforms (TikTok, Instagram, YouTube) can be massive, but you have to create and format specific content that they want to push to their user base.

For the past year or so, I began noticing more and more artists finding organic success on social media by posting vertically one-shot performance clips with lyrics on the videos. This was my “ah-ha” or eureka moment.

I realized many musicians were taking elements of a traditional long-form music video and adapting it as short-form vertical videos specifically for social media.

However, even editing short clips from a traditional music video into a vertical format isn’t good enough. I touch more on this later.

For decades, traditional music videos have been the primary marketing tool for artists to reach new potential fans. The problem is no one watches full music videos on social media and the algorithms hate it.

I was able to one artist to buy into the idea so we decided to give it a shot in the summer of 2024 with an acoustic album of many of the artist’s popular songs.

We posted about 20 short-form performance videos and there was a good response on Instagram with a few of them. Overall, we did notice that posting these types of short-form Reels gave us more views and engagement than we typically saw by pushing it to non-followers. The cool thing about Instagram analytics is that you can see how a Reel performs with your followers versus non-followers and how many followers you gain from the video.

This allowed us to experiment further and get more familiar with TikTok, a platform I’ve avoided diving into for so many years. With this experience, we were able to do this campaign again, but with the new studio album.
 

Viral Campaign Timeline

 
Now that we have that covered, here’s a breakdown of all the key moments during the campaign. I have included links to the exact video to give you a better idea of what was posted.

Thursday, August 8, 2024: The album campaign kicked off with the first single release of Take It 2 Far. The first short-form performance video was posted on all platforms on the same day. The video started with the chorus, and then led into the first verse. It performed poorly, initially getting only a couple hundred views the first day.

Tuesday, August 13, 2024: The next video to promote Take It 2 Far, starting on verse two, was posted and went viral on TikTok.

Views for the first 7 days of Take It 2 Far on TikTok

Even though it started to tail off a bit, the algorithm was still pushing the video steadily for over a month and brought in hundreds of new followers a day.

For comparison, this is what we typically would see as best case scenario on TikTok before this album campaign started:

The graph above is for a video promoting an acoustic version of his most popular song with over 10 million streams across all platforms.

After the first couple of days, we were getting noticeable bumps in views and engagement too. Once the algorithm favors your video, it’ll push all your other videos to non-followers.

Tuesday, August 20, 2024: After about a week of the song taking off on TikTok, the momentum carried over to Instagram. Up to this point, we gained about 5k followers on Instagram and 5.6k on TikTok.

To keep the momentum going, we shot another batch of videos for the song in a different location. However, none of the videos for this single would ever reach the same heights as the initial viral video.

Wednesday, August 21, 2024: I got a text from the artist showing that Snoop Dogg reacted to his Reel and followed him.

Shortly after, he reposted our Reel to his 89.2 million followers on Instagram.

The video Snoop Dogg reposted to this Instagram followers.

Side Note: We have no idea how Snoop Dogg came across the video as it seemed very random but we’re glad it came across his radar. Because the video was going viral on TikTok and did not have the same response on Instagram. By the time Snoop Dogg saw the video and reposted it, we had FB and IG ads running for about a week already. It’s possible he saw the ad or maybe someone who follows shared it and was connected with Snoop. Who knows.

Thursday, August 22, 2024: After about 24 hours, Snoops’s video hit about 1.3 million views, 30k likes and 1k comments on his Instagram. We wanted to make sure people knew about this so in the next video post for the song, we wanted to acknowledge that Snoop reposted it. We mentioned it in the caption.

Friday, August 23, 2024: Another type of content we introduced was responding to popular comments with videos. The goal was to engage the new fans and show some personality to build a deeper brand relationship with the artist outside of the music. Although these videos didn’t go viral, some of them performed extremely well because of their entertainment value.

We also used this opportunity to make sure people knew about Snoop Dogg reposting. There were already people commenting that either the song reminds them of Snoop Dogg or that Snoop should be on the remix. This was a great tie-in for one of these types of videos.

Wednesday, September 4, 2024: In order to take this momentum to the next level, I felt like we needed to spark more user-generated content (UGC). The hope was to figure out how to incorporate the song into a dance challenge. Instead, we tried launching an open verse challenge for the first time. It didn’t do too well, but we did have about 20 people participate across all platforms.

Thursday, September 12, 2024: The next single “What Dreams Are Made Of” drops. We shot a batch of videos on a rooftop from a space we rented. None of the 6 short-form videos we posted to promote this song went viral, but it still had a positive response.

Friday, September 13, 2024: The second single was added to a Spotify Editorial playlist with 241k followers.

This song was originally supposed to be the last single before the album dropped but we moved it up in response to the viral success we were having with the first single. Because of this, I submitted the song for Spotify editorial playlist consideration a week before the single release date and thankfully it still got added. However, it is still recommended to submit to Spotify at least 3 to 4 weeks in advance of the release date.

During the 3-month album campaign, this playlist brought in over 80k streams. It was great this happened because we can compare streaming numbers for a song that got playlisted but didn’t have the same social media success as the other singles.

Thursday, October 3, 2024: The third single Can We Still Be Friends officially drops and eventually became our most viral song. However, the first video flopped.

Due to scheduling issues, we had to shoot last minute at night the day before the single release. I was not prepared to shoot, but we just needed to improvise something to get a video out for release day.

Not a strong start, but the beauty of doing these short-form videos is it doesn’t matter. You can keep posting until something hits.

Thursday, October 10, 2024: We shot another batch of videos for the third single. For the second video, I wanted to experiment with posting a video that was still on a tripod and had the artist sitting this time. The camera was handheld in all the previous videos and he was standing.

This video also flopped, but why? Was it because of the still shot? Was it the sitting? Or was it because it started with the chorus and went into the first verse? Although it was easy to say that a sitting shot, especially if there isn’t any camera movement, doesn’t make for an interesting or engaging video, we learned that wasn’t the case.

Tuesday, October 15, 2024: The third video we posted went viral and hit similar numbers as the first viral video in August. I wasn’t ready to rule out that a sitting and still camera shot could work so I tried it again. This time, I started the video with the second verse and that did the trick. Also, the reason this video also did better is because you can see his entire outfit.

I believe this video helped the next one to go viral, reaching the most views we’ve seen on a single video so far.

Thursday, October 17, 2024: We post the fourth video and it goes viral, reaching over 2 million views across all platforms and becoming our most successful one in the campaign.

Monday, October 21, 2024: We introduced “fit check” as a new type of content to experiment with. As a fashionista, this type of content made sense for the artist and it did well hitting 160k views. It even caught the attention of West Coast legend Suga Free, to whom many commenters during this campaign have compared the artist to during the album campaign.

Friday, October 25, 2024: The new album officially drops on all platforms.

Monday, October 28, 2024: I suggested the artist go live on TikTok and Instagram to talk to fans about the new album. As strange as it sounds, this move was more about showing the new followers that this artist is a person.

Tuesday, October 29, 2024: Because of the viral success of the video we posted on 10/17, we wanted to post another one with the same backdrop. Unfortunately, it was the last and only take we did in front of the house before getting kicked off the property so we couldn’t finish recording the second verse.

Since we only had half of the second verse recorded, we shared a 20-second snippet and it went viral, also reaching 2 million views across all platforms.

Thursday, October 31, 2024: We released our only “traditional” music video for “It Might Not Be Love” on YouTube. This was shot the previous year. For how much was spent on this music video, it did not provide a good return on investment for how it performed compared to the short-form videos.

We posted a short snippet of the music video on socials but it didn’t perform well. The mistake the first time was mentioning the full video was on YouTube in the captions and on the video itself, which could have potentially caused algorithms to derank it.

Wednesday, November 13, 2024: Erykah Badu shared the 20-second snippet on her Instagram Story. Although this didn’t really move the needle, we still gained about a thousand new followers and it was cool to see this as big fans of the artist.

Screenshot of the Erkyah Badu repost on Instagram Stories

Thursday, November 14, 2024: We introduced a new type of content called BS Comments where the artist would respond to negative comments. It’s our take on Jimmy Kimmel’s Mean Tweets where artists, athletes and celebrities respond to mean comments about them.

Thursday, December 5, 2024: Since the traditional music video wasn’t effective, we shot a batch of videos for the fourth single at a local bar. We posted the first short-form video, outperforming the clips pulled from the music video.

Wednesday, December 18, 2024: The best video for “It Might Not Be Love” out of the recent bunch was posted and it also started to take off leading up to Christmas.

Instagram graph showing the Reel performance for It Might Not Be Love.

It’s annoying that once you run an ad on an Instagram video, the performance metric graphics for ‘followers versus non-followers’ disappear so I can’t show previous ones unfortunately. But since we didn’t run this video as an ad, I’m able to share what the graph looks like for this video. Of course, it doesn’t take a data scientist to understand that this is the type of performance you want to see – views increasing from non-followers.
 

Social Media Campaign Costs

 
For this campaign, we wanted to keep costs at a minimum by focusing on building organic momentum on social media.

Even though we accomplished this, we made sure to push the album from all angles. In addition to paying for radio promotion and a publicist, we also put ad money behind videos that were gaining traction to add fuel to the fire. All these things did help, but all of the momentum came from organic socials from these short-form videos.

So if we’re just looking at the core costs of creating and posting videos on social media, including ad spend, it was about $1,000. This also includes a $250 rental fee to book a rooftop to shoot videos for one of the singles.

This does not of course include the cost to hire someone like myself to manage the entire campaign and create the video assets, but if you’re doing it yourself, this won’t be a cost for you.
 

Key Viral Video Takeaways

 
1. Going viral is often unexpected. You hear this a lot from people who go viral. In our situation, it was definitely true. We were seeing some success posting short-form performance clips for a previous acoustic album release but did not expect any of our videos to take off like the first one.

Because it is unexpected, it’s good to be aware of the action steps you should take if it were to happen to you to keep the momentum going. I cover this below.

2. Negative comments are “good.” As you become more popular, you will naturally have more haters and attract more negativity your way. Unfortunately, that’s the way our culture and society works now. But people leaving negative comments ultimately help your video in the algorithms. This can be viewed as a good thing as long as you’re not reading these comments or taking them to heart.

As someone who read most of the comments, I would say 90% were positive and 10% were negative. A lot of the “negative” comments were drawing comparisons to what the artist looks or sounds like to be funny or entertaining.

3. Luck and timing still matter a lot. The first time I posted the video for the first single, the numbers were doing what they normally would do. But the next video took off on TikTok only and not the other platforms.

The second video that went viral, promoting the third single, took off on Instagram and not TikTok.

Through experimentation leading up to these viral videos, I found that posting around 9AM PT on either Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday worked the best for us. The analytics on Instagram and TikTok showed that our peak active users was at about 4PM PT.

Sometimes you don’t know what video will catch with the algorithm. You just have to do your best to use the analytics to find the best times to post and keep trying.

4. Comment baiting in the videos helped. It’s one thing to ask a question in the caption as a way to encourage comments from your fans. It’s another thing if elements in the videos naturally encourage people to leave a comment. This could be from how you look, how you dress or any imperfections in the video.

From our end, it was something that was totally unintentional, but it worked in our favor. The artist is very fashion-conscious and can be a bit more… adventurous with his clothing choices so viewers often left comments about it.

5. Experiment with which part of the song to post. Going into this campaign, my hypothesis was starting the video with the chorus or hook was best move. Turns out that starting the video with the second verse performed best. Now, this may vary depending on the genre or style of music you do so it’s important to experiment.

Also, you don’t need to share the entire verse or include the chorus in the video. In fact, I’ve seen plenty of artists just share 15 – 30 seconds of a verse and have it perform well.

With this in mind, we tried sharing a 20-second snippet of a verse and it took off.

6. Social media success does not directly translate to streaming success and vice versa. Despite earning over 7 million views from all of these videos, we saw a slight increase in overall streaming numbers. Once Snoop Dogg reposted our video to his Instagram followers on August 21st, we saw a noticeable bump in streams on Spotify as shown below.

The streaming impact on Spotify after Snoop Dogg reposted the video for “Take It 2 Far” to his 89 million followers.

In general, the numbers and attention you earn usually stay localized within that platform, except when something goes mega-viral. What I noticed is the reverse is true too. If you get a lot of streams from Spotify playlists, this often does not translate to getting followers on social media.

7. You can’t predict which video will go viral. Initially, I thought if certain performance metrics were high enough, the algorithm would more likely push it to non-followers.

On TikTok, you have ‘average watch time’, ‘percentage of full video’ watched and ‘retention rate’. You would think these metrics are important to them since they’re highlighted in the analytics overview.

When I compared these numbers to other videos, I found that there were some that had better metrics but they weren’t getting the same love with the algorithm. There are likely other metrics that are taken into account, like shares and how many videos are created from your original video/sound.

8. High production and higher costs for video don’t mean better marketing performance. As an independent artist, a traditional music video where you’re spending thousands of dollars out of pocket just isn’t a cost-effective marketing tool in today’s digital climate. That’s exactly what we saw play out in this campaign. We got significantly more reach and followers from 20+ short-form performance videos that cost a fraction of what we paid for a traditional music video.

Most of the short-form videos I put together and posted were shot on a $500 camera (Insta360 Ace Pro is now $300, but there’s also a newer model), but you can do better with most modern smartphones, like an iPhone 16 Pro Max.

Because these videos can be inexpensive and simple to shoot, you can create more and have them edited much quicker. Because content is so saturated, it becomes more of a numbers game than having super high-quality production.

In fact, highly produced content can potentially work against you in the newsfeed as people subconsciously prefer more authentic, less unedited videos. This is why the short-form performance videos that usually perform best are often one-shot.
 

Conclusion

 
Typically, songs and videos that go mega viral encourage and incentivize user-generated content (dance challenges, lip syncs, reactions, reviews) and/or attach themselves to memes or events. For us, that was one area we weren’t able to capitalize on to take these viral moments even further.

Despite that, this was a successful campaign as a fully independent effort. Creating the right content to promote your release on social media doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive.

Hopefully, this case study and campaign breakdown was useful for you. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out, leave a comment or set up a call to chat with me.

The post Going Viral On Social Media: Campaign Breakdown For Musicians appeared first on D4 Music Marketing.

Many artists, especially more established ones who have been in the industry before social media and algorithms were even a thing, are hesitant to promote older songs. Not only do they feel it’s a bad look, but they think fans only want to hear new material.

If you’re in the middle of a campaign to promote a new release, your focus should be solely on that. However, you may have down periods that present a perfect opportunity to try something like this.

In this blog, I will share my 8 reasons why we should challenge this old way of thinking and suggestions on how to go about promoting older music to reach new fans.

To be clear, when I talk about promoting older songs, I’m talking about creating content like short-form performance videos focused on reaching newer audiences. However, it can also include sharing backstories of a song and behind-the-scenes videos to engage current fans.
 

1. We live in a totally different content climate.

 
We’re not in the 20th century anymore where communication, media and entertainment operated much differently. Traditional media (TV, radio, film, print) had their corporate gatekeepers for their respective content channels. With limited ways to share art and communicate, content was scarce because it was expensive to produce. Plus, distribution to a wider audience was not accessible to the average person.

For the music industry, you had gatekeepers who decided who was put on and what was marketable to the masses. The mindset was to push the new hot thing to get people to buy records and tickets for shows. It was a cyclical cycle that still goes on today. Because music distribution was controlled and commercial music was relatively scarce, it made more sense not to push older songs.

But then the internet, digital downloads, smartphones and social media platforms changed everything for the next 2 decades.

Communication and access to information became democratized. Individuals have become empowered to become their own media companies and build businesses. This ultimately took the power away from the mainstream (traditional media channels) and created a fragmented online landscape of different interests, hobbies and passions.

In this new climate where most music doesn’t follow so tightly with mainstream culture anymore as it once did pre-Internet, there’s no reason not to promote your older songs. After all, there will always be people who have never been exposed to your music, which ties into the next point. With all these changes, it is fair to question and challenge many of these norms and taboos around how musicians should operate.
 

2. Your music is always to new someone.

 
The online landscape has become fragmented with so many different niches, communities and pockets of interest that go below the mainstream radar. We now have very popular musicians in one particular segment of music that most people still never heard of.

This is why there’s always someone out there who has never heard your music. So any old song of yours will be brand new to them.

Usually, your current fans are the ones who would expose these people through word of mouth. Otherwise, they may discover it passively through playlists or algorithms that recommend your music.

Instead of depending on these passive methods, it would be better to be proactive and create specific content to promote your older hits.
 

3. Not all fans were there with you from the beginning.

 
The assumption many artists make is that fans know all your music and only want to hear new material. With so many different touch points online and opportunities for discovery, the reality is that people will become fans at various points of your career. This was true in the past, but even more so now.

Despite your entire discography being easily accessible in the age of streaming, not everyone will want to dig into every project, especially if you have a lot of music.

There’s always a chance newer fans may have missed certain projects of yours, even popular ones. Even though the main objective of promoting older songs is to reach those who haven’t heard your music yet, some of your current fans may appreciate it. Your day-one fans may also enjoy the nostalgia as well.
 

4. Marketing needs to focus on bringing in new fans.

 
It doesn’t always make sense to lean heavily on new, unproven songs to promote music to reach new fans. If you have popular songs in your older catalog, it would be smart to leverage those tracks instead. Set aside a budget for social content or even paid ads using your proven hits to draw in new potential fans on a regular basis. It’s possible to set up an ad campaign promoting older songs using dark ads that don’t get posted to your profile and have your current followers excluded in audience targeting.

Any successful business needs to focus on bringing in new customers, but also keeping customers coming back. The way I see it, new music is generally focused on engaging your current customers/fans. On the other hand, your older proven hits, and even deep cuts, are focused on attracting new customers/fans into your ecosystem.

Or to use marketing speak, your proven songs are ideal for the top of the funnel, the awareness stage, to draw in new potential fans. Your new music is to engage your current fans and generate interest that could lead them to action (i.e. buy tickets to the upcoming tour).

Otherwise, it’s much harder to sustain as a business if you rely solely on your current fans to get your name out there and buy tickets and merch regularly. You need consistent growth to be sustainable. I’m seeing this issue firsthand with the independent artists I work with now.
 

5. Producing songs/albums is expensive so maximize your investments.

 
From an artistic perspective, albums are great and important bodies of work that often define your career and legacy. But from a business standpoint, we should reevaluate how we promote them.

Many fans don’t understand how much producing albums can cost with producers, paying other musicians, studio engineers, graphic designers, mixing & mastering engineers, etc. This is why singles are more lucrative. You get more out of each song by giving it undivided attention.

Typically, you only have 2 – 4 lead songs that are focused on in the promotion for an upcoming album. All the other songs you’re just hoping people will listen through once the full-length project is released to the public.

The attention a new album has in today’s climate, even for the biggest stars, is 1 or 2 weeks. After that, it’s on to the next big thing.

For an independent artist who has spent $20,000 to $30,000 to make an album, that’s a big gamble. You’ll have to hope touring and selling merch will allow you to get your return on investment.

So if there are inexpensive ways to easily promote and bring attention to songs from older albums and songs that didn’t get the same attention in the initial rollout, why not do it years later? Again, with so much content saturation, there’s no reason not to give it a shot and maximize the mileage for something you’ve already paid to make.
 

6. You need consistent content for marketing.

 
There are musicians who hate the word ‘content’ for different reasons, but it is now a core part of the business and marketing. Content marketing is a very popular and effective way of attracting and engaging new fans, especially on social media, because of its potential to scale globally at minimal cost. In today’s digital age, content has become numbers game because of how much cheaper and easier it is to create. The more quality content you post regularly, the better you do on social media. It’s a competitive landscape so consistency is the key to grabbing your share of attention in newsfeeds.

Typically when there’s new music or an album, social media posts increase. This lasts for a few months to promote singles and eventually the album. You have tour and merch posts to monetize the new material in hopes of recouping the cost of recording the new album. Once that cycle is over, then what?

If you want to continue to keep your fan base engaged while trying to earn new ones, you want to keep content flowing regularly even if there’s nothing new to promote.

This is particularly true if you want to take advantage of organic reach and have the algorithm on your side. What better time to post videos and draw attention to older songs people already love?
 

7. You don’t know until you try. What’s the worst that can happen?

 
The fear many musicians have is that revisiting older material may draw criticism. First, you’re not going to lose fans for doing so. Second, if you do, then they’re not the fans you want. There’s always going to be that one snobby, entitled fan who may leave a comment but who cares.

Just like with anything in life, you don’t know if something is going to work until you give it a good try. This may require reevaluating certain outdated beliefs.

So much of marketing and promotion in business requires some willingness to experiment or try something new. If the majority of the music business is still stuck in the past, why not try something that not everyone is doing?
 

Which older songs to use?

 
Let’s say I have convinced you to give this tactic a shot. How should you go about approaching this? Which older songs should you start with?

Your proven hits. Your best songs are more likely to attract new potential fans. Also, videos using your hits are more likely to motivate your current fans to share that content too. This is particularly great for running ad campaigns to create awareness.

Use data from streaming platforms. Look at your streaming data to see if other songs in your catalog have performed very well that were not singles. It’s possible that you have a deep cut that fans naturally love. On Spotify, the more obvious songs are the ones that have made it into your popular songs list on your profile and you’ve never promoted as a single or made a video for it.

Ask fans. Get your answer directly from fans. Ask them in a social media post. On Instagram Stories, use the question box or poll stickers to get ideas.

Get feedback from fan communities. Whether it’s on Reddit, Discord or Facebook Groups, fans are often talking about you. You may not have time stiff through all the different conversations so maybe have someone do it for you. I came across this thread on a subreddit from one of my favorite artists that would have been a gold mine of ideas for which older songs to promote.

What’s trending? If there’s a certain topic trending or a cultural moment is happening and you have a relevant song, make a short-form video performing that song. Maybe there’s a cover song that’s getting a lot of attention and you have a cover of the same song.

Album/song anniversaries. If it’s the 10th anniversary of a song or album, breathe life back into it by creating some short-form videos. For those worried about criticism, this gives you the perfect excuse to cover all the songs, even the non-singles.

Tie your song to a calendar event. Make videos using songs that have an easy association with a calendar event (i.e. Rebecca Black’s Friday, Valentine’s Day, 4/20 or even Christmas) and post it on those days.
 

Conclusion

 
It doesn’t matter what stage of your career you’re in, you should always continue to promote your catalog as part of your overall marketing strategy, especially your proven hit songs.

The exception is if you’re a global superstar and can easily afford to wait comfortably only to put out new music every couple of years. But even then, there’s nothing wrong with staying top of mind in such a content-saturated, attention-scarce world.

Otherwise, for the independent, middle-class artists who have worked hard to get to where they’re at, you should consider revisiting older songs in a fun and easy way. Especially with short-form performance videos being popular, it has become a cost-effective way to promote older material on social media. If done right and consistently, the algorithm on platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts will constantly push your video content to new potentially fans for you.

The Moral of the Story: If you want to keep growing sustainably as a business, you need to focus on expanding your fan base by using assets you have available, especially older hit songs. With so much competition for attention in this digital age, you want to make sure you can engage your base regularly but also attract new fans.

The post 7 Reasons Why Every Independent Artist Should Promote Older Songs appeared first on D4 Music Marketing.

In our current climate, the key to getting yourself in front of potential fans cost-effectively is through short-form video content. Typically, musicians associate this type of short-form content with the dance, lip-sync and crazy challenge videos found on TikTok. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be any of that. This trend of short-form videos can actually be quite simple and more in line with what’s natural for musicians, which is “live” performance.

Short-form live performance videos have grown in popularity in the past couple of years and have shown to be effective for marketing new music and even helping some artists go viral.

In this blog, I cover all the basics you need to know about how to go about creating short-form videos as a musician to promote your music on social media.
 

The Transition From Long To Short-Form Video

 
With the rise of the internet, smartphones and social media over the past 20 years, we have now officially come to the end of the traditional music video era and the new reign for short-form videos. This transition has been going on for many years, starting with Musical.ly (before becoming TikTok). You can even argue this trend started as early Twitter’s Vine in 2013 with its 6 second looping videos.

With the higher cost of attention in the oversaturation of content in our feeds, the best way to reach fans on social media is through short-form video content. When it comes to marketing yourself and your music, video content is king and this shift to short-form makes it much easier for you. Not only is it typically cheaper to produce, you can often do a lot of it yourself.

This has also influenced how music is being made and released, with songs becoming shorter in length (2 minutes or less) and a stronger focus on releasing singles and EPs instead of full albums.

At this point, it should be no surprise that the importance and validity of a traditional budgeted music video for independent artists has diminished. This doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t do a long-form music video at some point, but it’s challenging to get your return on investment if a lot of money goes into it. I see traditional long-form music videos more of a luxury as a brand-building play than a necessity for promoting a song. Some artists want to create long-form music videos as an artist extension of the music for storytelling and there’s nothing wrong with it if you can afford it.

So if you’re still early in your career and you don’t have a budget, your focus should be strategically using short-form video content to build an audience/fan base at scale.
 

Short-Form Video Basics

 
Short-form video is essentially any type of video content that is optimized for social media consumption. More specifically, I’m referring to videos of you performing the song similarly to how you would in a traditional music video. Here’s an overview about short-form videos that you need to know.

There are 4 fundamental characteristics that make a short-form video.

Vertical / Portrait Oriented Video – The video orientation naturally fits with how people consume content on their smartphones. It takes up more visual real estate when someone scrolls through their feed, making your video more noticeable. This means you should be filming with your phone upright (portrait) and not turning it to its side (landscape). If you’re shooting on a camera, it’s best to shoot in 4K so you can crop the footage to fit a 9:16 orientation. The orientation of the video does not effect the potential for the video to go viral. However, vertical videos are more immersive and engaging so it gives you a better chance.

Length – The video length is typically less than 1 minute, but what is considered optimal is debatable and will vary by platform. With YouTube shorts, it has to be less than 180 seconds (179 seconds to be safe) or it won’t be recognized as a Short. Whereas with Instagram Reels, it has to be no more than 3 minutes or the algorithm won’t recommend your video to non-followers. For TikTok, you can’t have a song in a video be longer than 60 seconds due to licensing agreements. In general, short-form videos between 15 to 30 seconds will get the most engagement. The length of the video is key because the average person isn’t watching long videos while scrolling on social media.

On Video Captions – If your music has lyrics, there should be text captions on the video itself, usually in a color like yellow so it stands out more. Sometimes the text will have a black or white outline to help it stand out and not blend too much into the video. Having the lyrics on the video itself is important because many people scroll their news feed without the sound turned on. Seeing text changing in the video also catches people’s attention. Having lyrics is not necessary as some artists prefer a clean aesthetic, but it may vary by song or video. It’s at least worth testing with or without lyrics to see what may perform better with your audience.

Optimized For Short Attention – We all know that attention spans continue to diminish in the digital age, so the video content needs to jump right into the action. This means no slow or long intros. Generally, you need to hook viewers within the first few seconds. This can entail starting with the hook or chorus of a song. Some may even add a visual element in the video editing to draw attention, like camera shake, starting upside down or in black and white.

As an artist, there are 3 general ways you can approach short-form video for potentially reaching new fans.

1. Directly music related: This entails things like performing original music or covers, sharing, playing beats, producing music, mixing mashups live, DJ sets, etc.
2. Making music content tying in interests / hobbies / passions: This is incorporating music and other interests like dance, sports, food, pets, drugs or fitness. For example, making songs based on food recipes like how Good Boy Noah has done with his puppet cheetah.
3. Brand or personality focused: This is more about showcasing your personality whether it’s from doing meme content, reaction videos or short skits, but not music. This can naturally overlap into your interests and hobbies if it’s a part of your brand.

What I’ll be covering is content that is more specific to musicians and involves music performance. Regardless of which way you want to approach it, the intent for your short-form video should seek to either:

• Entertain
• Inspire / Motivate
• Educate

If you’re able to accomplish those things, you’re more likely to have your videos shared and engaged with.

As for where short-form video content is shared, the 3 platforms you’ll want to post on are:

• TikTok
• YouTube Shorts
• Reels (Instagram and Facebook)

Each platform has their differences so you’ll need to make sure you optimize your short-form videos to fit the platform you’re posting on.
 

Short-Form Video Setups & Examples

 
Here are some basic short-form video setups / ideas to consider starting with. Most of the examples shared below are from hip hop / rap artists because that’s what I normally listen to and come across but it can still be applied to other genres and styles. It’s up to you if you want to do an actual live performance or just a lip sync. Lip sync is much easier to film while performing the song live in a video can require more work to capture good audio, but it comes off as more authentic.

Please Note: All setups discussed below involve a performer in the videos. Technically, you can execute short form videos without you physically in it and just have the lyrics go with your music over stock footage. The problem is this isn’t going to be effective for most, especially if you’re not an established artist yet.

However, if creating video content on social media really isn’t for you or you don’t plan on doing live performances, then you may want to consider other music marketing options.
 

1. Performing with still camera on a tripod

This is the simplest thing you can do. Set up your smartphone or camera on a tripod and record yourself. This can be easily done in your home, the backyard or at a local park. Because the shot is still, you’ll want to make it interesting with the background, what you’re wearing or any props in the video.

Once you get comfortable, think about other visually appealing or interesting places. This can be done in national parks with beautiful landscapes, popular vacation spots, tourist attractions (in front of the Eiffel Tower) or busy public areas with tons of people behind you. Just be aware that some places have strict rules about filming so be careful and be discrete.

Examples

• LaRussell in front of a house
• Tanner Adell at a barn
• Stevie Ray at his doorstep
• Mei Semones playing the guitar at her doorstep
• Shanin Blake in a living room
• Shanin Blake on a log in nature
• Infinity Song (Band) in front of an old structure
• Amp Live (Producer) in his studio
• Amp Live on a beach
• Samara Cyn sitting on a chair on a green hill
• Samara Cyn sitting on steps in front of green wall
• KODUKU singing in an open field
• Mary Ann Alexander singing at home with short intro
• Alam Khan playing the Sarode at home (Instrument Only)

2. Using actual live show performance

If you’re already doing a live performance (hopefully in front of a decent sized crowd), you can have someone record you on stage performing full songs. This can also be staged and done in a larger backyard area and a crowd of people. You can then extract the best segments and add lyric captions on top.

LaRussell is someone I’ve come across who has done this a lot. Here are my favorite examples of his:

• Show performance
• Festival performance
• Backyard performance

3. Performing the song in one static location

For this setup, you’ll need someone to film you. The idea is you’re performing in one area, but the camera will be moving with and around you to make things more interesting.

LaRussell is someone who does a great job of this as a majority of the short form videos he puts out uses this basic setup.

Examples:

• A-1 and his producer in a park
• LaRussell performing on the street
• Pink Sweat$ performing live in a parking garage
• Russ in Paris with the Eiffel Tower behind him
• THRONE in a room
• RMS on a street
• Alexia Evellyn in front of a waterfall
• Miles Minnick rapping in an alley street
• Norman Sann rapping in a parking lot

4. Performing the song with constant movement

Instead of standing in one area, you as the performer can be constantly in movement. It can be as simple as walking straight towards the camera or moving around within a scene.

The rap duo Flyana Boss has done a great job of executing this with running in their videos, which has prompted many viewers about how they were able to pull it off as smoothly as they have.

Examples:

• Shanin Blake slow walk towards camera
• Pink Sweat$ on a moving boat
• Flyana Boss running out of a restaurant
• Flyana Boss running in Disneyland

5. Performing a song while doing another activity

Another setup to change things up is to perform while doing another activity. This can be done with a static camera or someone else to film you.

The activity can depend on your personality and interests that make sense with your brand or the song you’re performing. Or it can just be completely random or unexpected to create some intrigue.

Rapper Locksmith created a video series called Lock Lyft where he invites fans on a car ride and he performs for them while driving.

Examples/Ideas:

• Driving (Locksmith)
• Biking (Flyana Boss)
• Cooking
• Rolling up a joint
• Exercise
• Hiking
• Roller Skating / Skateboarding
• Household chores

6. Performing with props or extras

Incorporating props or other extras into your setup is an easy way to make your videos more interesting. This can be something as simple as a big hat, a mask, green screen, other performers or even the rain. You can also try using your pet or your kids.

The band Walk Off The Earth and LaRussell does a really good job of using props in their videos.

Examples

• Static performance with kid
• Juggling a ball with paddles
• LaRussell with a photographer in front
• LaRussell shot through a basketball hoop
• LaRusell with bikers
• Coyote staging a set in a kitchen with props and actors
• Pertinence in front of a car and hanging mic
• Scoochie Boochie in front of volcano using greenscreen

7. Performing and acting out the lyrics

Lastly, consider creating a scene and acting out the lyrics you’re performing as if it was a one shot music video. Let’s say you’re performing a song about a break up, have someone in the shot pretending to be your partner and reacting to the news. Here’s an example of that from Russ (TikTok) and another on Instagram for the same song.
 

Short-Form Video Creation Tips

 
– Do multiple full takes. When filming, rather than just doing a verse and hook in one take, do multiple takes of the entire song so you can extract the best parts as different videos. You can do this to test which parts of the songs perform better.

– Maximize each location. One location can be used to do multiple songs and in different parts of the space. For example, let’s say you film in a park. You can shoot standing on a table, sitting on a bench, in front of the playground, on a swing or slide, on a basketball court, etc.

– Schedule a day for content. If possible, dedicate a day for content (“content day”) where you can record multiple videos in one session to save time. Performing 3 songs in 3 different locations in a day can potentially yield up to 18 to 36 short videos for you to post.

– Stay organized. Create a system to keep all the video files organized because you’ll be posting these videos multiple times. If done right, you should have an organized library to pull from to be consistent with your posting.

– Perform versions of songs already on socials. If you do a lip sync, just make sure to do it to a version currently available on social platforms, like TikTok and Instagram, so that you can add your song from within the app itself. This allows you to earn royalties from your video and it displays your artist and song name in your post. When you upload your music to an aggregator like DistroKid, they will have an option to distribute to social platforms. In most cases, a platform like Instagram can auto-detect the song and tag it on the post without you having to manually add and sync the track.

– Practice before filming. Make sure to really practice and rehearse your performances, especially when shooting with a videographer. You want to make sure you’re respectful of their time. Keep going even if you mess up a part. This saves everyone time, especially if you hired someone to film you.

– Don’t put text captions on the bottom. Captions are traditionally on the bottom, but it shouldn’t be with short-form videos. The placement of text captions for your lyrics should be placed closer to the center of the video because of the overlays that TikTok and Instagram has. If you have the text too low, it will overlap with the title, caption and engagement overlays on the bottom. If you have the text too high, it may likely cover your face and you definitely don’t want that. You should be able to see a preview of where the overlays are before posting to see if it clashes with your text.

– Autogenerate captions to save time. You can auto generate captions for your videos in typical video editing software like Adobe Premiere or Final Cut Pro, which is what I use. The same goes with mobile as my preferred app for editing on my phone is InShot and it has the ability to auto generate text captions from the audio. There are also free online video editing tools like CapCut and Veed that offer free plans. Instagram and TikTok also have a feature that can generate captions for you. Regardless of which tool you use, it will require making edits as it won’t be perfect, but it will at least save you some time.

– Keep testing. Don’t assume something doesn’t work the first time you post it. There are a lot of variables involved when you share something to social media, whether it’s the day of the week, time, platform, world events, the song or the video content itself, so you can’t draw conclusions after one post.

– Experiment and get creative. A lot of what was covered in this blog are basic starting points, so there’s definitely room to get creative and experiment. There are other elements, concepts, edits, props or camera tricks that can be incorporated to create a more visually appealing experience. Maybe there’s an opportunity to turn your videos into a series or highlighting a fun alter ego.
 

Final Thoughts on Short-Form Video

 
Creating short-form videos to promote your music doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. As you’ve seen in the examples shared in this blog, it’s actually quite the opposite. Many artists have found success doing simple, straightforward performance videos to promote their songs on social media. If you’re consistent, you should see gradual growth of followers as these platforms will start to suggest your videos to new audiences.

I found viral success posting these types of videos on Instagram and TikTok. Read my full breakdown of this album release campaign that led to multiple videos going viral and Snoop Dogg reposting one of them.

But remember, creating and sharing short-form video content is only one part of marketing. It’s an important tool for attracting new potential fans and engaging your current supporters, but there’s a lot more that goes into the marketing process. I’ve covered many aspects of it on various blogs on this website. Just don’t expect that this is the only thing you need to do to build a music career from scratch.

If you’re just starting out and have a few releases on digital platforms like Spotify and Apple Music, don’t be afraid to throw some ad money behind these videos to get some feedback. If you encounter a situation where one of your videos goes viral organically on a platform, then you definitely want to spend money for ads to add gas to the fire.

Lastly, music quality still matters. Your success with short-form videos is still going to be dependent on how good your songs are. If you do short-form videos consistently for a year or so and still haven’t gained traction, maybe your songs aren’t good enough yet and that’s okay. As long as you like your work, keep learning and improving upon your craft.

Not all songs should be fully marketed with a budget, but sharing these low-cost performance short-form videos is a great way to see what songs are ready.

For more specifics on how to shoot video with your smartphone, check out this blog here:

6-Step Guide to Make Quality Cover Song Videos With Your Smartphone

The post How to Create Short-Form Videos to Gain New Fans As A Musician appeared first on D4 Music Marketing.

As an independent musician, good media coverage is the key to growing your fanbase and establishing notoriety. It can be overwhelming to find music blogs to submit music to when there are endless options to choose from. Some artists may choose to work with public relations agents that do this work for them, while others prefer to get media coverage on their own. If you want to send your music to blogs with guaranteed feedback, check out Groover: a platform that connects artists directly with influencers in the music industry.

Here are the best strategies to find music blogs so that you can successfully pitch your music to the right people and get media coverage.

 

Define Your Genre

 
To find music blogs that are best suited to promote your music, you must first define your genre or genres. If you put in the work ahead of time by carefully selecting which blogs fit your style, you will maximize your chances of getting attention. Avoid sending mass emails to a bunch of music blogs; this technique rarely works and you will most likely end up with an empty inbox.

First, write down the primary genre or genres that your music represents. Let’s take an indie pop artist as an example. Numerous subgenres fall under the umbrella of indie pop: indie rock, alternative, bedroom pop, dream pop, lofi and others. It is crucial to define these keywords to then find music blogs that promote artists in your genre already. While many blogs promote a variety of musical styles, there are some that are only focused on certain genres. Use this to your advantage when doing your research.
 

Make A List of Similar Artists

 
Once you have defined your genre and subgenres, make a list of similar artists that fall under the same categories. Make a list of at least five artists that are in the same universe, ranging in notoriety from emerging artists to more established bands. If you need help writing your list, try looking at the “Fans also like” section on Spotify either on your own profile or the profile of similar artists.

For example, here are five artists in the indie pop scene: Pi Ja Ma, November Ultra, Alice Phoebe Lou, Benee, and Vampire Weekend. These musicians share certain similarities in genre but are very different in terms of style and notoriety. Pi Ja Ma is an emerging indie pop artist from France whereas Vampire Weekend has been around for over a decade, playing their hits to stadiums around the world. However, it is important to analyze the media coverage for all five artists, no matter their notoriety.

The “Fans also like” section on the Spotify profile of French indie pop artist Pi Ja Ma

Find Music Blogs That Promote Your Genre

 
Using your list, you can now start researching which media and music blogs have written about these five artists. You can start your research by looking on their social media accounts and seeing if they have reposted articles that they have been featured in or shared interviews from music blogs. After scanning their socials, go ahead and look them up on your preferred search engine. For the emerging artists on your list, it will be easier to do your research because there will be less content to filter through. If you look up Vampire Weekend, for example, you will most likely find pages and pages of content and some of the biggest blogs in the industry talking about them. Try filtering the search results by date and dig back in time to figure out which music blogs were talking about the big bands before they made it big.

Let’s take French indie pop artist Pi Ja Ma for example. She has been profiled by some of the bigger French news outlets such as Liberation and Marianne, but there are also a number of small indie music blogs that have written about her project, including Modzik and MusiK Please. Go through each artist on your list and write down who has been talking about them, no matter how big or small the media is.

By using this technique, you can avoid searching “best indie pop music blogs” on your search engine and really do some real research. Because the music industry is constantly changing and evolving, it’s crucial to stay up to date about who is being talked about and more importantly, where.
 

Start Small: Choose Independent Music Blogs Over Big Media

 
Every emerging artist would love to land a feature in Pitchfork, but sometimes it’s best to start small and focus on music blogs that are more accessible. Many of the bigger music blogs are not open to unsolicited submissions and are curated by journalists and PR agents. Independent music blogs are usually more receptive to pitches and are looking to promote underrepresented and emerging artists. If you manage to get your music featured across multiple small music blogs, your audience will grow as well as your legitimacy in the industry.
 

Find Music Blogs With a Local Focus

 
Another technique to narrow down your search for music blogs is to think locally. Are you a band based out of your garage in Brooklyn? Seek out music blogs that promote the Brooklyn indie scene. Did you or do you study at a university that has a music blog or radio show? Reach out and pitch your project. I personally have reached out to the local music blog of my hometown to promote my project even though I moved away a decade ago. By brainstorming with a local focus in mind, you can find music blogs that will take a personal interest in sharing your music and telling your story.

Independent music blog “the deli” that promotes emerging artists from local scenes across New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago

Find Music Blogs That Correspond To Your Identity

 
Every artist represents an overall image that encapsulates more than just their sound. Ask yourself: what defines me as an artist apart from the genre of music I play? Perhaps you are a woman navigating a male-dominated industry. Reach out to feminist music blogs that promote women in music. Maybe you are passionate about fashion or cinema. Find music blogs and media outlets that talk about these cultural intersections! With a bit of time and well done research, you can find music blogs that make space for your voice. The only thing left to do is pitch your project!
 

Our Selection of Music Blogs By Genre

 
Hopefully with these strategies you will be able to personalize and narrow down your list of music blogs to contact. If you want some more tips, here is a list of our top music blogs that you can contact directly on Groover sorted by genre. You can also discover the full list of music influencers categorized by genre and location on the bottom of the Groover homepage!

Pop:

High Clouds – Belgium
Music & Fashion Blog – France
Plastic Magazine – United Kingdom
Longueur d’Ondes – France

Rock:

The Joy of Violent Movement – United States
Indieoclock – Brazil
MOWNO – Italy

Rap, Hip-Hop, and RnB:

Wordplay Magazine – United Kingdom
HipHop Paranoia – United Kingdom
Interlude – France
Backpackerz – France
Dummy Mag – United Kingdom

Folk:

York Calling – France
Berlin On Air – Germany
Tonic Grain – United States

Electro:

Meet & Greet – France
Riptide Mag – France
Guettapen – France
EKM.co – Canada

The post How To Find Music Blogs To Promote Your Music appeared first on D4 Music Marketing.

In earlier days of the Internet (in the late 1990s and early 2000s), searching for song lyrics was one of the top things people did online. I remember I would print out the lyrics to my favorite songs from sites, like AZ Lyrics, and sing/rap along so I could memorize them faster. The good news is making your lyrics accessible is so much easier now, compared to how it was a few decades ago.

In this blog, I will cover all things lyrics that independent artists should do for every release as well as things to consider for marketing your music.
 

First things first…

 
Before getting into the meat of things, here are some basics you should be aware of in regards to lyrics.

Copyright your lyrics

As a songwriter, the most important thing you should do is to copyright your musical compositions, which include your lyrics. It is vital to protect your creative and financial assets.

Technically, anything music you have written and recorded is automatically copyrighted in the United States as long as you can show proper documentation.

However, in order to be legally protected for cases of infringement in the court of law in the United States, you need to pay and register your songs with the Copyright office first.

Although it’s ideal to register your songs before releasing them, it may not be economically feasible to do that every time. You can save up songs to register in one larger batch. The most important thing is to keep this in the back of your mind, especially if you have a hit song that’s getting a lot of attention.

You can refer to this blog for more details.

Archive your lyrics

Create an online system where you can organize and categorize all your lyrics. It can be stored in a Dropbox folder, along with all your other artist assets, where you or anyone on your team can easily access.

I know it’s common for artists to forget their own lyrics, especially if they haven’t performed the song in a long time, so having this archive will be useful. Yes, if you follow some of the other steps I mentioned below, you can just Google them. But, I think it’s still nice to have your own personal library.

If it’s not a habit already, make sure it’s a part of your writing, recording and marketing process because it’ll make everything so much more convenient.

Do you write your lyrics on physical paper or a notebook first? Keep those safe as well as you may be able to use them down the line for content or just keep them for sentimental purposes.
 

1. Add your lyrics to your website and other music-related platforms

 
Make it convenient for fans by having your lyrics easily accessible wherever they may be listening to your song.

If you have a dedicated page for a release on your website where fans can listen directly or watch a music video, include the lyrics on the same page. This is what I did for Butterscotch’s single Sade Life. This will help for getting your website to show up higher in search results when someone is looking for lyrics to a specific song of yours. After all, you want your website to be the central authority for all things related to you.

Another place you should have your lyrics is your music videos, whether it’s on YouTube or Facebook. So when you upload a music video for an upcoming release, add the lyrics in the video description.

If your release is on BandCamp, be sure to include lyrics on there as well.

Adding your lyrics to these platforms can also help when someone doesn’t remember the artist name or song title, but they can search by a specific lyric in the song.

2. Create an account with Genius and add your own lyrics

 
Genius is more than just a website for lyrics, it’s a place where fans can also annotate lines in a song to provide context, offer their theories behind the meaning and share additional details. It’s sort of like Wikipedia for music.

I highly recommend creating an account and adding lyrics for all of your releases.

Once you create an account, don’t forget to get verified on Genius so you have more control over your own songs in case you have fans that add lyrics before you or provide incorrect information. You’ll also be able to add comments as the verified artist, which is a great way to engage with fans and provide additional insight as the original writer.

For example, you can see a list of annotations The Grouch has added to some of his songs. He’ll occasionally chime in on a song or two.
 

3. Include plain lyrics after uploading to your music distributor

 
Music distributors, like CD Baby and DistroKid, will usually have a place for you to include lyrics after uploading your songs to them. Providing them gets it automatically sent to digital stores that will use and display them like Spotify, Apple Music and TIDAL.

Your lyrics will also show up right up top of Google search results via LyricFind.

For DistroKid users, you can click on the individual release from your home screen to find the link to add lyrics to an individual song or you can click go to distrokid.com/lyrics/ to see the lyric status for each song.

Just make sure to pay attention to how they want you to format lyrics because different platforms want it typed out a specific way. If your lyrics get rejected, be sure to read their guidelines carefully.

Here are some common guidelines for submitting lyrics:

• Provide only actual lyrics in the song. Don’t include any other information! This means don’t include artist names, album title, song titles, social links, section of the song, etc.
• Begin each line with a capital letter.
• Do not use any punctuation at the end of a line. Exclamation points and question marks are acceptable, but no commas at the end.
• Any repeated lines must be written out so don’t write “Chorus 2x”. Actually write out the chorus however many times it’s repeated.
• Only use one blank line to separate sections of the song like verse, chorus, bridge, etc.
• Any background vocals or ad libs should be included at the end of the line in parenthesis.
• Write out explicit lyrics instead of using asterisks unless a word is bleeped out in the audio recording itself.
• Avoid having lines that are really long. Break up long sentences onto multiple lines the best you can.

4. Add synced lyrics for Instagram Stories and Spotify through MusixMatch

Have you ever wondered how you get your lyrics to show on Instagram Stories and have the words synced perfectly as the music plays? This is all done through a 3rd party lyric company called Musixmatch.

In addition to Facebook/Instagram, synced lyrics are supported by Apple Music, TIDAL and even Spotify.

Spotify recently announced late 2021 that they would start showing song lyrics on their app. The lyrics will pull from Musixmatch, which is the same source Instagram Stories pulls the synced lyrics from. If you listen to a song on your Spotify app with synced lyrics activated, you’ll see a box on the bottom that you can pull up to see the lyrics.

How do you go about syncing the lyrics so it’s timed with your music?

One way is to go to Musixmatch directly and get verified as an artist.

You’ll be asked to sign up for an account first and then provide your artist profile links for Spotify and Apple Music. Search your artist name on Google with the word “Spotify” or “Apple Music” to find this quickly. Once you submit these links, Musixmatch will email you back asking you to verify your identity.

Once you’ve been verified, you’ll be asked to take a brief course on how to submit and sync lyrics. You have to pass this course before you can add any of your lyrics to their database, which shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes.

Add the lyrics to one of your songs and you should see an option to sync it to music. This can be done on desktop or on the Musixmatch app.

For DistroKid users, you can sync your lyrics on their website now that they are officially partnered up with Musixmatch. It is a bit easier going this route, but I still recommend going through Musixmatch first to verify your artist profile and learn how to format your lyrics. Keep in mind that synced lyrics are only available on Musician Plus and Label subscriptions. As of this writing, DistroKid is the only distributor that offers this feature.

How to add synced lyrics on Distro?

To get started, you will need to submit plain lyrics first to DistroKid and have it approved before you can do synced lyrics. Go to the lyric section of your DistroKid account to see the list of your releases and the lyric status of each song.

If your plain lyrics have been approved, click on ‘synced lyrics’ to start the process. Syncing lyrics to the music feels sort of like a game where you’re trying to time it perfectly. It may take you a few tries just to get use to the pace and timing of each song. The basic idea is you hold the spacebar down right when the line first starts and you let go once the last word of the line is done. You keep repeating the process until the song is done.

Keep in mind that syncing lyrics on DistroKid is slightly different than how you sync through Musixmatch. The benefit with doing it through Musixmatch is that you can go back to restart at any point so you don’t have to do it all in one take.

Be aware that it can take days or even weeks for synced lyrics to register into these platforms. So if you don’t like how it turned out, you can always go back to redo them.
 

5. Create a lyric videos as low budget promotion tool

 
If you don’t have the time or you’re on a tight budget to do a music video, lyric videos can be an effective alternative for promoting a new release.

Generally, lyric videos are very simple where the lyrics are displayed along with the song over some basic visual component. The imagery used in a lyric video can be static graphic backgrounds, motion graphics / animation, live show video and stock/B-Roll footage.

For example, here’s a minimalist lyric video we put out for the first single for Lyrics Born’s new project:

 
Here’s an example of a lyric video that I made using leftover b-roll footage:

If you’re looking for inexpensive options, try taking a look around Fiverr. They are an affiliate of mine which means I do get a small commission for referrals at no extra cost for you. Please read my full disclosure for more details.

Fiverr is a popular freelance marketplace where you can find a variety of different services at budget-friendly costs. Personally, I don’t use Fiverr for lyric videos because I’d prefer to make them myself. I wouldn’t be opposed to it if I didn’t have the time, but I have used Fiverr for other services though.

However, if you don’t have the tools or skills for video editing, you can also reach out within your network to see if there’s someone who can do it for you. Otherwise, I’d recommend starting with Fiverr.

Be Careful: Fiverr is great if you’re on a budget. Because it’s a popular online marketplace with freelancers from all around the world, you have to always be careful with who you deal with and the types of services you pay for. When it comes to lyric videos and related media/content, Fiverr shouldn’t be much of an issue. For things like marketing and music “promotion” services, I would be very cautious of potential scams.
 

6. Making karaoke videos of your most popular tracks

 
Fans love to sing along to their favorite songs so why not make a karaoke video of your most popular songs. This could take a bit more video work and will require, of course, the instrumental versions without main vocals.

Although if you do create a simple lyric video with stock footage or a static background, you can easily just swap out the audio track with the instrumental version to keep the timing of the lyrics shown on screen.

Here’s an example where I do exactly that for a release. Check out the lyric video below:

Since I had all the stems for the song, I created the karaoke version by syncing up the instrumental and background vocals to the lyric video. When I rendered the video, I muted the main audio and here’s how the karaoke version turned out:

7. Sell your most popular or memorable lyrics on merch

 

Some lyrics in a song really hit home for a lot of listeners. I know I have my personal favorite lyrics from my favorite artists that will always resonate with me. While some will tattoo their favorite lines, others may just want to buy clothing with those lyrics.

Here are examples from Amy D, Sa-Roc and Brother Ali.

In case you’re not entirely sure about what lyrics to highlight, ask your fans. Start a poll or just ask them to comment on their favorite lyrics. Once you have a good idea, using a dropshipping service that does print on demand merch is a great way to experiment different designs.

The dropshipping company I personally use with clients and recommend is Printful, who is also an affiliate of mine.(Full Disclosure)
 

8. Publish a lyric book

Depending on where you are in your career, you may choose to publish a lyric book for a particular album or your entire catalog. You can go do a minimalist approach or you can collaborate with a visual artist to create art for each song. This can be sold as a physical book at shows and your website as a downloadable PDF.

The first lyric book that I personally own is from Aesop Rock who included it free with his album on CD. The lyric book is called “The Living Human Curiosity Sideshow” and it was from his 2005 album Fast Cars, Danger, Fire and Knives. Because of how dense and abstract his lyrics are, having something to read along in physical form was really cool.

You can also promote a lyric book as a bonus insert that will be included in an upcoming album release. This is what Sage Francis recently did for his 20th anniversary vinyl repress of his first album “Personal Journals.” It includes never-before-seen photos and handwritten lyrics of songs on this album.

16-Page Lyric Book Insert in “Personal Journals” Vinyl

9. Sell handwritten lyrics in a frame

Another cool product independent artists can offer for sale is an art piece of your handwritten lyrics with your signature.

This can be done on-demand where fans can request a verse or section of a song they want handwritten or you can do a limited number of pieces from your most popular songs. Eligh, an artist I work with, does handwritten lyric pieces on-demand and we have a form that asks them what song they would like when they add to cart.

Just be very careful with how you ship them with a frame. Yes, you technically ship it in a tube without the frame and save money. However, shipping with the frame makes the product more refined and can justify charging more.
 

10. Incorporate lyrics in a contest or giveaway

 
Another angle you can use with lyrics is in giveaways or contests. It can be as simple as giving the original handwritten lyrics you wrote before recording a hit single as a prize. Or maybe you’re looking to do something more experimental where the contest involves writing or performing your lyrics.

Maybe you can write 2 verses and have the 3rd verse be something where fans can submit as a part of a contest. The winner would get songwriting credits for their part.

A recent example of this is similar to what Russ did on TikTok. He launched an open verse challenge with Duets where the winner got to be a featured artist on the remix of one of his songs. This could also be done in Instagram Reels and requires participants to write and perform their own lyrics.

Although I don’t think he initially launched this challenge with the intention of collaborating with the artist, Hailey Knox did so well with the verse she wrote and sang for the Remember Open Verse Challenge that he invited her to be a part of the official remix of the song.

For a more experimental idea, share only the lyrics and the instrumental of an upcoming song before releasing the finished song with your vocals. Host a cover contest before they hear you perform your own song. Never heard or see anyone do this, but it was just something random that I always wondered how it would work out.

There are definitely fun ways to incorporate lyrics as a part of a contest or giveaway to keep fans engaged when marketing your music. These are things to consider to change things up a bit from time to time.

The post 10 Ways to Enhance Your Music Marketing Around Song Lyrics appeared first on D4 Music Marketing.

As you can imagine, this is a very popular question I get from aspiring and emerging artists. It always revolves around marketing music without a budget.

“How do I start a career with no money?”

“How do I market my music with little to no budget”

“How do I promote my songs if I’m broke?”

For so long, I’ve avoided answering this question directly because I didn’t want to support this idea that you can build a sustainable music career by depending on free or cheap options. But then I realized that I’ve indirectly answered this question throughout multiple blogs so I decided to put it all together in one resource.

In this blog, I will cover budget-friendly ways to tackle the different areas of music marketing. It’s important to understand that marketing encompasses more than just music promotion to reach new potential fans. It also involves other things like how to maintain relationships with your current fans, staying top of mind with different touch points, accessing data to make better business decisions and having products to sell them.

Please Note: This blog contains affiliate links to products and services I personally use and recommend. Using these links helps to support my work at no extra cost to you. Read my full disclosure on all the companies I’ve partnered up with here. For full transparency, I will label any affiliate links so you know.
 

Music Distribution

 
When you’re just starting out, you can get away with uploading your music on free platforms like SoundCloud, YouTube, BandCamp and AudioMack in the short term. This is especially true if you’re starting music out as a hobby and having fun with it.

The problem is these aren’t usually the go-to places to listen to and discover music (with the exception of YouTube) if you want to take music to the next level.

Eventually, you’ll want to get your music on digital service providers (DSPs) like Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music. As an independent, you’ll have to go through a music aggregator like DistroKid (Affiliate) or CD Baby to do that, but it’s relatively inexpensive depending on what service you go with.

You may want to consider using some free music distribution options. TuneCore has a free plan that allows you to upload unlimited music to the top social platforms (TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube) but they take a 20% cut of your royalties.

RouteNote offers a free plan where you can uploaded unlimited music to all the top DSPs and take 15% of of your royalties you earn through them.

The company I personally use with my clients and recommend only be as low as $23 a year. Read my breakdown on what I think is the best music distribution for independent artists.
 

Website

 
Some may say it’s debatable, but I’m a big believer that independent artists need to have a website if they want to be a professional. It doesn’t mean you need to have one right away, but at some point, you want to have online real estate that you own and control. it’s something you The main benefits of having your own personal website:

• You can set up an online shop to sell your music and merch directly to fans without a middleman taking their cut.
• Establish your own personal online space where you can control your story while actually owning the property. Remember your social media accounts are on rented land; you don’t actually own your followers and your profile.
• Create a landing page to drive traffic from your social media ads. This way you have a place to market new potential fans and further develop your relationships with them.

As someone new to the music business, you can hold off in the short term since it can be a bigger expense. There are a bunch of different website platforms to choose from, but it can range from $100 to $300 a year. On top of that, if you don’t design it yourself, it can cost hundreds of dollars more depending on who you have doing it for you.

If you’re looking for free options, Wix and Weebly offer free plans for you to try out. However, I highly recommend not using them as a long-term solution. You can read more about my thoughts about them and the drawbacks they present here.

Although I’ve created over 50 websites on WordPress, my personal favorite website building platform right now is Squarespace (Affiliate). I have partnered up with them to offer you 10% off your first-year subscription if you click this link and use the coupon code D4MUSIC10 when you check out.

For example, I’ve recently built this website for Rocky Rivera using Squarespace.

If you do decide to create one yourself, you’ll want to incorporate these 11 things into your musician website.

In the mean time, you can get away with you using a micro website or a “link in bio” page instead of a full website. Linktree is a popular option, but the one I like best is Beacons. Not only does it look better to me, but it also offers more features and tools with the free plan. I personally use it myself.
 

Target Audience

 
You can’t market effectively without defining a target audience. Who are the types of people most likely to become fans of your music and how do you go about reaching them? This is all needed to help guide your strategy and build a foundation for your music career.

There’s not necessarily a tool or service that you need to figure this out, but more so a strategy or mindset. What I like to say is you need to niche down and build within a community. I wrote a very detailed blog on this that you can read here.

Once you have an audience, the next step is knowing how to reach them. If you have the budget, I’m a big advocate of paying up for Facebook, Instagram and YouTube Ads. Just be warned that it’s easy to waste money if you don’t know what you’re doing or if you’re music isn’t good enough to be marketed yet.
 

Email Marketing

 
You’ll often hear that having an email list is essential for your music business. Emailing fans is a more effective way of maintaining a direct relationship with them compared to something like social media.

Email marketing services can be pricey, but Mailchimp is actually free. Even though features are limited in their free plan, you can still build a list of up to 500 email subscribers without paying a cent. My biggest issue with Mailchimp is that they’re expensive if you have a lot more email subscribers. It can cost almost $60 a month with around 2,500 subscribers. I know an artist who was paying $250 a month because they had a ton of email subscribers.

I started using ConvertKit (Affiliate) recently and it is another great option. They recently increased the number of subscribers allowed in their free plan to 1,000 subscribers. I don’t have as much experience with them compared to MailChimp, but I do like that they are moving more towards the music space with their latest acquisition of FanBridge, an email marketing service for musicians.

These are both excellent free options when you want to limit your expenses earlier on in your career.

Bandsintown has a free email marketing service currently in beta. This could be something worth checking out.

The best budget friendly option right now is using Beacon’s email broadcast tool. I’ve already converted a few of the artists I work with to Beacons because it’s just more affordable once you hit a certain number of email subscribers. For unlimited email sends and a bunch of other features, it cost $25 a month paid annually.
 

Content

 
Whether you like it or not, you’ll need content as a tool to promote yourself and your music. This is often the biggest challenge for artists, at least being able to create and put it out consistently. It’s important to understand that content marketing is arguably the most effective and scalable form of marketing.

Photos

You definitely need high-quality photos to use in your promotion like social media posts, websites, EPK (Electronic Press Kit), online profiles, covert art and more. For some things, you may be able to get away with using a newer smartphone as long as you have the right lighting.

There’s a good chance you may know a photographer that may be able to do stuff for free or cut you a deal. Ask people you know within your network for recommendations.

Videos

When it comes to marketing yourself and your music, the most important type of content is video. You don’t need to pour your life savings into one high production video, but some moving picture with your music in it will do.

Here are some video content ideas that don’t need big budgets. You may be able to do it yourself with some simple video editing and maybe another person to help out with the recording. It is entirely possible to produce quality video content that can go viral using your smartphone and free video editing tools available.

Short-Form Video – This type of video has become increasingly popular with the rise of TikTok over the years. Because it’s shorter and easier to digest, it’s the ideal way to market yourself and your music on social media. Read more about how to get started with my dedicated blog on short-form video, specially revolving around performance of a song. You can also learn a lot from an album campaign release using them.

Green Screen – Perform your song using a green screen as a backdrop so you can change the background to anything you want. Here is a video using a green screen that I edited. Instead of different scenery, I used different solid colors for each element of the song:

Lyric Videos – Another low-budget option is doing a lyric video for one of your songs. You’re basically overlaying your lyrics with the song over some stock footage or B-roll video. Here’s an example of a lyric video that uses b-roll footage:

You can also do an animated lyric video. If you’re not good with video editing, you can find some budget-friendly options over on the popular freelance marketplace Fiverr. They are an affiliate so please read my full disclosure to learn more about what that means.

Live Performance Video – For these types of videos, it doesn’t exactly have to be “live” but it should look like you are. It can be recorded someplace in your home or somewhere outside for a nice backdrop. If you are filming outside, be careful with where you go because some places don’t allow you to record without a permit or permission. For example, national parks. Here are some examples of videos I’ve shot and edited:

Music Visualizers – Maybe for whatever reason, you weren’t able to record a video for your release. One option is to make a music visualizer around your cover art. If you use DistroKid (Affiliate) to distribute your music, you can actually create a free, short mini video to use on social media. You can also pay for them to generate a music video visualizer for the full song as well.

The key to good content is something that is shareable so make sure whatever platform you’re on, that others are able to share it. This means not having a private profile or account.
 

Playlisting

 
One of the best free playlisting opportunities for your upcoming releases is to submit your song to be considered on Spotify’s editorial playlists and Amazon Music’s curated playlists. Getting on one of these playlists won’t make you a global superstar overnight, but it’ll give you a nice little boost of momentum. It isn’t easy to get placed, but it’s worth a short for something that is free.

Another free tool you can use is Playlister by DistroKid. It’s currently in beta as of this writing, so you’ll need to enter the password “gravy” to use it. This tool allows you to get contact information from Spotify playlisters based on any genre or keywords you provide. Because Spotify does not provide a way to reach out to playlist owners, it can be a challenge to pitch your songs. With Playlister, this process is much easier to pitch your songs.

For more on Spotify playlists, check out my guide here.
 

Music Blogs

 
Another route for marketing your music on a budget is pitching your songs to independent music blogs. A publicist can cost a lot of money so it’s a great starting point if you don’t quite have the funds and video content to use in Facebook, Instagram or YouTube ads. Just keep expectations in check as music blogs just don’t have the same influence they used to before social media dominated online attention.

A popular tool to help with not only pitch to music blogs, but also playlists and influencers, is SubmitHub. They do have free submissions you can choose from, but I feel it’s not worth your time. It’s cheap so I’d recommend paying up to $30 or so in credits to submit to their premium blogs.

Another similar tool to consider is Groover. They are based in France, but you can reach bloggers from all around the world. I personally have not used them yet, but they look to have a lot of the same blogs and similar pricing to SubmitHub.

Lastly, I put together a list of 44 blogs where you can submit your music for free, a lot of which accept submissions through SubmitHub.
 

Merch

 
We all know that there’s very little money to be made from marketing and promoting your actual music in this streaming age. The real money, aside from performing at live shows, is selling merch like tees, hats and posters.

Merch can also consist of selling CDs of your albums as fans still like having something physical to take home as a memento or collect. This still has good profit margins, but the demand for them isn’t what it was pre-streaming.

If you’re a relatively new artist, you’re probably not going to want to sink money into getting CDs or vinyl pressed up (definitely not vinyl as it’s expensive). That’s an investment you’ll want to hold off on, but there are ways to make money selling physical products without money upfront. This is where print-on-demand comes in.

Print-on-demand (dropshipping) services like Printful (Affiliate) allow you to design products to sell and will handle everything from production to fulfillment. You don’t have to do any work other than promoting the products on your website. There are no fees or costs on your end. You only make a profit for items you sell. To learn more, I cover this topic in-depth here.

What should you make and what kind of designs should you use? For that, you need to know who your target audience is and how your brand reflects that. This blog I wrote will help you to determine what merch you should be making as a musician.
 

Graphics, Logos, Cover Art

 
An important factor in music marketing and branding is the visual component. Not everyone can afford a graphic designer or access paid software like Adobe Photoshop. There are free or cheaper Photoshop alternatives you can try if you want to attempt creating them yourself.

If money is tight, one of the best options to help you with graphics is Canva (Affiliate). It’s a free, user-friendly app to create a wide variety of graphics from templates. For example, I did a whole blog on creating free cover art for your next release using Canva.

There are a lot of bonuses and features that come with their paid plans, but the free plan allows you to do most things you’ll need without having to pay.
 

Branding

 
Good brands are memorable and carry a positive reputation to the ideal people they are trying to reach. This is why understanding branding is massively important to your success as an artist.

Yes, you need good music, but you also need to make sure your presentation and content stick in the minds of your ideal fans. You want fans to emotionally latch to who you are and what you stand for so they are willing to financially invest in you.

Branding can be a confusing topic for many artists. The good news is I have a free branding guide for musicians that you can use to help you figure this out.
 

Music Promotion

 
Releasing music can be a tedious process. There’s a lot that goes into the planning and strategy, so I actually put together a very detailed release checklist for independent artists. This will ultimately save you a lot of time, and money, by allowing you to focus on the right tasks rather than wondering what you should be doing.

When it comes down to the actual promotion of your music, there are good and bad ways to go about it. A very useful tool for promoting your music are smart links. Assuming you’ve paid a music aggregator or distributor to upload your music on major streaming platforms, this is a great way to share your music. I covered a bunch of free options for you in this blog here.

As for running social media ads, there aren’t any free options as you will obviously need a budget to run them. But, in this video below, I break down when you may want to consider running Meta or TikTok ads when promoting your music:

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Analytics / Insights

 
Data is power. Having good data to have for your analytics helps with making better business decisions in your music career. As a musician, you have free access to a lot of this information on the various platforms you’re likely on already.

You can learn information about your social media posts, the type of people who engage with your content, what are the top cities your fans are in, your best performing music and much more.

Facebook Page Insights

Instagram Page Insights

Spotify for Artists

Apple Music for Artists

Amazon Music for Artists

TIkTok

Google Analytics – This is installed on your website. Many popular website platforms will provide you with some website traffic analytics of their own, but Google Analytics is more powerful. It may be too complex for non-tech savvy musicians, but it’s good to add to your website to collect data over time for someone else to review.
 

Other Free Tools and Apps

 
Outside of marketing and promotion, you’ll need other free tools to help with your day-to-day tasks. Thankfully, our smartphones allow us to stay productive while on the go. I compiled a list of free mobile apps that can be useful for musicians.

Have you considered leveraging the power of artificial intelligence? With the rise of AI, more powerful tools are becoming accessible to the public that can help musicians in areas like business-related writing, song lyrics, music production, graphics and video content. Check out my beginner’s guide to AI for musicians to see a list of 25+ AI tools to try out. Many of them are free or inexpensive.

Conclusion

 
Hopefully, this blog has helped put the pieces together for you and pointed you in the right direction about marketing your music with little to no budget required. There’s a lot that goes into marketing and not every area is going to be your priority. You don’t need to have everything done and in place right away.

The last bit of advice I want to end with is this, which touches on another question I get a lot. Of course, I’ve already written a whole blog on what you should know about starting a career in music, but many have asked me, how should I actually start?

Your priority is to set some kind of foundation for your online presence, which usually entails optimizing your social media profiles. Focus on posting video content, whether that’s writing original music, recording performance videos, doing covers or fun videos on TikTok. Most importantly, treat it like a hobby first and have fun with it.

Hold off on thinking about monetization and focus on building an audience through your content organically. Don’t completely neglect how you might want to monetize, but don’t fixate on making money so much that you become impatient.

While doing all of that, you want to dedicate a lot of time putting yourself out there and meeting people. With your niche and target audience in mind, use a community-orientated approach to grow your network. This can be done online too, but I think it’s best to do this in real life and with real people in your city.

The post How to Market Your Music With Little to No Budget (Resource for New Artists) appeared first on D4 Music Marketing.

At the same time, there are different strategies and tactics to promote yourself and get your music in front of new potential fans. One of them is pitching to independent music blogs that have their own dedicated following. These bloggers are music lovers who enjoy sharing good music with their readers.

I created a list of 40 active music blogs that, as of 2023, you can submit and pitch your songs for exposure, at little to no cost… but is it really worth your time?
 

Is Submitting to Blogs Worth It?

 
This may seem a bit hypocritical. I believe submitting your music to independent music blogs for exposure is not the most cost-effective use of your time and energy. Why write a blog about where to submit if I feel this way? There are a few reasons.

1. The problem that independent blogs and smaller publications face is that social media and streaming platforms have basically replaced them as the go-to source for discovery and dialogue around music. We are more likely to learn about new music from our friends and playlists (curated and algorithmic). Music blogs just don’t have the same power and influence they once did over a decade ago with social media taking over our attention online. If music blogs are local mom-and-pop shops, social media is the Wal-Mart or Amazon of attention that just took over your town. It’s what most people check when they wake up, during their work breaks and before sleep.
2. Part of it is my DIY mentality where I feel you shouldn’t depend on someone else’s validation and following to get some exposure. Although leveraging someone else’s audience can be an effective way to accelerate the growth of your fanbase, we have many, many tools and platforms to get in front of potential fans directly without an intermediary.
3. Blogs can get bombarded with submissions just because there are so many artists looking to get put on and validated. Unfortunately, at the same time, there are way fewer music blogs still operating today. Many of them closed down and are slowly becoming inactive. This makes it a bit less enticing to pursue an independent music blog.
4. Although doing a little research and pitching your song doesn’t take too much time individually, it can add up if you’re pitching to a bunch of them for every release. There’s no guarantee that you’ll get accepted, let alone a response, as acceptance rates tend to be very low.

What Value Do Music Blogs Have Today

 
You might be thinking, why would I compile this list of blogs if I don’t think it’s the best tactic. I believe blogs can still have some value and serve a purpose for newer, developing artists who aren’t ready to invest a lot of money right away.

This isn’t to say independent music blogs are completely dead. After all, breaking into mainstream music publications with more attention and larger audiences is not feasible for most musicians. At least with independent blogs, there’s always going to be niche pockets of readers all over the web that stayed loyal to these blogs all these years. I’m all for starting niche and making your way up to other avenues.

The main point I want to get across is it’s about diversifying your marketing/promotional efforts. Even for more established artists, you shouldn’t just focus on music blogs or getting on playlists.

I’m an advocate for paid options like Instagram and Facebook ads, but I still feel it’s important that musicians have different options because not everyone wants to, or can afford to, invest big money early in their music career. Not only that, running social ads effectively has a learning curve.

Going back to the original question of should you submit to blogs. If you have the time for it, you should definitely include it as a part of your marketing plan, but it should never be the core component.

For developing artists, you should definitely experiment with submitting to blogs. After all, there are only so many options you have to get more exposure with minimal financial risk. If you’re just starting out and don’t have much money, it’s worth a shot.

Lastly, I know it’s easier said than done, but try not to take any feedback or the lack of response as a sign of your worth as an artist. Always remember that what’s considered “good music” is subjective. Not all bloggers are musicians either so their criticisms can only help so much. At the same time, no musician makes great music right away. Be open to feedback and seek constructive criticism as you develop as an artist.

If you are looking for professional feedback for your music, you can try platforms like Crowd Review (AudioKite) and Fluence.
 

Important Tips About Submitting to Blogs

 
Before getting into the list, I wanted to go over a few pointers you need to know.

– Don’t just blindly submit to every blog just because you can. You’ll still need to do some research on what are the right blogs for your songs. Make sure your style or type of music makes sense for what they are looking for so you’re not wasting anyone’s time. This will mean you’ll need to listen to some of the songs they cover to see if your music fits.

– Bloggers prefer new or unreleased music. If your best song was released over a year ago, don’t even bother submitting it. You want to use a song released within the first couple of months. The sooner the better. They want what’s new and fresh in order to ride any momentum your song may have.

– Personalize your pitches and keep them short. Instead of just sending a generic greeting, try to include the specific name of the person you are pitching. Most of the time, it will be on the contact or submission page. This shows that you’re not sending out mass emails. Your pitches should only be a few sentences long where you touch on who you are, what you want and about the release. Lastly, be specific in what you’re looking for – getting featured, a review or an interview.

– Send direct links to your music. Unless it is requested, DON’T send MP3s or any file attachments that need to be downloaded when submitting your song. You’ll need to upload it on a platform that doesn’t require someone to login or subscribe to a specific service to listen like Spotify or Apple Music. Read carefully on what platform they prefer, but usually, the top option is a public or private SoundCloud link. If you have an EPK (Electronic Press Kit), you may want to include the link to it as well.

– Read the submission directions and guidelines carefully. Each blog may be different in what they expect. Some only want to cover singles while others may want only bigger projects. Some only want new music while others may only cover it if it’s not released yet. You may also have to contact someone very specific and not use their general contact form or email address. Take the time to investigate all of these details, as it will increase your chances of success.

– Follow up once and don’t spam. If you don’t hear back, follow up once and move on. Never spam and keep asking because that’s a recipe to get ignored. Chances are the blogger didn’t see it or they’re not interested. Try again for the next release.

– Watch out for scams. Be really careful about any blogs that ask you to pay to submit your music to a blog and do a review or interview. If they charge, do a bit of digging to make sure they even have a real audience that is going to even see it. Check what’s their social media engagement like. This even applies to the blogs on SubmitHub. It’s very easy to get scammed or pay for something that may look legit but won’t do anything for you. Here’s a good example that you’ll likely want to avoid.
 

Music Blogs

 
Here’s the list of blogs I compiled for you in alphabetical order. There’s a well-balanced mix of blogs focusing on different genres and based in geographical locations. I made sure to only include blogs that are active as of November of 2023. If you feel like you have an active blog that belongs here, feel free to contact me.

As you’ll see below, lots of music blogs now use SubmitHub to handle and filter the large volume of submissions they receive. You can always go there directly for more details and stats on these blogs, as well as other blogs to submit your music to. There are two types of submissions, standard (free) and premium (paid). I would not bother with any of the free options (very limited) and would buy credits for premium submissions since it’s inexpensive.

SubmitHub is a legitimate platform but does carry some controversy with their pay-to-review model. Some see it as a form of payola while some question the integrity of bloggers operating in this model. Personally, I think it’s a great concept, but it is definitely not perfect.

Although I have not used them yet, you may want to consider using a submission tool like Groover. From the looks of it, it’s very similar to SubmitHub in pricing and blogs you can reach except they are based in Europe.
 

The post 40 Music Blogs to Submit Your Songs for Exposure… But Is It Worth It? appeared first on D4 Music Marketing.

Although Spotify is the most popular paid streaming service, not everyone uses it and it’s not possible to link to all the different outlets your music is on when promoting it. This is where a smart link or music landing page comes in.

A smart link directs the user to a web page that contains links to all the different places people can buy or listen to your new release. In some cases, you may want to include other relevant links, song snippets and videos in your marketing efforts.

This smart link is what you would use in your call to action to promote your new release in your social media posts, IG URL, newsletter, IG Stories, etc. You can also leave this smart link in the YouTube or Facebook description of your music video so viewers can follow up on what platforms they can stream or download it.

Some of these tools discussed below will allow you to create a smart link page for a Spotify pre-save campaign for an upcoming release as well.

In this blog, I’m going to cover some of the best smart link options out there (free and paid), provide an overview of their features and share my thoughts on them. My main focus is going to be on the value you get for free plans with each tool.
 

What Do You Need to Get Started?

 
In most cases, what you’ll need in order to create a smart link with one of the following tools is a URL to your music from a music platform or service.

For example, here’s how you would get the URL on Spotify:

You can also do a Google search of your artist name, song/album title and music platform. Stick to using a URL from Spotify or Apple Music unless the tool specifically requests something different.

For example, I searched “Eligh Last House on the Block Apple Music” to get this link:

https://music.apple.com/us/album/last-house-on-the-block/1376923851

These smart link tools need a scan source to be able to pull all relevant data it needs to populate your smart link landing page. It’s not always 100% accurate so just make sure to double check the links for each service you include on your landing page.

Some will let you use an ISRC code for an individual song/single or UPC for the release instead, which you should be able to get from your music distributor.

For example, here’s how you would find this for DistroKid users. From your main dashboard, click on one of your releases and you should find it in the locations below:

For Pre-Save Campaigns

If your music is scheduled for release and you want to do a pre-save campaign, you may need the Spotify URI (Uniform Resource Indicator).

It’s easy to get the URI after the music is already released (the same way you would get the album link on Spotify), but it may not be as accessible before it hits stores. It will depend on your music distributor.

DistroKid says you have to request it by contacting them directly to get the Spotify URI before your music is released. Select ‘Managing Music and Profile in Stores’ and then ‘Request Artist or Album URL/URI’ to submit the ticket.

The release date needs to be more than a week or two away to process this request so plan accordingly. You will need to provide the UPC for the release. They can only provide links for iTunes/Apple Music, Google Play, and Spotify before your release goes live.

If you use CD Baby, it’ll be easier to get the URI.

The good news is in some cases, you can also use the ISRC or UPC instead, which should be provided to you when you upload your music to your distributor.
 

HyperFollow from DistroKid

Example: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/butterscotch1/purple-lights

For those who use DistroKid as their music distributor, they will automatically generate a smart link called a HyperFollow page after you upload your release. This is probably the easiest and quickest free option if you’re a DistroKid subscriber.

Customization Notes: You can edit the HyperFollow page.

• Select which services you want to show as options and even reorder them. Ideally, you’ll want to put the more popular options that your fan base uses.
• Add your social media links and set it so it will do this for every HyperFollow page moving forward.
• Insert your Facebook Pixel for retargeting ad campaigns.
• Embed a YouTube video below the cover art. This is a great way to share your music video for the release.

Pre-Save Feature: You can use this link to promote the song before its release in a Spotify pre-save campaign. For those who pre-save your release, they will automatically follow you on Spotify and you can get their email address (if the user checks the box to share their email with you).

Performance Data / Analytics: In the HyperFollow dashboard, it shows how many views and saves each of your HyperFollow pages gets.

If you click on the HyperFollow page for each release, it will show you:

• How many page visits
• Number of new followers generated
• Details about the people who pre-saved, including their city/state/country and their favorite artists on Spotify.

However, it does not tell you how many times a service or platform gets clicked on.

Cost: Completely free for DistroKid subscribers only. My recommended music distribution plan is called Musician Plus which is $44.99 a year.

Feature.fm

 

Example: https://ffm.to/bs-scotch-ep

One of the more popular smart link tools I’ve seen being used is from Feature.fm. It has a clean layout that looks like the other services out there.

The one cool feature is that you can listen to a short snippet of the song directly on the landing page by clicking on the cover. If you’re releasing a project with multiple tracks, you can click on the icon on the top left to reveal the tracklist so visitors hear the songs first.

Customization Notes: You can customize almost everything you would need in their free plan.

• Change the link URL to something custom to your release.
• Add/remove specific digital music services.
• Include your social media links.
• Insert your Facebook Pixel, Google Analytics and more tracking in a paid plan only.

However, they don’t offer the ability to embed a music video in any of the plans.

Pre-Save Feature: Once you log in, you can select ‘Create a Pre-Save Link’ from the welcome screen. You can use a URL that is created by the major platforms for the pre-release, UPC code or ISRC code in case you don’t have the Spotify URI.

There’s an option where you can send fans to a specific URL after they pre-save. If you’re offering an exclusive download or access to a secret video, this would be a good place to do it.

Feature.fm Pre-Save Page

Performance Data / Analytics: Only the last 7 days of analytics and performance data for your smart links is shared with you in the free plan. Some of the visitor data you get to see is the top services/platforms that are clicked, how many listened to your song preview, where visitors are clicking from (like your IG profile or YouTube for example) and their geographic location.

Cost: There is a free plan that allows you to create as many smart links as you want if you sign up as an artist. Paid plans start at $17/month for artists if paid yearly or $19 paid month to month, which give you access to more features. If you sign up as someone who represents artists, then you’ll have to pay to access their smart link tool.

How to Create: Sign up for an account and it starts with filling out your artist profile. Once you get to the welcome screen, click on ‘Create a Music Smart Link’ to get started. Like some of the other services, input a link to your release from a major platform or the UPC/ISRC code. It will do a scan and pull up all of the other related links from other platforms.

Smart Links from ToneDen

ToneDen offers free smart links if you sign up for an account. Their layout and design are simple like most of the others.

What I like the most is the ability to embed a YouTube video at the very top. If there’s no video, you can choose to play a short snippet of one of your songs. The services to play the song preview are YouTube, SoundCloud, Deezer and Spotify.

Unlike Feature.fm, you can only play one song snippet on your landing page. For a multiple song release, it will only play the first one.

Customization Notes: You can basically customize everything you would need in their free plan.

• Manually select which digital platforms to include. There’s even an option you can select that will automatically sort the music platforms based on how many times it has been clicked on. This makes sure that the most popular option is on the top of the list.
• Change your landing page image (where your cover art is) and add a page background.
• Include your social media and website links.
• Insert a Facebook or Google pixel to track and retarget those who visit your ToneDen landing page.
• Customize the link URL.
• Embed a video on the top of the landing page.

Performance Data / Analytics: You get plenty of data including landing page views, number of unique visitors, click-throughs to a music platform, the number of clicks each listed service gets, referrers, top countries and top cities.

Pre-Save Support: Only available if you have a premium plan. If you want to create a smart link for a Spotify pre-save campaign, select ‘New Release’ when asked which music template to use. You will need the Spotify URI of your unreleased single or album. You can leave this field blank and enter the URI once you have it from your distributor, but make sure you’ve added one before the save date. You can set it up so that your pre-save page becomes a regular pivot/landing page once your music is released.

Cost: Free to create smart links and pre-save campaigns, but you have to pay to collect emails and access their other marketing tools. Their plans start at $50 a month, but you’re paying to use their automated social marketing platform and not just smart links. I have yet to try it, but it does look like a promising investment for independent artists.

How to Create: When you first sign up for an artist account, it’ll take you to a screen where you can decide to make a ‘Spotify Pre-Save Campaign’ or ‘Create a Landing Page for Your Music’. Enter a stream Source, a URL to your music release, and you can then customize your landing page how you want.

LinkFire

 

Example: https://logic.lnk.to/NoPressure

LinkFire is the smart link tool used by the major music labels (Universal Music Group, Warner Music and Sony Music) for their artists. It’s very easy and straightforward to use, but it’s not necessarily catered for your typical independent artist.

The key features that you would want or need from a landing page are only available for higher-priced plans. You can get more out of the free plans from the other tools mentioned in this blog than to pay for LinkFire.

Customization Notes: Once you provide them a URL or code to scan, they will generate the complete page for you then you can make a few changes after.

• Customize the link URL.
• You can add/remove the service destinations.
• You can select a song that visitors can sample on the landing page. You can also choose a YouTube video, but it doesn’t show as an embedded video. If you click on the cover art, it will pop up a video with the video playing. It doesn’t look good though because when I tried it, the cover art was zoomed in on one corner.
• Can’t include additional links to your social media or website.
• Adding a Facebook Pixel for retargeting is reserved for only premium members, starting at $150/month. Google Analytics tracking is only available in higher paid plans.

Performance Data / Analytics: Very minimal for the ad-supported plan and it’s limited to 200 visits a month worth of data. You get more insights if you pay.

Pre-Save Support: Creating a pre-save link is only available for Business plans that start at $50/month.

Cost: There is a free/ad-supported plan. Plans start at $10 a month for artists.

How to Create: Start off by signing up. Once you confirm you email and activate your account, just click on ‘create link’ to get started.
 

HearNow from CD Baby

For CD Baby users, you can create your smart link / pivot page with HearNow. Unfortunately, I don’t have much information or insight about HearNow since they don’t share much on their website. I’m not about to pay to see what they offer either.

I will say that their design looks the most unique out of the other smart link pages. Their layout appears to accommodate bigger releases like EPs and albums where you can list all the tracks. Similarly to Feature.fm, you let visitors listen to multiple short snippets or the full song directly on the landing page.

Customization: Yes, but I don’t know any specifics because it’s not mentioned on their website.

Performance Data / Analytics: No idea, but I imagine there should be some basic analytics provided.

Pre-Save Support: If you want to create a smart link page for a pre-save campaign, you’ll have to do that with CD Baby’s Show.co.

Cost: The drawback is you have to distribute your music through CD Baby and you have to pay. It costs $2.95 monthly or you can pay $24 a year ($2/ month), which is reasonable.

How to Create: To create your HearNow page, log into your CD Baby account. Once you’re in the account dashboard, click on the ‘Release Your One-Page Website’ under ‘Featured Tools’ to get started.

Linktree

 

Example: https://linktr.ee/stateofemergency

A lot of musicians already use Linktree in their Instagram profile to compensate for the fact you can only have one URL there. It’s not exactly a smart link service like the others I mention. But their tool/service is essentially a fluid pivot page where you can manually add any links you want, like to different streaming platforms and your website. This means you can use another smart link service like DistroKid’s HyperFollow page inside Linktree.

Using Linktree can be convenient if you’re already using their service for various social media platforms since you can just change the links up for each release.

The drawback is if you only get one URL / page. For me, I like the idea of creating a pivot page for each release and leaving the URL in the music video description. So in case if someone discovers your song on YouTube for the first time, they can still access the pivot page way past the release.

Customization Notes: Yes, you can make some basic color changes, but full customization is only available on the paid plan. You can create unlimited links though in the free plan.

Performance Data / Analytics: It will only tell you how many lifetime views your Linktree page has received, but you need the paid pro version to access more data.

Pre-Save Support: No

Cost: It is free, but they do offer a pro version for $6 a month with a bunch more features and analytics. The most notable ones for promotional purposes are the ability to embed a video and add your social media links. You can also customize it to fit your branding.

How to Create: Sign up for an account here. It’s really straight forward once you add your links to your page.

UPDATE: Linktree recently acquired the smart link service Odesli (Songlink), which is discussed below.
 

Odesli (Formerly Songlink) – Acquired by Linktree

Example: https://song.link/us/i/1519923240

Odesli was what I used briefly earlier on when it was still known as Songlink. Their landing page is not the most visually appealing, but it gets the job done. I only wanted to include those who want something really quick and simple without needing to sign up for an account.

Customization Notes: It is free to create a smart link, but you have to sign up for an account to do basic customization. If you upgrade to their premium plan for $1.99 a month, you get extra features like a custom smart link URL and add a Facebook Pixel.

Performance Data / Analytics: You can access up to the last 30 days of data for your page if you pay for the premium plan.

Pre-Save Support: None

Cost: Free, but their premium plan is $1.99 a month for extra features and customization options. Not worth it though unless they revamp their tool to compete with the others.

How to Create: All you have to do is pop in the URL for the release from one of the major platforms (Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play, Amazon Music) and it’ll automatically search and pull all the links into one page. You don’t even need an account to do this.
 

Create Your Own Pivot / Landing Page

 
Personally, I prefer to create my own pivot/landing page on an artist’s website specifically for that release. For those who have some experience with web design, you can just make a new webpage on the website dedicated to your music release and add the necessary elements.

The main benefit of going this route is that everything takes place on your own property where you have full control over what goes on the page. It also doesn’t cost anything extra since you’re already paying for the hosting of your website.

What you should have on your landing page:

• Links to the top music outlets where the single can be streamed or downloaded. If you use a website builder and management service like Squarespace (Use code D4MUSIC10 for 10% off – Affliate Link), you can easily add buttons and link them to each streaming/download platform. I usually go with the big 4 – Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and Google Play. See an example I made using Squarespace.
• Embedded music video. If not, display the cover art with an embedded music player below from either Bandcamp or SoundCloud.
• Facebook Pixel so you can create a custom audience for Facebook Ad retargeting. I would suggest going this route if you’re going to do an ad campaign to cold audiences or people who have never heard of you.
• Google Analytics for performance data (which you should already have installed on your website).
• Lyrics and song credits
• Links to buy merch if you have any.

Here are some custom pivot/landing page examples:

http://flying-lotus.com/more/ (WordPress)

https://grandtapestry.com/walk-with-me (Squarespace)

https://butterscotchmusic.com/scotch-ep/ (WordPress)

Using Bit.ly

Lastly, you may want to make a shortened, custom link with bit.ly for presentation purposes. Insert this link on your social media profiles, posts and video descriptions when the single is officially out.

Here are examples of what I used for previous campaigns:

https://bit.ly/gtap-walk

For my landing page, I also use bit.ly to shorten the URLs to each individual platform where the single is being released. Creating a bit.ly link for Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and Google Play allows me to track which platforms people are clicking on to listen to the release. I use this data to determine the order I put the platforms in for future releases.

Here are the results for one of the campaigns where I used bit.ly to track how many times each platform is clicked:

As you can see, Spotify was clicked the most and followed by Apple Music. For this particular audience, I would make sure Spotify is the first option.

Here are the results for another campaign:

For this artist, I would make sure Apple Music is the top platform on the landing page.
 

Conclusion

 
Regardless of where you are in your music career, it would be “smart” to create a smart link for every release. There are tons of these smart link services out there, but they all essentially do the same thing. The ones covered in this blog are generally the more popular options. If you have a music video uploaded to Facebook, YouTube or IGTV, be sure to include this smart link in the description.

Overall, my favorite smart link tool with all things considered (look, cost, features, customization, user friendly) is ToneDen’s Smart Links. The two big features I value highly is the ability to embed a video and include your Facebook Pixel, which you can all do in the free plan. The downside is you will have to pay to use their pre-save link.

I also like Feature.fm, but you can’t embed a video and the Facebook Pixel feature is only available in a paid plan. If you’re trying to keep costs low, one strategy is to use Feature.fm for the pre-save campaign. Once the song is live, use ToneDen’s Smart Link for everything else like social ad campaigns.

DistroKid’s HyperFollow is great if you already use them to distribute your music, but not a fan of the header design and their branding is a bit much. The huge plus is that you can pre-save, embed video and add a Facebook Pixel at no extra costs.

The big reason why I like having the video on top of the landing page is for Instagram Ads. Since the longest video you can use in an ad is 60 seconds, you want to direct viewers to a landing page where they can watch the full video and easily find the song on their preferred platform/service after they watch. If you’re doing Facebook Ads, you can promote the full music video so there’s no need to have the video on top. Depending on how and where the smart link is going to be used, you should be able to find the right smart link tool to fit your needs.

The post What’s the Best Smart Link Tool for Promoting Your Music Effectively? appeared first on D4 Music Marketing.