Because of this, we’ve seen artists actively pull all their music from Spotify, with many more wondering if they should do the same.

What actually happens if you remove your catalog from Spotify? Can you still sustain a career without your music on the biggest music streaming platform in the world?

The short answer is yes, but it’s not without consequences.

In this blog, I’ll cover what impact taking your music off Spotify can have on your career and what steps you should take if you decide to go through with it.

What You Actually Lose Without Spotify

1. Streaming Revenue From the Largest Platform

This one’s obvious. Spotify is the biggest streaming platform globally, so pulling your music means losing a nice chunk of your streaming revenue. There’s no exact percentage, as it will vary between artists, but you can expect to lose out on at least a third of your streaming royalties. This is a rough estimate based on how much market share Spotify has for the U.S., but it can be more depending on the country your listeners are in and what platforms they use.

For example, Spotify represents around 41% of the streaming royalties for one artist I work with. 62% of their fan base is in the U.S., while 38% account for the rest of the world, including top countries like the U.K., Canada, Australia, Germany and other European countries.

For some artists, this is not going to matter much. Streaming already pays so little that their real income comes from shows, merch, brand deals or direct fan support. In those cases, Spotify revenue feels more expendable.

For other artists, every dollar matters, especially those who are fully independent. There are some who need their streaming royalties to survive, feed their families and continue to create the art they’ve been fortunate to live off of.

Before making any decision, you need to take a good look at your numbers and know how much Spotify contributes to your monthly or yearly income. Everyone’s situation is different, so see if you can afford to live without Spotify.

2. Spotify’s Discovery Engine

One of the big benefits of Spotify is its discovery engine. Their algorithmic playlists, like Discover Weekly, Radio and Mixes, help introduce your music to new listeners.

There’s also Discovery Mode, where artists can opt in specific songs to let Spotify push certain tracks more heavily in exchange for a 30% cut of royalties on those streams. It’s controversial for being pay-to-play (payola), but for some artists, it helps to drive more streams.

That said, if you’re a newer or developing artist without much of an existing listenership and catalog, losing Spotify’s algorithm won’t really affect you.

The good news is you still have access to other powerful discovery engines on social media, like Instagram and TikTok. As long as you’re posting regularly and engaging with fans on social media, you’ll do fine.

3. Listener and Music Data

Spotify for Artists provides a lot of useful data about your listeners and your music releases. For example, you can learn what the top cities and countries your fans are listening in, age groups, gender, types of listeners, individual song performance and even the source of streams.

This type of information can be used to make important business decisions for artists. One of the most popular use cases is for routing tours and booking shows based on the number of listeners in each city.

If you leave Spotify, you’ll still have data from other DSPs and social platforms. However, since Spotify is the largest, you’re losing access to one of the biggest pools of listener data available for your business.

4. Spotify Followers To Notify About New Releases

When you drop new music on Spotify, your followers will find it on their Release Radar playlist. That’s a built-in way to share new music with your listeners and fans without doing anything extra.

If you pull out from Spotify, you lose your followers and the ability to push new releases to them.

This is not a big deal because Spotify followers are siloed. You have no way to see who your followers are or message them directly. Similarly with social media, you don’t actually own that relationship either. But at least you can see who follows you on platforms like Instagram and TikTok while having the ability to communicate with them through comments or direct messages.

If you already have an email list or you’re active on social media, losing Spotify followers isn’t the end of the world. You have plenty of other channels for updating fans on new releases.

5. Show Promotion (Bandsintown Integration)

Spotify’s Bandsintown integration is genuinely useful for touring artists. When you list shows on Bandsintown, it automatically appears on your Spotify profile.Spotify also sends emails and app notifications to followers when you’re playing a show in their city.

This helps to promote your upcoming shows to fans who may not be tracking you on Bandsintown, which is a big plus.

However, if you don’t play many shows or tour regularly, this feature won’t impact you much. And if your fans are already tracking you on Bandsintown, you’re still covered. Just make sure you have a link to your Bandsintown schedule in your link-in-bio page and on your website.

6. Shopify Merch Integration

If you use Shopify to sell merch on your website, Spotify lets you display your products directly on your artist profile< You can even link specific merch items to your releases so fans see them while listening.

In my experience, we’ll occasionally see merch orders come in from Spotify, but it’s nothing substantial. But of course, this will vary by artist.

If you don’t sell much merch or don’t use Shopify, this integration won’t matter for you. It’s a neat feature for artists who use Shopify, but not game-changing.

7. Editorial Playlist Pitching

Once you’re off Spotify and no longer push new releases to the platform, you lose the ability to pitch a new song to Spotify’s editorial team.

Getting a track on an editorial playlist can provide a nice bump in streams, discovery, and revenue, but it’s rarely something that makes or breaks a career. Not to mention,the odds of landing on an editorial Spotify playlist are already extremely low, considering over 100,000 songs are uploaded every day.

You can also pitch new releases for Amazon Music playlists, but it’s likely not going to have the same impact as on Spotify.

Pitching to Spotify editorial playlists is a nice feature, especially since it’s free, but it’s not essential for independent artists.

Should You Leave Spotify? Factors to Consider

The big question is, should you actually do it?

This is where things get personal. I fully understand that no amount of money or reach matters if it conflicts with your morals or ethics. At the same time, this is also a business decision. Streaming platforms may not pay well, but some independent artists rely on that income to get by. When a decision affects your livelihood, you owe it to yourself to be fully informed.

Ask yourself honestly:

• How financially dependent am I on Spotify?
• How strong is my direct-to-fan ecosystem?
• How loyal is my fanbase?
• What stage of my career am I in?
• What are my long-term goals?

Don’t let pressure from fans or other artists dictate your move. Some artists leave for moral reasons and to set an example. Others stay because they need the money to keep their business operating. There’s no judgment either way, so do only what makes sense for you and your family first.

If You Do Decide to Leave Spotify

Let’s say you decide to go through with it. What now? Here’s a list of steps and things to consider.

Contact Your Distributor

Spotify won’t remove your music directly, but your distributor can. You’ll likely need to contact your distributor’s support team to request removal.

The good news?You can always add your music back later.

Inform Your Fans

Never pull your music silently. That’s how you confuse and upset fans.

Give fans a heads up about your decision on socials and your email list. Briefly explain why, and let Spotify users know exactly how and where they can still access your music.

Suggest Another Streaming Platform

Most casual listeners won’t switch platforms for one artist, but loyal fans might. Do your research and only recommend platforms you actually feel good about supporting.

Offer Listening Alternatives

The fans impacted by this decision are going to be Spotify users, of course. Here are some alternative ways they can still listen to your music.

• Encourage digital downloads (Bandcamp): Bandcamp is hands down the best option here. Fans can buy and own your music and stream it through the Bandcamp app like they would on Spotify. The best part is that you get paid more for your music. I personally like Bandcamp because the platform and community there are very supportive of independent artists.

• Use YouTube as a free option: YouTube is universal, searchable, and free. You likely have your music distributed here in the form of art tracks when you uploaded your music for release. Almost everyone already uses it, so it’s a solid fallback for fans who won’t switch DSPs but still want access to your music.

• Sell USB flash drives with your music: USB or USB-C flash drives are a cool, collectible option. Fans get files they own forever, and it adds a tangible, meaningful layer to the fan relationship. If fans have a newer smartphone with a USB-C connection, they can just connect the flash drive to their phone and transfer the files over. The big drawback is that music files can take up quite amount of space and be a little more inconvenient to use.

• Sell physical music formats (Vinyl & CDs): Although this option can be the most profitable for you, it’s also the furthest away from what Spotify users are used to when listening to your music through a phone app. Still, this should be mentioned as an option as one of the best ways to support you and your music in this situation.

Consider a Middle-Ground Option

For a lot of artists, taking down their entire catalog from Spotify is not an easy financial choice. What some artists will do instead is leave their previous releases on Spotify, but no longer release new music there. This keeps some revenue and discovery flowing while funneling fans towards platforms, options and channels where artists can better monetize their music.

Reinforce Fan Communication Channels

When you lose the features and benefits of Spotify, you should strengthen other areas of your marketing and communications with your fan base.

Encourage fans to:

• Track you on Bandsintown
• Sign up for your email list
• Join your Instagram Broadcast Channel
• Favorite your Instagram account so your posts show up more often
• Follow you on Bandcamp

When you don’t own your fan relationships on Spotify or even social media, it’s always a good idea to have multiple ways to reach them.

Conclusion

Yes, artists can survive without Spotify. It may be the biggest music streaming platform, but it does not have a monopoly over your career. You still have other platforms and channels that can supplement what Spotify can offer.

This is not to say it won’t be inconvenient for you and your fans, but being able to adapt as an independent artist is a valuable skill to exercise. In an ever-changing technological landscape, this is likely not the last time you’ll have to learn to make adjustments to how you operate.

The post Can Artists Really Survive Without Their Music on Spotify? appeared first on D4 Music Marketing.

Regardless of whether you’re a developing or established artist, the main goal here isn’t to rack up Spotify streams. Instead, the focus is on maximizing reach for discovery and brand awareness while building your social media following. Why?

Because growing a real audience is the foundation you need before streams, playlists or press can have any lasting impact. You want the ability to directly connect with potential fans so you can nurture those relationships to monetize later. That’s how you build a supportive fan base.

For the established artists, it’s important to regularly attract new eyes and ears to bring them into your marketing funnel. Having super fans is great, but business-wise, it can be challenging to sustain your career without bringing in new fans/customers regularly.

This plan won’t fit every type of artist or genre perfectly, but it should serve as a good starting point to figure out your content strategy.

The $1,000 Breakdown

• $600 → Short-form video content creation
• $400 → Social media ads (reserved only if a video pops off organically)

That’s it. Simple, clear and effective. The approach is a combination of organic posting and the smart use of paid media.
 

Why Content Comes First ($600)

Content is the core of this promotional plan, specifically video. Short-form video (think TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts) is the number one way people discover music today, especially for younger generations. These platforms are discovery engines that help push your content in front of new potential fans.

Many artists hate the idea of creating content, but the reality is that content has been key in promoting artists and their music, even before social media existed. From a marketing perspective, most online attention is on social media, so it only makes sense for artists to prioritize social media to build and grow their careers.

So if you’re serious about promoting a song and getting discovered by new people, you will need plenty of short-form video clips to post.

Here’s how I’d spend the $600:

• Hire a videographer if possible: See if you can find a local freelancer or someone looking for more experience with video who can do a video session for about $200 – $300 a session. For each shoot, aim for 2 to 4 hours at 2 or 3 locations. Within those locations, you’ll use different areas, angles, and backgrounds to give yourself more variety in your videos.
• Do multiple full song takes: Perform the song live or lip-sync it, just like you would in a traditional music video. Make sure to practice and rehearse beforehand so you can maximize your time shooting, especially if working with a videographer.
• Create volume: Chop up those takes into different clips. You can create a clip of the verses, chorus only, verse + chorus, bridge into chorus, or even a few standout lines within a verse. These clips can range from 10 to 90 seconds. If done right, one shoot can easily yield 20 to 40+ usable pieces of short-form videos.
• Switch things up: For each new location, bring outfit changes. Experiment with different camera angles, editing techniques, props or other actors to give you even more variety.
• Add text captions over the video: A lot of people scroll their news feed with the sound off. Using text on the video is one good way to catch someone’s eye and stop the scroll. This can be text captions of the lyrics as you’re performing them, or you can also use a text hook. Your hook should either signal who the song is for, communicate what it’s about, or intrigue the viewer to watch more. Some artists may choose not to use any text, and that can work perfectly fine too.

To learn more about creating short-form videos and what type of video you should be creating, check out this blog here.

After your first shoot, you should have a full month’s worth of daily content. Maybe even more if you post only on weekdays and recycle clips with new captions or hooks.

For posting on Instagram, you can use the new trial reels feature to test content. Posting a reel as a trial will only show it to non-followers to see how it performs before deciding to make it public on your profile and share it with the rest of your followers.

What if you can’t hire a videographer?
Use the $600 to invest in equipment: a tripod, lighting, and maybe editing software. Your smartphone camera is more than good enough, especially if you have one of the newer iPhones or Samsung Galaxies. Ask a friend to help shoot if needed. The key is consistency, not fancy production.

If you are shooting your own videos, check out this blog.
 

When to Use Ads ($400)

The remaining $400 is strictly for ads, but there’s a catch. You don’t spend it unless one of your videos starts taking off organically.

Think of ads as “fuel for the fire.” If a clip is already working well on its own, boosting it will amplify its reach and impact. Otherwise, spending ad money on a video from the beginning without trying it out first is a risky gamble.

Since we’re on a limited budget and you can test it for free, it makes sense to put money behind a video once you know it works as an organic post.

Here’s the step-by-step process:

1. Post your first batch of 20–30 clips daily (or weekdays only). Once a day is fine.
2. Watch the numbers carefully: If a clip shows strong engagement numbers or signs or signs of virality, consider putting $100 – $200 behind the video.
3. Keep stacking: If a second video also does well, put another $100 behind it. You’ve got up to four shots with that $400.
4. Keep the momentum going: If a video goes viral and attracts followers, use another $300 to create a fresh batch of videos for the same song, in new locations or with new visuals, to keep the momentum alive.

What If Nothing Pops?

 
This is important: not every song is going to hit, and that’s okay. It may take posting multiple videos for months and experimenting with different songs to start seeing traction. Remember that what’s considered “good” music is subjective, so there’s no way any strategy is guaranteed to work right away.

If none of your clips take off after the first $300 session, don’t panic.

Here’s how to pivot:

• Use the second $300 for a new batch of videos, but this time for your next song.
• Keep the $400 in reserve for ads, in case something from the next batch pops.
• What about the first batch of videos? Keep posting them on Instagram as a ‘trail reel.’ This is a useful tool for creators to see how your videos perform for non-followers without having the video visible on your profile. However, you can’t post it exactly as you did before so you’ll need to change it up and experiment with different captions or text hooks.
• If the second song doesn’t move the needle, repeat the cycle with the third. Shoot another batch of videos and you should have $100 left over for ads.

Newer artists often need several songs before something resonates with an audience. It doesn’t mean your music sucks, it just means you’re still developing and experimenting. The problem is not the algorithm. Having the self-awareness and patience to not let poor responses to your videos affect your consistency will give you the best shot of finding success.
 

What About Playlists, Music Blogs, Radio or PR?

 
I wouldn’t spend money on any of these with a $1,000 budget. Here’s why:

• Playlists: Other than pitching to Spotify’s editorial playlists (which is free and worth doing), I wouldn’t pay for any playlisting services. Legit services can be expensive and it usually won’t build a fanbase. Streams and followers are siloed on their respective platforms, so you can’t reach directly to listeners… at least for now. Plus, there are a lot of playlisting scams. It carries some risk if your song lands on a botted playlist with fake streams.
• Music Blogs: We no longer live in the 2000s. Blogs aren’t how most people discover music anymore. Sites like SubmitHub or Groover can be fine to submit your songs for feedback, but don’t expect them to break your career.
• Radio: A majority of Americans still listen to the radio, but it’s a high barrier of entry and radio pitching services can be expensive. Unless your song goes massively virally and crosses over into the mainstream/traditional media, most songs aren’t going to be the right fit for radio programming on the popular stations where you would ideally want your music on. Of course, there are smaller local or college radio stations. But in my experience, it’s not cost-effective compared to what you can achieve on social media.
• PR Campaign: Hiring a publicist is costly, and even if you land a feature in a big outlet, it won’t necessarily move the needle for your business at this stage. Getting cover on Rolling Stone isn’t going to transform your career.

With limited resources, your focus should be squarely on creating content that reaches people where they already discover new music, social media.
 

Scaling the Plan

 
$1,000 might feel like a lot for a new or developing artist. But you can scale this plan down:

• $500 budget: $300 for content, $200 in reserve for ads.
• $250 budget: $150 for DIY content (tripod, lighting, editing apps), $100 for ads if something works.

The same logic and steps apply, but in smaller chunks.
 

Final Thoughts

 
Promoting your music and building real traction is one of the hardest parts of being a developing artist. If you’re not regularly performing live and reaching new listeners in person, your next best opportunity is on social media, specifically through short-form video. It’s been the engine behind breakout artists of all types for years, and it’ll remain essential heading into 2026.

Here’s a recap. If I had $1,000 to promote a song:

• $600 → Shoot short-form performance videos
• $400 → Keep in reserve for ads if a clip takes off organically or goes viral

No playlists. No blogs. No PR. No radio. Just consistent, engaging video content and smart use of ads.

Social media, especially video, is the most cost-effective way to promote your music and develop your brand. A playlist can expose someone to a new song, but a video can communicate a lot more about you. And at the end of the day, you don’t just want listeners who stream some of your songs or buy a vinyl record. You want fans who will recommend your music to their friends, show up to your live shows every time you’re in their city and buy merch regularly to support your career long-term.

Remember, the goal isn’t to inflate vanity metrics like streaming numbers. You want to grow your audience and fans who connect deeply with you as an artist and brand. That’s how you build a music career that lasts.

The post How Artists Should Spend a $1,000 Budget Promoting a Song in 2026 appeared first on D4 Music Marketing.

Planning to release a new single? Don’t want to miss any steps?

Putting out a new song is relatively straightforward, but there are a lot of things that go into the process of a successful release.

In this blog, I will discuss everything independent artists need to know about releasing singles. On top of that, I will share my checklist that I use for my clients. I will cover the entire process in depth so you can feel confident you’re doing all you can to reach your goals with the release. Whenever you release music, feel free to use this blog as a reference so you have all your bases covered.

My single release process is broken down into 6 phases:

1. Preparation
2. Distribution
3. Promotion Planning
4. Days before the release
5. Day of release
6. Post-release

Before jumping into the process, I’ll go over why you want to release more singles and how often you should do it. If you want free downloadable checklists, links will be at the end.
 

Why release more singles?

 
Many claim the album is dying in this digital age. Although it’s never going to be dead, the traditional “release an album every year or two” model is incompatible with how emerging independent artists build momentum and grow a fan base in this music climate. Releasing singles makes the most sense for those objectives, especially for newer artists on a tighter budget.

1. Releasing singles consistently is more effective for growing your audience. To grow a fanbase, releasing content on a regular basis is needed to build momentum and stay top of mind. Fan loyalty is fickle when we have more music options than we can keep up with. Going silent for an extended period of time can set your progress back.
2. You get more out of each song to engage fans. Producing professional quality music can be expensive. Releasing singles allows you to focus attention on one song and maximize its potential. When releasing an album, you may have a few lead singles, but other songs will not get the attention it deserves. This is particularly true if you haven’t established yourself as an artist and don’t have a strong following yet. Plus, with so much more music being released now, the attention an album gets, even for the biggest music stars, is often a couple of weeks.
3. A single is easier to consume. At the end of the day, music listeners prefer short, consumable pieces of content like a single song or video from artists they never heard. Before serving people full meals, you gotta break it down into snackable servings until you find enough hungry fans who want a buffet.
4. Professionally recorded, mixed and mastered albums can be expensive. Unless money is not a problem, it doesn’t make sense for new, emerging or developing artists to fund an entire album out of pocket without any traction and an existing audience to market to.

This does not mean you should never release larger projects. A collection of songs from an album or EP can allow fans to fully dive into your essence as an artist. Since anyone can release singles, an album release signifies an important milestone in an artist’s career. You’re more likely to get coverage from media, press and blogs for an album than just a single. Lastly, albums and EPs are more eventful, which opens up bigger monetization opportunities like tours and merch.

In today’s music industry, releasing singles and shorter songs is a new reality, but it doesn’t mean you have to conform or compromise your artistry. Just understand that pouring thousands of dollars into an album, when you’ve never released a single song and don’t have a fanbase, is very risky gamble.

How often should I release a single?

 
A singles-oriented strategy to grow a fanbase will work best if you can release singles on a consistent basis. A song every two weeks or once a month is an ideal pace, but this depends on a number of factors.

• Do you have enough music ready to be released? It would be smart to have a handful of completed songs stocked up rather than releasing it as you complete it. This way you’re not stressing out to meet your deadlines.
• Do you have the ability to record and produce the music professionally? Unless your music aesthetic is intentionally lo-fi or rough, it’s important to have your music mixed and mastered. You want your songs to sound great on any device it is being played on. It doesn’t matter how much music you put out there, if it’s not the best version it can be, it will probably not attract much attention.
• Do you have a marketing/promotion budget for each single? You need a dedicated budget set aside for each release. I would say a few hundred per single at least, with the majority of going into video content creation and possibly social media ads. After all, it is pointless to release music consistently if you’re not effectively promoting it to reach new potential fans.
• Are you able to create video content for each release? The most important promotional asset you need to push your single is video content. Pushing your single by itself with only cover art has very limited potential in social media news feeds.
• Do you have the physical, mental and emotional capacity to handle the necessary tasks for each release? If you have a lot going on in your life, maybe like a full-time job, it may not be the best idea to commit to releasing a song every two weeks. Figure out how much time you can set aside to create and release music.

Hip hop artist Russ released a song a week for two years straight before one of his songs took off in 2015 and charted on the Billboard Hot 100. This was how he became a global success, but that’s what worked for him. It’s not feasible for most musicians to attempt this and risk burning out. Depending on your individual circumstances and resources, you need to decide on a release schedule that works best for you.

Find a pace that you’re comfortable with at first and stick with it, even if it’s 1 single every 3 months. You can always pick up the pace later. Consistency is key to build momentum and the better you can stick to your plan, the quicker you’re likely to find success.
 

Phase 1: Preparation

 
Checklist

• Mix and mastered audio file (.WAV)
• Design cover art (.JPEG or .PNG)
• Plan out promo content (videos and photos)
• Register song with copyright office
• Cover song? Secure mechanical license
• Decide on songwriting splits with collaborators​ (song split sheet)
• Register song with PRO (Performing Rights Organization) and MLC (Mechanical Licensing Collective) or publishing admin
• Let your music licensing / publishing company know about the release (if you have one)
• Set a release date
• Explore merch opportunities

Mixing and Mastering

After the song is written and recorded, you’ll need to mix and master it so it can sound its best wherever it’s being played. Unfortunately, anything involving music recording, engineering and production are out of my scope of knowledge so I can’t help you there.

But if you’re unfamiliar with the importance of mixing and mastering, you can easily do a search on YouTube or Google to learn more about it. Although it’s best to pay a producer or audio engineer who knows what they’re doing, you should still educate yourself with the basics.

 
Want an affordable service to get your song mastered? Landr offers a mastering service that only takes a few minutes and they let you try it for free. An artist I work with has used them in the past for the projects we released.

Design Cover Art

 
In order to distribute your music to stores, you will need cover art to go with your release. The image format you want is JPEG or PNG.

For distributors like DistroKid, the minimum resolution should be higher than 1400 x 1400. Because your cover will be used in various placements on these digital platforms, you want to make sure it looks good, even on large screens or TVs so aim for 3000 x 3000 resolution.

If you need a tool to increase the resolution of your cover art with minimal quality loss, try this free tool called Let’s Enhance. For example, if you export cover art from Canva at 1400 x 1400, you can scale the resolution up to 2800 x 2800 while keeping the same quality. You get 5 free image enhancements with a free plan. Another option is using CapCut’s Upscale Image tool.

Plan Promo Content (Videos and Photos)

 
Having video content to release with your single is necessary to see the best results. Watching a video creates an active listening experience that makes it more likely for viewers to be engaged and listen to your new track. You don’t need a big budget, high production music video, but you do need visual content to go with your music. A traditional lyric video or live performance footage of the single can be included in the mix as additional content. I mention this early in the preparation stage because you may need extra time to get the video content done in time for the release.

The traditional music video can work fine, but it should not be the only video you have. If your goal is to grow your social media following and reach new potential fans, I highly recommend leaning into creating multiple short-form videos. Chopping up your traditional music video into shorter vertical clips to post on socials is a viable option, but I would recommend doing more.

In the age of TikTok, Reels and YouTube Shorts, it is essential to have a handful of short-form videos, shot vertically of course, to promote your single. Not just your typical, “hey, I have a new single out” to promote the day of release, but even multiple short teasers leading up to the release. Typically, these are about 15 – 30 seconds in length but generally under 90 seconds.

Additionally, you want to focus on video content that can get the attention from people who don’t know who you are, but can be entertained by or find value in it. Just think, if you were on a crowded street in a major big city, what would you do to get attention as an artist? For video, it doesn’t have to be anything crazy or super creative. It can be simply you performing your new single on video with the lyrics on it. This is the case if you want to post videos for organic growth or use the videos as creative for your ad campaigns.

Depending on what the song is about, there may be an opportunity to get creative with your promo content. Maybe there’s a strong theme or visual component that you may want to commission as an art piece from a local artist you like, specifically for the single. That art/design can be used as the cover art and merch to promote that specific song.

Here’s some other content you may want to have to go with your single release:

• A video that breaks down the story behind the song.
• A video breaking down your favorite lyrics.
• Use video to create a story around the song.
• Performance videos (could be as simple as you lip syncing the chorus/hook in different scenarios or dancing to it).
• Behind the scenes footage of the song being recorded, if it’s interesting.
• Don’t limit it to just video. Make sure to also get behind the scenes photos from the recording of the song and the music video.
• For music videos, take some actual photos (not just stills or screenshots of video). This could be used for video covers on Facebook, Instagram or YouTube.
• Have new photos that can be used for the cover art or single announcement.
• Crowdsource footage from fans to make a video.
• Live performance of the single from a previous show.

There are other simple video options out there if you don’t want to invest much money or you want to be more anonymous in the videos. I personally wouldn’t recommend it, but you may have your specific reasons for going this route.

For DistroKid users, you can try their music video generator Vizy for a simple visualizer you can post or to use for running Meta Ads. It costs less than $10 each. With the rise of AI in the past few years, you can easily find other options to create quick visuals with a Google search.

The more video content you have to promote the single, the better. Get creative and have fun with it. For artists, marketing with video content is where I would dedicate the most time, money and energy into for the release campaign.
 

Publishing Tasks

 
Are you a songwriter? Make sure you’re a member of a PRO (Publishing Rights Organization) so you can register the song credits and receive performance royalties you’re owed from publishing. Avoid making these mistakes when registering your songs.

Is the song a collaboration? If you wrote the song with other co-writers, get your ownership percentage splits in writing based on how much each person contributed to the song. This document is called a split sheet. Be sure to collect their publishing information like the IPI (Interested Party Information) for each person being credited so you can register it properly. Remember the IPI number (11 digits) is not the member ID from the PRO.

Is the song an original? If it’s a song you wrote or co-wrote with other writers, make sure it’s copyrighted. If you don’t use a publishing admin, don’t forget to register your song with the MLC to collect mechanical royalties for the musical composition when DSPs, like Spotify and Apple Music, stream your song on their platform.

Is your song a cover? If you’re releasing a cover song for a physical format, downloads or streams, you need to get the proper mechanical licenses. Usually, your music distributor should offer you an option to secure the mechanical licenses for your cover song when you upload your music. For example, here are the instructions for DistroKid. If your music distributor doesn’t offer the service, try Easy Song Licensing or Royal Solutions (TuneLicensing).

Do you work with a music licensing or publishing company? If you work with any companies that pitch your music for sync opportunities in T.V. shows, movies, commercials or video games, be sure to let know ahead of time and send them the proper assets.

Are you using a publishing admin? If you use a publishing administrator (as you should if you’re an independent songwriter) like SongTrust, then you only need to register the song with them and not your PRO. For those who are not familiar, a publishing administrator helps you collect money that you’ve generated around the world for the songs you wrote. Although not related to publishing, this is a reminder to also register your song with SoundExchange since it’s an administrative task typically grouped for collecting royalties from your music.

Set a Release Date

 
You should always give yourself a minimum of 2 weeks between the day you upload the music to your distributor and the release date. I would aim to schedule the release 3 to 4 weeks in advance, especially if you want to give yourself plenty of time to properly promote and pitch to playlists. Even if you upload the track far in advance, it doesn’t mean you have to announce the single right away either.

Although the music industry usually releases new music on Fridays, you can technically release it on any day of the week. I would avoid the weekends though. I personally like Wednesdays or Thursdays.

Lastly, be aware of other big name artist releases, events or holidays that may be going on around your tentative release date. It’s not going to make or break your single release, but it’s always better to minimize any distractions that can takeaway focus from your song.
 

Explore Merch Opportunities

 
Creating new merch with a music release is more common with an EP or album. For singles, it may be a bit more challenging and riskier.

But depending on the song, the story, message or theme behind it, there may be an opportunity to create a design to go with the release of the single.

If it’s something you want to explore, be sure to do it early in the process so you have the proper time to execute.

Phase 2: Distribution

 
Checklist of what you should have:

• Mastered song (Typically 16-bit, 44.1 kHz WAV)
• Cover art file (3000 x 3000 resolution JPEG or PNG)
• Lyrics
• Songwriter credits
• ISRC code
• Release date

Once preparation is done, you should be ready to schedule your release for distribution. To get your songs on services like Spotify and Apple Music, you need to go through a music aggregator (music distributor). Although you can easily get your music in over 150 digital stores this way, you will have to manually upload your music to Bandcamp, SoundCloud and Audiomack. Remember to add the ISRC code (discussed below) to those other platforms once you get it from your distributor to link the master recording.

Make sure your song is going to the top platforms:

• Spotify
• Apple Music
• Amazon Music
• YouTube Music
• YouTube
• Pandora
• SoundCloud
• Bandcamp

Make sure to select every store so your single is everywhere. If you’re using DistroKid, be sure to also select Facebook, Instagram, Instagram Stories and TikTok so they are available there.

Bandcamp

You can upload your single on Bandcamp ahead of time as a draft or private song. Once it’s time to release, you can manually set it to public and your followers will get an email notification that it’s available. Unfortunately, you can’t schedule it to go public automatically. If you’re not selling digital downloads of your music on your website, I would consider doing so with Bandcamp.

SoundCloud

You can get the song ready on SoundCloud by uploading it as a private song. You can schedule a release to go public at a specific date and time, but it’s only available for SoundCloud Pro Unlimited users. If you have free basic plan, you’ll have to do this manually.

Audiomack

If you do hip hop, R&B, electronic/EDM, reggae/dancehall or latin music, Audiomack is another music distribution platform you can upload your music. Similarly to SoundCloud, you can schedule your single to go public automatically. Just keep in mind they only focus on those specific genres. Also, they only pay out master recording royalties and no publishing royalties.

Is the single going to be released again on your upcoming EP or album? When you upload a song to your distributor, they will generate an ISRC code for your song recording. Make sure to use that same ISRC code when you upload the song again for the album. Doing this will allow digital music stores to treat the previously released single and the song on the album as the same song/master recording so your streams numbers are linked.

What is an ISRC code? The International Standard Recording Code is an international standard code for uniquely identifying sound recordings and music video recordings. Every song you upload will have a unique ISRC code like how every product in a supermarket will have a unique barcode to identify the item. You should be able to get this code when you upload your music to your distributor. If you use DistroKid, click on your release in your account dashboard to see your ISRC code. Be sure to include your ISRC when uploading your song to Bandcamp and SoundCloud.

ISRC code location for DistroKid users

Lyrics

Music distributors like DistroKid will allow you to add lyrics so they can submit them to platforms like Apple Music, iTunes and MusixMatch (for Instagram Stories). Here are guidelines on how to format lyrics for Apple Music and MusixMatch.
 

Phase 3: Promotion Planning

 
Checklist:

• Start a task timeline or calendar
• Submit for Spotify editorial playlist consideration
• Submit for Amazon Music Editorial playlist consideration
• Add a Canvas video to Spotify
• Launch pre-save / pre-order campaign link
• Create smart link or pivot/landing page for the release
• Prepare single announcement post
• Day of release post
• Incorporating Patreon
• Upload audio message to Pandora AMP
• Consider windowing your release to maximize revenue
• Consider live streaming to promote the single

After you upload your music to your distributor and a set release date, your primary focus is going to be on promotion and marketing. To make sure everything runs smoothly, create a schedule or timeline of what needs to be done on each day leading up to release day. Set deadlines to make sure you stay on task.

In this section, I will go over tasks for you to consider in your planning process and what you should have ready for promoting your single.
 

Submit for Spotify Editorial Playlist Consideration

Once your single is uploaded, you should submit your song for Spotify editorial playlist consideration. It’ll take a few days for Spotify to get your single into its system. You should receive an email from Spotify saying that it’s been added and scheduled for release.

Submit for Amazon Music Editorial Playlist Consideration

Now you can pitch your new release to Amazon Music’s curation team to be considered for, not just their playlists, but their (radio) stations as well. The process is the same as Spotify, but done through your Amazon Music for Artists profile.

Add a Canvas Video to Spotify

According to Spotify, adding a Canvas video to your song on their platform are likely to see the following benefits:

• 145% more likely to get track shares
• 20% more likely to get added to playlists
• 9% more likely that fans will visit your profile
• 5% increase in streams
• 1.4% more likely fans will save your song

When you share your song to Instagram Stories that has a Canvas video on Spotify, it will show there as well.

If you just need something quick and basic, you can use DistoKid’s free Canva generator as a member.

Launch a Pre-save / Pre-order Campaign

Update: Spotify now has a new feature called Countdown Pages that allows fans to officially pre-save your album release through their platform. Unfortunately, it does not work for singles. My views on a pre-save campaign have changed and I don’t feel it is necessary or worth the trouble.

If you have the time and energy, you can consider launching a pre-order or Spotify pre-save campaign. Pre-orders can help you chart, but the focus should be on pre-save since most people stream music. Pre-add is Apple Music’s version of a pre-save, but it’s only available for albums and not singles.

To improve your chances of getting on algorithmic Spotify playlists, you want to incentivize people to pre-save your song on Spotify. I believe getting pre-saves for your release is the only engagement signal you can build up before it is released. I would like to think that pre-saves can help with getting placed on Spotify’s Editorial playlists, but there’s no real way to test that. At the very least, you’ll be able to make a bigger splash with all your pre-savers getting a notification that the new single is out.

To make a pre-save link, you may have to use a smart link tool to generate one. Not all of them will let you create it for free so refer to this blog to find the tool that works for you.

If you use DistroKid, they will automatically create a free pre-save link / pivot page for you called a HyperFollow page. On this pivot page, Spotify is often on the top of this list so it makes it easier for you to push for pre-saves. Just asking your fans may not be enough incentive for them, so you may want to offer something of value if they do pre-save.

Here’s an example of DistroKid’s HyperFollow page you can use for a Spotify pre-save campaign.

You can check to see how many people saved your release and it will also give you some data about those people. More importantly, it will give you their email address. This is how you can offer something in exchange for the pre-save. It could be access to unreleased content. It could be a free download of the song. It could be a one-time coupon code for your merch store. It could be a giveaway where you will randomly select anyone who has pre-saved the song.

Butterscotch offered to do a beatbox shout out for those who pre-save

Create a Smart Link or Pivot Page

A smart link or pivot page is a web page that contains links to all the different places people can buy or listen to your new release. This a link you would use to promote in your social media posts, Instagram profile, newsletter, IG Stories, etc.

Whether or not you want to want to do a pre-save campaign, you should still have a smart link/pivot page for every release. The easiest option is to use DistroKid’s HyperFollow page because it’s automatically generated for you after you upload your release.

Lastly, you may want to make a shortened bit.ly link for presentation purposes. Insert this link on your social media profiles, posts and video descriptions when the single is officially out. It can also help with tracking clicks and where they are clicking from.

https://bit.ly/sade-life

https://bit.ly/gtap-walk
 

Prepare Single Announcement Post

Example of an announcement post

This is essentially your first post mentioning you are releasing a single. It can be done on social media and through an email newsletter. Some may want to post the cover art for this initial announcement (assuming you have other content like a music video) or save it for the day of the release.

Some artists also like to post a teaser before the official announcement. For example, you can post a photo (not the cover art) and mention in the caption you’ll drop a new song if you get ‘x’ amount of comments or emojis.

You’re not limited to some static photo or cover art either. Nor are you limited to doing it with one post. You may want to make multiple, short form promotional videos to use leading up to the release day. You can maybe perform some of the lyrics acapella in one video. In others, just perform the chorus/hook in a bunch of different ways. A powerful device for promotion is repetition. Usually it’s the chorus that you want to have stuck in people’s heads (earworm effect), so lean into that with these announcement/promotional videos.

In terms of timing the announcement, I would minimize the time between the first announcement about single and the actual release date if you don’t a way to tease or engage your fans until its out. In other words, I would avoid announcing a new single is dropping in 4 weeks and not mention again until release day. Most of the marketing for the single should be happening after the song is out anyway, so it’s okay to have a shorter lead time for the release. You can still upload the single to the distributor 4 weeks in advance and announce the single is coming 1 or 2 weeks before the release date.
 

When and how to release a traditional music video?

If you do decide to have a long-form music video to go with your single release, you ideally want to launch them together. But it’s okay to release the video after the song is already available too. However, avoid releasing a music video before the song is available on digital stores. You need to make sure people have someplace to go to hear and download the song after they’ve seen the video.

If you have enough promotional content, you can release a video with a song the same day. If not, space them out by releasing the song first then the music video shortly after.

With a few platforms (YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo) where you can release long-form music videos, there are generally two strategies when it comes to how to release it.

1. You can make it available on all platforms at the same time. It’s more convenient and fewer steps for people to watch natively on the platform they are on.
2. Upload to only one platform like YouTube and direct everyone there. This helps build traction in one place rather than having the views scattered.

To help with funneling views, you can also launch a video premiere on YouTube or Twitch to turn it into a watch party event. Be sure to schedule and promote the premiere ahead of time so people know exactly when to tune in. Let fans know that they can opt-in to receive a notification reminder if they choose. After the premiere is over, you may decide to upload to Facebook.

However, I find that it’s more difficult to pull this off as an effective funneling strategy, which is why I found it’s better to make the video available on all platforms. Deciding on which route to go with will depend on your business goal.

Update: The premiere video feature on Facebook was deprecated August 22, 2022 so you can only do video premieres now on YouTube.

Remember that YouTube favors creators who upload videos on a regular basis (a couple of times a week). The typical musician only uses YouTube as a vault to upload the occasional music video, which is not optimal to take advantage of YouTube’s algorithm. Funneling all your views to YouTube is not going to be helpful unless you’re already consistently active on their platform or if your video goes viral elsewhere first.
 

Day of Release Post

If you have a traditional music video to release with your single, this would be a good day to post a snippet for Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and X. Choose at least three short clips that are the most engaging. Avoid the intro if it needs to build. Make sure that there’s a smart link to your release in the description of your music video so fans can easily stream, save or add to a playlist.

For Facebook, you’ll likely just use the full music video as the release day post, unless you’re trying to funnel views to YouTube.

If you have short-form performance videos, you can also consider posting this first. Because you can post as much as you want over the course of the campaign, there’s no real right or wrong way to approach this. You can even save the traditional music video a week after the single drops.
 

Incorporating Patreon

If you have a membership business through Patreon, you should decide how you want to incorporate this single release. You may give your patrons early access to see the music video or listen/download the song before it’s officially released. I have a couple of clients that use Patreon, so it comes up naturally for me when I’m planning releases. If you don’t use Patreon, you can ignore this step.

Pandora AMP – Artist Audio Messages

If you have a presence and following on Pandora, you may want to use their artist audio message feature. You can add a 15-second custom voice message to your songs with a specific call to action. Use it to link Pandora listeners to your website to sell merch or target fans geographically to sell tickets.
 

Consider Windowing Your Release to Maximize Revenue

Windowing your release has become an increasingly popular strategy for artists. What this means is making your release available on platform that allows you earn money upfront before it is widely released through streaming. For example, you can make the single live on Bandcamp a week before its official release date so fans can listen to it early and possibly pay for the download.

Consider Live Streaming

If you have the following for it, you may want to go live on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok or YouTube to promote your single. You can host a Q&A session to talk to fans about the release and share stories about the song or video.

A platform where I’ve seen this done well is on Twitch. When releasing her video Safehouse, JVNA went live on her Twitch to host a watch party for the premiere on YouTube. In the live stream, she explained what the song was about, broke down the music video, answered questions and shared insights about the process.

JVNA Release Party on Twitch for her new single.

Weeks prior to this, she was on Twitch teasing fans with the green screens as she was getting ready to record the scenes for her music video.

What JVNA did is a bit more “advanced” and she does have a larger following, but it gives you ideas of how you can build excitement and engage fans around a single. It can be as simple as live streaming the day before the release and play a teaser of the song or video.

We did something similar on Twitch as her first live stream on the platform:

If you do go this route, don’t forget to add the live stream event to Bandsintown so your trackers will get a notification. You can also add live stream events to SongKick so it shows on your Spotify profile.
 

Phase 4: Days Before the Release

 
Checklist:

• Have social media posts ready with captions and hashtags
• Design and schedule your email blast
• Get smart link / pivot page ready
• Schedule music video (YouTube and Facebook)
• Create a custom thumbnail for your video
• Prep video clips for social media ads

Plan Your Social Media Posts

You should have your posts all ready to go including captions, links and content you plan to use for your posts. If you have a traditional music video, you may want to use the full music video as the day of release post or just a snippet that leads to a full video.

Primary platforms to post on to promote your single:

• Instagram
• Instagram Stories
• Instagram Broadcast channel
• Facebook
• Twitter (X)
• Post on your Community tab in YouTube (If you have over 500 subscribers…)
• Post message in Bandsintown
• Send message in Bandcamp

Design Your Email Newsletter

Get your email ready to send to your list. Keep the email simple with one focus, which is to either to the music video and/or pivot page where fans can stream the song. Schedule it to send for the day of the release.

Customize Your Smart Link / Pivot Page

Depending on which smart link tool you use, you may need to do some customizations before your single goes live. This includes adding your music video, social media links and Facebook pixel for retargeting.

If you create your own landing page as I do, you will need to add the direct links to each digital platform your single is going to be available on. You should already have Google Analytics and your Facebook Pixel installed on your website. Usually what I do is wait for the song to release at 9:00pm the day before which is when it goes live for me in California (assuming you set it to release based on New York time). I create bit.ly links for each major streaming platform and add those shortened links to the landing page.
 

Schedule Music Video (YouTube and Facebook)

For YouTube, I recommend uploading your music video as close to when you start promoting. Because not all your subscribers will get notified of your new upload, so it’s important to maximize engagement and views within the first 24 hours of uploading it. This feedback is what YouTube’s algorithms use to determine if your upload is worth popping up on the home page or suggest videos of your subscribers. You can also schedule your video to go public from private at a specified date and time.

Fill in the video description with as much relevant data as possible. This includes:

• A link to your landing page or where people can listen/download the song.
• Lyrics
• A short bio
• Link to your website
• Link to your social media accounts
• Relevant tags

Another good option you have is to schedule your video as a premiere. This turns your music video into a livestream event where fans can gather and watch it together for the first time. After the video premieres, it turns into a regular Youtube video on your channel with the exact same link. If you want to be able to upload the music video to YouTube ahead of time and not have to wait for the day of the release to upload, I would recommend doing this.

The other convenient thing about doing this is that you can embed the video to your website/landing page, include the link in your LinkTree, start adding end cards, include the link in a scheduled email blast, add it to your YouTube playlists and set it as a featured video on your YouTube channel all before the video actually goes live.

An example of a video premiere page on YouTube

If it’s a cover song, make sure you optimize your headline, thumbnail and tags to be seen by those maybe looking for the original song.

For Facebook, you can easily schedule your music video to publish in Meta Business Suite.
 

Video Prep for Social Media Ads

Whether its snippets of your music video or a collection of short-form performance videos, get them ready so you can use them as creative to run ads for Meta and/or TikTok. Ideally, you want them to be less than 1 minute long. Be mindful about the video sizes (1080 x 1920, 1080 x 1080, 1920 x 1080) that’s needed for the various placements on Meta.

In terms of campaign objectives, you may want to drive traffic to the full music video or the smart link to get people to stream the new single. You can also be build up video views for clips you’ve already posted on socials as a strategy to build custom audiences from it to run conversion campaigns down the line.
 

Phase 5: Day of Release Checklist

 
Promote on social media channels

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Instagram Stories
• Instagram Broadcast Channel
• TikTok
• X (Twitter)
• YouTube Shorts
• Post on your YouTube Community tab
• Post message to your trackers on Bandsintown
• Send a direct message to followers on Bandcamp

Upload music video (YouTube, Facebook)

• Embed the video into your smart link, landing page or “Link in Bio” page (Linktree, Beacons page)
• Add smart link in the video description.
• If you upload to Facebook, pin the video to the top and make it a featured video.

Update YouTube channel

• Add your video as a featured video for your channel.
• Add to your playlist for music videos.
• Add a link card to take viewers to your website or landing page.
• Add the art track of your single to your channel as a playlist. This is autogenerated if you opted in to have it created from your music distributor.

Update your website

• Create a page for the single, add a smart link and embed the music video to your home page.
• If you have specific merch for the release, make it available for purchase.
• If you created a custom landing page, make sure to embed music video there and add links to the individual streaming platforms.​

Update social media profiles

• Add the smart link for your single to all your social media profiles.​ If you use a link-in-bio tool like Linktree or Beacons, be sure to update that to include the smart link to your single.
• If you created a banner or avatar graphic for the release, update it at this time.

Add lyrics

• Genius
• Musixmatch: Sync up lyrics to your song to display on platforms like Instagram Stories, Spotify, Apple Music, etc. Some distributors, like DistroKid, offer these services too.
• Apple Music / iTunes (via a distributor like DistroKid)

Make the song public
If you uploaded as private and prepared these ahead of time, all you would need to do is make them public.

• SoundCloud
• Bandcamp
• Audiomack

Launch social media ad campaign

• Meta Ads (Facebook and Instagram)
• TikTok Ads
• Spotify Marquee Ads
• YouTube Ads

Phase 6: Post-Release Checklist

 
You did all the planning and preparation. The single officially goes live and you made the initial announcement on your channels that the track is out. As many of you should know, it doesn’t end there. In fact, you’re just getting started.

How long you continue to promote the single is going to depend on your goals, how much promo content you have, your budget, other releases planned and how well the single performs. I would give yourself 2-4 weeks to promote the single

Here are some things you want to do to follow up with your single’s promotion.

• Resend to email List – Send another email to people who didn’t open it the first time. For MailChimp users, here’s how you do it.
• Promote multiple times on social media – Don’t just post about it once. Have multiple short-form clips ready to be used as promo. In fact, create a schedule and map out when you want to roll out all of the other content you have. Because algorithms control what shows up in social media news feeds, there’s a good chance not everyone has seen your post the first time. Avoid spamming posts throughout the day and using the exact same covert art multiple times. You should always have a variety of content to use so you’re not posting the same photo or clip.
• Mix up the type of content – Instead of music video snippets and performance clips, incorporate other types of content into your social media posting. Share behind the scenes. Get personal and tell stories related to the single or break down the lyrics.
• Encourage user-generated content – Think about ways your fans can use your song in the creation of their own content. Keep an eye out for trends and opportunities the song can used. For example, in a meme or dance challenge.
• Create your own themed playlist – Build a playlist around your single with other artists that match the mood, theme, genre or topic. Give it a proper title and create cover art to go with it. Here’s an example.
• Look for playlist opportunities for your song – You can read more here.
• Seek press and blog coverage – Getting coverage on bigger publications isn’t usually accessible unless you’re more established and go through a publicist. However, you can try submitting to these 44 independent music blogs.
• Set up automated payment splits for mechanical royalties – If there are other collaborators on the song, you can easily set up payment splits. Currently, DistroKid is one of the few distributors that offer this.
• Schedule your next release – Lastly, get your next single ready and repeat this process! You have to keep releasing music and build momentum. Remember, consistency is key.

Conclusion

 
My goal was to give you a complete overview of the most important things you should consider for a successful release. At this point, you may be a bit overwhelmed by how much work can go into a release.

Although this is a comprehensive break down of my release process, it doesn’t mean you have to do everything for every single you put out. Ideally, you want to but don’t be hard on yourself if you’re not able to. Even I don’t end up covering it all for various reasons from lack of ad budget to no opportunity to create promotional content. My best advice is to give yourself plenty of time to handle tasks so you’re not doing everything last minute. I’ve had to do that a couple of times and it’s not fun. Use the checklists as guides and do as much planning ahead to stay organized. If you’re just starting out, do the essentials and slowly add more aspects to the release as you get more comfortable.

The post The Ultimate Single Release Checklist for Independent Artist in 2026 appeared first on D4 Music Marketing.

Even if you have a video go viral, it doesn’t stop there. There are things you want to do to capitalize on this momentum and keep it going for as long as you can.

Whether you’re still trying to build traction for yourself on social media or you find yourself on the cusp of a viral moment on social media, here are some points to do and consider. It’s always good to keep these points in the back of your mind so you’re ready when it happens.

1. Like and respond to comments to keep engagement up.

 
It may be a chore but try and respond to as many comments as you can. You don’t need to sit there all day but be sure to check in periodically to engage with your fans. Just be warned that there will be negative comments sprinkled in. Also, review any flagged comments on TikTok or Instagram. I often find positive comments get trapped there too. Lastly, consider going live on the platform where your video is going viral to engage with new potential fans in real-time.

2. Put ad money behind videos that are taking off organically.

 
This is the best time to invest money in social media ads since the viral video is shown to be effective in gaining attention and hitting a chord with viewers. You don’t need to spend anything too crazy. If you have the funds, a couple hundred dollars would be more than enough fuel to add the fire.

3. Pin the viral video to the top of your profile.

 
You always want to make sure to keep your top-performing videos on the top of your profiles. Whether it’s Instagram or TikTok, pin the best ones as you go to make sure new potential fans can easily find them so they’re more likely to follow you.

4. Keep posting more videos!

 
Getting the algorithm to consistently push out your video to non-followers is like catching a wave in surfing. Post another video with the same song within a day or two. No need to overdo it and post multiple videos in a day. Try a different verse or the same verse in a different location.

5. Study the viral video and experiment.

 
See if there’s anything about the video that may have triggered something for the viewers. Was it the second verse of your song that was used? Was it something you wore or the location of the video? Get a feel for what viewers are responding to and be willing to switch things up.

6. Mix up the types of content.

 
With this video going viral, it’s going to attract new followers who are just learning about you for the first time. This is a great opportunity to get a bit deeper about who you are, show your personality and introduce other songs and videos. Focus on engagement/nurture type of content or “middle funnel content”.

If you read my campaign breakdown where we had a few viral videos, you can see that we tried different types of content, like an open verse challenge and created videos responding to funny comments. Also, the artist is big into fashion so we tried doing “fit check” videos that did well to entertain and deepen the fan relationships.

7. Need to be nimble and flexible with your plans.

 
Monitor the analytics and act quickly. Because the video for the first song went viral at the beginning of the campaign, I had to change and adapt to what was going on. Our entire marketing and release schedule changed so we could make the most of this new momentum.

8. Encourage UGC (User Generated Content).

 
Getting shares on your video will help spread virality, but the hope is it “infects” someone with a large following who will share it or be inspired to create their own video using your song. This could be things like a meme, dance challenge, remix, open verse challenge, reaction or review. A true sign of a video going full-on mega viral is if other people are creating content from your song and it grows exponentially as if it has a life of its own.

The best example that comes to mind to illustrate this is Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road where his memes eventually led to a dance challenge that exploded on TikTok in 2018. The song became a global hit that reached 15x platinum, won multiple Grammys and holds the record for being #1 the longest on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

You can potentially manufacture that next level of virality by paying top influencers, but that can be a pricey campaign. It’s also possible to have it happen organically.

9. Optimize your profile for the next step.

 
Getting views and engagement on your viral video is exciting. You’ll likely see a large influx of new followers and your other recent videos will get more love from the algorithm. But what’s next? You want to make sure you have a way for new followers to take the next step in this fan relationship. Your profile link should go to either your website or a “link in bio” site where they can follow you on their favorite streaming platform, sign up for your email list, shop for merch or see your upcoming shows.

When you attract new fans into your marketing funnel with your viral video, you want to have your marketing foundation set so they can easily continue down the fan journey with minimal friction.

Conclusion

 
Even though we have a better understanding of how and why things go viral, it doesn’t make it any easier to do. After all, there is a lot of luck and timing involved too.

However, I’m seeing more and more artists go viral by posting short-form performance videos on Instagram and TikTok. One of the artists I work with had a few videos go viral during an album release campaign I ran. To read about my breakdown on the campaign and see examples of the viral videos, check out this blog here.

The post Going Viral? Here’s How Musicians Can Capitalize on the Momentum appeared first on D4 Music Marketing.

When working with agents, promoters, talent buyers and venues, you always want to make sure to make a good impression to build those business relationships. Not only by being professional but by doing everything you can to sell out the show.

In this blog, I’ll cover 12 ways you can announce and promote your upcoming shows and tours.

1. Bandsintown with Spotify & YouTube Integration

 
The first place that I go to when a show is confirmed is to add on Bandsintown.

Bandsintown has been the go-to live music directory for many years now. Fans can track/follow their favorite artists and get email notifications when a show is announced in their city.

From my experience, it has become the standard platform for musicians to list their live shows. You can also add a widget to your website that will automatically have all your shows listed from Bandsintown on to your website.

You can also send geo-targeted messages to fans who track you to follow up with reminders or special offers.

Bandsintown is integrated with Spotify, meaning your shows and events will be listed on your Spotify profile. Fans will get notifications in-app and via emails from Spotify as well.

More recently, Bandsintown also has an integration with YouTube that allows your shows to display on your videos and YouTube Music profile. I explain how to set this up below:

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2. SongKick

 
SongKick is also a concert discovery service, but it is owned by Warner Music Group. They used to be the main live show platform for Spotify, but that 13 year relationship ended with the new Bandsintown integration.

SongKick may not be as important moving forward for newer artists. For established artists, you may still have fans that use the platform so it doesn’t hurt to list your upcoming shows and tours there.
 

3. Email Marketing

 
If you have an email list (and you should), you’ll want to send out a newsletter to get the word out.

If you can geo-target your fans by city, then that would be the most ideal. There’s no point in announcing a show in a particular city if you have fans all over the country.

Otherwise, you’ll want to announce a group of shows together rather than emailing them about individual shows.

Some email marketing tools will use IP addresses to help you determine where your fans are located, but it may not always be reliable. Something you can implement is having a question about what city they’re located in when signing up for your newsletter.
 

4. Social Media

 
Promoting your shows on social media is the standard and bare minimum that is expected of you as the artist. You should do this on all platforms you’re active on. For example on Instagram, you can make the announcement with a standard post, Reels, Stories and a Broadcast channel message.

The problem with social media is that the algorithms generally don’t like these types of posts, especially if it is just a standard flyer with text on it.

The next best thing is to do a selfie-style video or share a short performance clip to promote the show. This is way more personable and engaging than a flyer.

If you can capture good audio in a setting with a nice background, you can try doing a livestream performance as a way to promote your tour. Once it’s done, download the livestream video and chop it up into shorter clips to post. Leave some white space in case you want to add text overlays. This is a great way to repurpose your content.

Lastly, consider creating a skit or a fun advertisement video if it makes sense for your brand or personality. This is a trend I see more artists are doing over the years. It requires more thought, time and energy, but at least providing entertainment value helps to get more views on it.

Some other tips:

If you post on Facebook, be sure to include the ticket link in the post itself or add a comment with the ticket link.

If you post on other platforms where you can’t include the ticket link, add it to your “link in bio” or micro website (i.e. LinkTree or Beacons). You can also use a chat automation service like ManyChat to DM your fans a link to buy tickets if they leave a specific comment like TICKETS.

On Instagram, create a Story and include a link sticker for tickets and tag the venue so they can reshare. You may also include the location tag for the city the show is in.
 

5. Paid Socials

 
Venues and promoters will have a budget to market and promote each show. Typically, this is done through their own channels and social accounts. They may request advertising access to your Meta properties, but it doesn’t hurt if you run ads to your fans directly from your own account.

Since posts that sell something may see lower organic reach on socials, you should put some money behind the announcement post and have it geo-targeted to the city the show is in. For an independent artist, $50 to $200 is a reasonable amount to spend.
 

6. Facebook Events

 
Depending on the demographic of your fanbase, you may consider creating a Facebook Event for your upcoming show. Younger demographics likely don’t use Facebook regularly so it may not be as effective if your music leans more on the “youthful” side.

However, with over 3 billion active monthly users, Facebook is still the number one social media platform globally. Facebook Events is a free service with a wide reach and can recommend shows to users through its algorithm. The event page has an RSVP system that allows fans to see people they know in their network who are interested or going.
 

7. Pandora AMP Audio Messages

 
For those fans who use Pandora, you can leave a short, geo-targeted audio message in between your songs to promote a show. When you set up a campaign for each individual show, you can include a clickable ticket link for fans to purchase tickets directly from the app.

Claim your Pandora Artist Profile or log into your Pandora AMP account to get started.
 

8. SMS Marketing

 
If you’re already paying for a short messaging service (SMS), like Community or SuperPhone, you’ll want to send out geo-targetted texts out to your fans when there’s a show in their city. Depending on the service, you can also target fans within a specific mile radius of a city.

In my experience, SMS is very effective for promoting shows. Since it goes directly to people’s phones, you see higher open and conversion rates.

The drawback is you have to be careful with how many texts you send over a certain period as you don’t want to annoy your fans. More importantly, SMS marketing services can be quite expensive.
 

9. Local Media

 
Local media outlets may offer ways to announce or list shows in your city. Outlets to look out for are city newspapers (with arts and entertainment sections), community and college radio stations, magazine publications, music blogs, and local TV stations.

If you have a publicist, see if they can do this for you, especially if you have a tour in multiple cities.
 

10. Local Online Communities

 
Check if there are local online communities that allow you to promote an upcoming show. This could be on a specific subreddit for a specific city or local music community. You can also check Craigslist.

If you know of fan-created online communities, like on Reddit, Discord or a Facebook Group, that’s something to consider. Dedicated fans of these communities will likely share new show or tour announcements on their own.
 

11. Fan Membership Platforms

 
If you already have fans on a membership platform like Patreon, you should be prioritizing your show announcements there.

For some of the Patreon pages I’ve set up, one of the perks we offered is early access to all things related to the artist. For shows and tours, this means sharing the pre-sale code to Patreon before the general public.
 

12. In-Person Flyering and Postering

 
Lastly, you have the old-school way of promoting your shows. Before the internet, you would have street teams that would hand out flyers in person and put up posters around the city. For independent artists, this was your main method to get the word out about your shows.

In this digital age, flyering and postering are not very common. Assuming you already have a fan base and some traction in a local city, this can still be a viable option. You’ll want to focus on areas, buildings, businesses and even other concerts that your target audience or fan base would most likely be in.
 

Conclusion

 
The goal for every artist should be to perform in front of a sell out crowd. To make that happen, make sure to utilize all your different options and do your part to promote your live shows and tours. You want to leave a good impression so you’re more likely to be booked again in the future.

After all, a show with a low turnout can reflect poorly on your reputation with venues and promoters. But whatever you do, be sure to avoid these live performance mistakes.

The post 12 Ways Musicians Can Promote Live Shows and Tours appeared first on D4 Music Marketing.

What is Windowing in Music?

 
Windowing is a content distribution strategy where you’re making your content(music) exclusively available on a platform, channel or format for a limited time before it is made widely available. The goal is capitalize on the initial demand by generating as much revenue upfront within a short window before it goes to other distribution channels that don’t pay as much. Essentially, it’s a practice where you intentionally stagger the availability to maximize how much you can generate.

For a music release, this means charging fans for early access to the new music and other perks before the release is on all streaming platforms. You want to generate as much money upfront so you’re not depending on any revenue from streaming royalties that won’t even start showing up until at least 2 or 3 months later.

The practice of windowing isn’t new, but the need and appeal for this strategy in music have grown over the years with the increasing popularity of streaming and low royalty rates.
 

How Should You Window Your Next Release

 
Before we get into specific platforms, I wanted to share some ideas and tactics to consider to ensure windowing can be successfully implemented.

The basic execution of this windowing strategy can be as simple as making your new release available to listen to and download on a specific platform (i.e. Bandcamp) before the official release date where it will be available on all streaming platforms.

For most artists, this is probably all you’ll need since it doesn’t require any lead time and is easier to execute. However, you do have the option to customize and test different tactics.
 

Physical Products
 
Windowing is easier done digitally but you can also do this with physical items like vinyl and CDs. Launch physical and digital download formats together a month in advance of the official release date on streaming platforms.

If you really want to try and milk the release upfront, consider windowing with a 3-step process where you separate the physical release first for a few weeks. Maybe another 2 weeks later, you make it available for digital download. Then after another 2 weeks, it’s available everywhere. The only thing is it requires much more planning ahead and having all the physicals pressed beforehand. 
 

Other Perks
 
You can also attach other perks to incentivize fans to purchase the music physically or digitally before the streaming release date.

• Signed vinyl or CDs
• Merch bundles and fan packs
• Raffle for merch, tickets, meet & greets, etc.
• Video shout-outs (i.e. Cameo-style videos)
• Deluxe album version as a download
• Invitation to listening parties (in-person or online)

If you’re someone who cares about charting on Billboard, you can do ‘fan packs’.
 

Time Frame
 
How long should you stagger each window before the official release on streaming platforms?

If you’re only doing a digital release window, I would say 2 – 4 weeks before the official release date.

If you’re incorporating physical releases, you’ll want to widen the window more to account for fulfillment and shipping so 4 – 6 weeks.
 

Best Platforms for Windowing

 
These are the 3 most popular and accessible options for you to window an upcoming release. There are other options out there, but what you’re mainly looking for is the ability to sell, listen to the music and potentially limit access.
 

BandCamp

 
Bandcamp is a great option because it has everything you would need to successfully window a release.

They have a storefront that allows visitors to listen to the new releases and purchase digital downloads or physical merch. Visitors are limited to only 3 full plays (can be disabled or increased) of a song before they are prompted to buy.

You can also host a listening party to celebrate with your fans exclusively on the platform.

The cool thing about Bandcamp is it’s built on a strong community around supporting artists on the platform. Fans also like the ability to select the file types for downloading, including MP3, FLAC, WAV and AIFF.

Although it doesn’t cost money to create an account and host your releases there, there are fees involved.
 

EVEN

 
Started in 2022 and officially launched in April of 2024, EVEN is a direct-to-consumer music platform that allows artists to maximize revenue from their releases in a world now dominated by streaming.

Understanding that low payout rates from streaming platforms aren’t changing anytime soon, they essentially positioned themselves as a windowing platform with an unofficial tagline of:

Empowering artists to sell their music first and stream second.

The growing popularity of EVEN has been largely due to rising independent Hip Hop star LaRussell, who initially put the platform on my radar. More recently, J.Cole has used the platform to monetize the 10 year anniversary release of his 2014 Forest Hills Drive album.

Like Bandcamp, EVEN offers a “pay what you want” model where you can set a minimum amount you accept. When setting up a release, you can include various rewards or perks (EVEN calls them access points) like bonus content, merch, events and fan experiences to incentivize fans to support.

Signing up is easy, but your artist account will need to be verified by their team before you start. As for fees, EVEN does a 80/20 revenue split so you keep 80% of the money you generate through their platform.

Check out their artist playbook for more information.
 

Patreon

 
Patreon is a monetization platform for creators to earn money from memberships/subscriptions. The tools and features available on Patreon give artists a lot of flexibility, especially for something like windowing. However, I would not recommend starting a Patreon solely for windowing a release.

This option is ideal if you already built a membership community and you’re looking for a way to window your release to attract new potential members to your Patreon. For example, you can promote early access to the new release on social media and an email list by encouraging fans to join.

Patreon supports audio files so fans can easily listen to the new release in the Patreon app, Spotify or other podcasting apps (via RSS feed). You can choose to enable or disable downloading as well.

However, the one drawback is you can’t upload multiple audio tracks into one individual post. You would have to create either a post for each individual song or an edit that contains the entire album in one seamless track. This is where Bandcamp or EVEN have an advantage since those are music-centric platforms that accommodate multiple tracks.

As for selling physical merch for windowing, your best option is to create a secret, password-protected shop page and give Patreon members access. You can easily do this with e-commerce platforms like Shopify and Squarespace.

Even if you have fans who don’t want to pay monthly subscription costs, you can sell access to an individual post containing the new release with a one-time charge. You can also include an album download for sale in your digital store.

For more on Patreon for Music Artists, I wrote some blogs and an ebook for you to check out.
 

Conclusion

 
As convenient music streaming is for the fans, the low payout rates on all platforms aren’t changing anytime soon. For artists looking to adapt, windowing new releases has become a viable strategy.

Just be aware that windowing a release strategy is typically reserved for artists who have a sizable fan base and multiple releases under their belt. In other words, this is not effective for newer or developing artists.

If you’ve tried windowing a release, I would love to hear your results. What platform did you use and how did you approach it?

The post How to Window Your Next Music Release to Maximize Revenue appeared first on D4 Music Marketing.

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.

This is a question musicians may be wondering about when considering launching a Patreon campaign as an additional income source.

What is the minimum number of fans or social media followers I need to have a chance of earning success on Patreon?

Since there are no discovery features on Patreon, it’s entirely up to you to funnel your fans to become paying patrons for your membership business.

As someone who has been working with artists and managing their Patreon accounts for 6 years now, this was a question I wondered about myself but never found an answer.

So in 2020, I did some research to come up with my own theory. I revisited these numbers in late 2023 while I was updating my Patreon For Musicians eBook to see if anything has changed since.

Of course, there are a lot of variables we can’t account for as every musician is different, but this should provide a rough estimate. Before we dig into the data, we must define what success looks like on Patreon.
 

What does success look like on Patreon?

 
Every musician is going to have an idea of what “success” on a platform is on Patreon. Some may be content with generating an additional $1,000 a month while others may be aiming higher. For our purposes, we need to define success in a quantifiable way with the data we have available.

Naturally, we would define success on the platform by how much money is generated monthly. Unfortunately, a lot of creators make that information private. Instead, we can look at the number of paid members, which is less likely to be kept hidden.

As of this writing, there are around 15,500 creators in the music category with at least 1 paying member according to Graphtreon.

What I did was look at the top 1% of musicians on Patreon, which consists of about 155 creators, and examine their numbers.

Quick Note: The music category on Patreon includes all types of content creators, not just musicians. This includes people who do music reactions, reviews, podcasts, Discord bots, run music venues and potentially other non-related music content that were miscategorized. For our purposes, we want data specifically for performing musicians, producers, singer-songwriters and even music teachers. The following numbers were filtered to exclude all the creators in the music category who did not meet the criteria.

As of October 2023, the top 1% of musicians and music educators in the music category have on average:

• 1,308 total members
• 777 paid members
• 530 free members

To reach this 1% upper echelon is what I would consider to be “very successful” on Patreon, but it is unlikely for your typical independent artist to get 777 paying members. At the very least, we can still draw some conclusions from this group.

On the other hand, only 6% of creators in the music category had over 100 members. So I would even go as far as to say becoming one of the top 750 out of 15,500 is still relatively successful.
 

How large of a fan base do you need to grow on Patreon?

 
With the baseline of 100 paid members as a marker for success, what is the minimum number of fans one should have before considering Patreon?

Because there’s no easy way to quantify how many fans an artist has, the best metric we can look towards as an outsider is the number of social media followers.

We all know that social media followers aren’t the most accurate measure of fandom for an artist because not all followers or subscribers are actual fans, let alone fans willing to pay for anything from the artist. An email list could have been a better measure, but unfortunately, it wouldn’t be realistic to get access to that information.

When I dug into the social media numbers of the top 1% (128 creators at that time) of musicians on Patreon in 2020, I found that you would need at least 11,000 social media followers on one major platform like YouTube or Instagram.

I did this again with a new data set from late 2023 and found that the average was 17,211. It increased by about 5,000 in about 3 years, so the bar is rising. But it was much easier to get fans to support their favorite artists during the height of COVID-19 than it is now, which explains this increase.

How did I come up with this number? Starting with the data from Graphtreon, I went through the top 1% of music creators on Patreon and found their highest follower/subscriber count for a single platform. Then, I took 20 music creators with the lowest number of followers/subscribers found in the top 1% and got the average.

The only platforms I looked into were YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. I realized after the fact that TikTok and Twitch should have been included, so that will be for a future update.

For comparison, creators in the top 1% had an average of 791,606 followers/subscribers on their most popular platform. In 2023, this number went down to 593,288. These are big numbers, but you don’t need that many social media followers/subscribers to be successful on Patreon as an independent artist.

So if the goal is to reach a baseline of 100 paying members on Patreon, you’re more likely to find success with a social media following of over 11,000 fans on a single platform. To be safe, I would say it is closer to 17,000 to 20,000.

These are not definitive numbers as there were musicians with 3,000 Facebook followers as their highest social media following and had over 300 patrons. There are a lot of factors to account for, but this should give you a general idea.
 

Interesting Discovery

 
One interesting discovery I found was that, on average, the number of paying patrons a top music creator had was 1% of the total number of their largest social media accounts. So if a musician in the top 1% has 50,000 Facebook fans/followers as their largest social media following, they would likely have 500 patrons (1% of 50,000). This also held true when I calculated it with the 2023 data set as well.

Another way to look at it is that the most successful musicians on Patreon were only able to convert 1% of their social media following.

It may not seem much, but getting 1% of 10,000 fans to join you on Patreon is considered relatively successful considering 94% of music creators on the platform have less than 100 patrons.

Using this information should give you an estimate of how many social media followers you should have to reach the specific income you’re looking to earn through Patreon.

So if you’re looking to generate $1,000 a month from Patreon with a $5 tier, you would need a following of roughly 20,000 to 40,000 to get 200 members.
 

Conclusion

 
The number one mistake I consistently see is artists/creators launching a Patreon without a fan base or an established following on at least one platform.

Because even if you have a large following, I find that it is still challenging to get fans to convert into monthly paying members on a platform outside the online ecosystem of what most use daily, like Instagram.

The artists I’ve helped launch Patreon with all have different fan base sizes ranging from 10,000 to close to 1,000,000. The one that had the most success had 95,000 followers on Facebook and Instagram combined with 30,000 monthly listeners on Spotify.

Although the focus has been on size, it’s not the only thing that matters. It’s also about how much your fan base resonates with you as a brand and how dedicated you are to growing your Patreon. It’s a lot harder than it seems.

If you feel like Patreon is something you’ve been wanting to start, I share everything I’ve learned in the past 6 years in my Patreon For Musicians eBook to help artists set up, launch and grow their Patreon. I include all the best practices, tactics for growth and mistakes to avoid.

patreonformusicians.com

The post How Many Fans Do Musicians Need to Be Successful on Patreon? appeared first on D4 Music Marketing.

This doesn’t only apply to new artists. It’s not uncommon for professional musicians to bounce back and forth between doing music full-time and taking up another job to supplement income. Or, even returning to a full-time day job and doing music on the side. It shows how volatile music can be for independents and why you can’t always depend on income directly from music itself, unfortunately.

As an emerging independent artist, you might be wondering what are your best job options to earn money to fund your music career. In this blog, I will cover 13 jobs you may want to consider while you develop as an artist.
 

What To Look For In A Day Job or Side Gig

 
In an ideal situation, you would be working a high-paying job in a field you enjoy that requires less of your time and is very flexible with your schedule, especially if you’re a performing musician. But of course, this sounds more like a fantasy than something you’ll likely encounter.

Generally, one of the key things you want from a job as an artist is scheduling flexibility. High pay is great too, but that usually entails a lot of your time and is high stress.

Secondly, the ideal jobs for artists are related to music in some way. Not only is it good for experience in a facet of the music industry, but it also opens up the potential to network and meet other artists or make industry connections. Not to mention, you might get access to services or resources to help advance your career.

Take into account your background, education, skills and strengths to see which jobs discussed below might more sense to you.

Many aspiring full-time musicians will work a day job, completely unrelated to art or music, make music in their free time and perform gigs at night. Absolutely nothing wrong with that.
 

Money Does Not Validate Your Artistry

 
Before getting into what these jobs are, I feel it’s important to emphasize this specific message.

Many musicians want the ability to make a living solely off music because they feel it legitimizes or socially validates them as “real” artists. I want to make it very clear that just because you have a day job or work side gigs to fund your music does not make you any less of an artist.

There are plenty of active independent artists who have built a strong following and released amazing albums, but still work day jobs. At the very least, it would be smart to have fallback options with the volatility of the music business.

You should never let this idea that if you’re not a full-time musician making a living solely from music, you’re not good enough as an artist.

Whether you’re just starting out or you’ve grown a large fan base, there is no shame in having other income sources unrelated to music. It does NOT make you a lesser artist or musician making money in other ways not directly related to music.

If music is something you’re passionate about and you want to pursue it, don’t worry about what others think. Humility is a strength.
 

1. Merch Seller

 
Selling merch for other artists during their shows can be a great way to earn cash and get useful experience for your career. Taking on a gig like this challenges you to be organized, pay attention to details and be on top of your game in terms of customer service and presentation. You also see what works or sells well and what doesn’t.

Start by checking in with your network to see if you have musician friends who perform regularly and need help. If any artists or bands you follow have a show coming up in your area, reach out on socials or email to see if they have someone selling merch for them. Some venues may also have merch sellers on a call in case an artist doesn’t have their own seller so network with venues as well.
 

2. Record Store Worker

 
Working at your local record shop can be a fun way to surround yourself with music and interact with other music fans regularly. This should be a good way for you to know what’s trending in music and give you insight into the consumer side of the industry.

The downside is the amount of record stores has dwindled in the past couple of decades so opportunities might be more scarce. At least, the latest trends have shown that the demand for vinyl and CDs is still going strong in the streaming era so they’ll stick around for the long term.

To see if your local record shop has any job openings, stop in to ask or check their website. They may have signs posted looking for help. There’s a very good chance they have social media accounts so be sure to follow them If there are any openings, they may post about it like this record shop did in my area.
 

3. Music Venue Worker

 
Working at a venue where shows are being held regularly is a good way to have a foot in a key revenue-generating sector of the music business. Depending on your skills and experience, there are a lot of different roles that may be for you, like a bartender, ticketer, front-of-house (FOH) engineer, marketing, talent buyer and security guard.

Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic led to many closures of smaller independent music venues around the world. However, the demand for live music has bounced back since the days of lockdown and is at an all-time high.

Finding opportunities at a venue can be as simple as walking in to ask or check the venue’s website. Also, find out what websites the venue uses to list job listings by Googling the venue name, city and “job listings” in one query.
 

4. Event Promoter

 
In another sector of live music, you have event promoters. An event promoter is someone who organizes, manages and promotes live shows. They can also act as a talent buyer to book artists for different shows, concert series or festivals they are throwing.

Some venues will have their own in-house event promotion team, but many will work closely with event promotion companies, where you’ll likely want to get started to get experience.

As an emerging artist, there’s a lot of value in working in this sector of live music from networking connections, industry insights, and marketing experience that you can apply to your own career. You may even get opportunities to perform.

The most practical way to get started is to find job openings at event promotion companies in your city or local area. To do this, look up upcoming shows at venues in your area and see who is throwing the event. For example, I can check the website of my local venue Harlow’s here in Sacramento and see who is hosting each show on the events page. The two event promotion companies I see there are Sean Healy Presents and (((FolkYeah!))).
 

5. Screen Printing Shop Worker

 
Merchandise is such an important income stream for musicians who want to make a living off music sustainably. Working at a shop that produces merch can be very useful in learning the printing process, what blanks are the best and new design ideas. Maybe you’ll even get discounts for your own merch, allowing you to have better profit margins.

Doing a quick Google search for “screen printing shops” should be able to yield some local spots in your city. Reach out to see if they have openings or keep on the lookout for job listing sites.
 

6. Record Label Employee

 
What better way to learn the music business than through a record label. There are different types of labels from local indie ones to the big 3 major labels (Universal, Sony and Warner) and their subsidiaries. Although they don’t just focus primarily on physical records like in the pre-internet days, they still encompass many aspects of releasing, distributing, publishing and marketing music releases.

Just be aware that the more established record labels may require college degrees in the relevant field you’re applying for.

To find a job at a record label, check on their website or social media accounts, including platforms like LinkedIn, to see if there are any job openings available. You can also do a Google search of the company name and add “job listings” to see which websites they often use to list jobs.
 

7. Photographer / Videographer

 
Content creation for musicians is more important than ever. Being able to capture photos and videos could be a fun way to earn money from other artists. In my experience, it’s quite common to see musicians who also do photography and/or videography.

After all, these skills in capturing visual art can be useful for your own needs. Or at the very least, it’ll allow you to communicate what you’re looking for from other photographers and videographers you may hire.

You can pick up an entry-level camera, maybe a used one, and start off as a hobby. Not ready for that type of investment? Use your smartphone. Generally, you can still get really good photos and videos with it.

To get started, offer to do free work for artists in your network.
 

8. Online Marketer

 
Online marketing is always a big area that artists need help with. There’s a wealth of information in the form of blogs, videos and courses that teach this stuff. If this is something you’ve been able to master, why not offer your services to handle certain areas for others?

Whether it’s managing social media accounts, growing an email list or running ads, there’s always going to be a demand. The best way to start is by working with those in your network who may need help in this area.
 

9. Graphic Designer / Web Designer

 
Just like with photos and video, there’s a need for creating graphics, whether it’s for social media, branding, logo, album art or a website. This area is a bit tricky since you have services like Canva and AI that are free or inexpensive alternatives artists can use to handle their graphic needs.

But, if you’re highly trained or skilled in this area, there’s going to be an opportunity. Plus, not everyone has the time to do things themselves. Others prefer to work with another person rather than depend on technology to create it.

You can start by offering your services to other artists in your network. There are also freelance marketplaces like Fiverr or UpWork to sign up for.
 

10. Tour Manager

 
A big part of the music business is live music. A tour manager works with artists to handle all the logistics, travel, coordination and budgeting involved with doing shows and tours. This way the artist can focus on their performance and not be boggled down by the business side of the show. Similarly to working at a venue or with an event promoter, it’s great insight and experience in the live music sector.

If you’re completely new to this area, see if you have any artist friends in your network who regularly perform shows and offer to do it for free to get experience.

You can also have an in by helping artists sell merch or taking photos at shows. A musician friend I know got his start because he was regularly taking photos and videos at shows for an established Hip Hop group. They eventually trained and paid him to be their tour manager.
 

11. Music Teacher

 
Teaching on the side is a common path for musicians. This can be done with private lessons in person, teaching an online course or as a part of a local music school. Of course, it will depend on your level of proficiency, education level and how comfortable you are with teaching.

You can find gigs on Craigslist or your local community. There may be someone in your network with kids who want to learn to play an instrument. I have seen some musicians announce that they are offering lessons on social media as well.
 

12. Anything related to other passions or interests

 
If finding a job related to music is tough, think about other areas of interest you have and see what jobs could be available. At the very least, it beats working a soulless fast food or office job you’ll hate.

For example, you may enjoy plants and gardening as a hobby. See if your local plant stores have job openings.

Maybe you love animals and consider yourself an animal rights activist, see if pet shelters have jobs or volunteer work available.

Even doing volunteer work on the side could potentially lead to paid opportunities in the future. I’ve experienced this firsthand.

I know we mostly live in a capitalistic world, but life shouldn’t be all about money. Look for other passions of yours that fulfill you and see that can be your stepping stone for music.
 

13. Lyft / Uber / Doordash

 
One of the most flexible gigs you can do unrelated to music is driving people around or delivering food. It pays close to the minimum wage as an independent contractor, but the ability to start anytime can be very useful.

To be honest, doing gigs through food delivery apps is what I started with and I still do to this day. I’ve been fortunate enough to make a decent living working with artists alone but I still do DoorDash to make a little extra income.

Because I can start and finish whenever I want, it’s the ultimate flexible gig. I used it as an opportunity to listen to podcasts while driving and learn new things in between deliveries.
 

Conclusion

 
Some may be wondering why I am covering ideal jobs for emerging artists. What does this have to do with music marketing?

The fact is marketing and music promotion costs money. You’d be surprised how many artists out there refuse to pay money to market and promote their music, but complain their music isn’t getting heard.

The funding of your art has to start with you. If you haven’t built enough leverage (i.e. large social media following, consistent hit songs, viral success) to get a record label to invest in you, it is solely up to you to fund the marketing and your development to get to that point.

Not making enough money from your music earlier on isn’t an excuse for why you can’t invest in marketing your music. If you can’t fund your business/career directly from your music yet, then you need to do it with a more stable income source. Again, nothing wrong with a day job or a side hustle.

If you’re having fun and believe in your music, keep going. Do not worry about what others think if you’re not making a living off music alone. As long as you’re making music for the right reasons (i.e. not to become rich and famous), you’ll always be an artist regardless of how you fund it.

The post 13 Best Jobs For Emerging Independent Artists To Fund Music Career appeared first on D4 Music Marketing.