Marketing Your Music With Free MP3 Downloads

Whether you're selling physical albums or MP3 downloads, selling in the music industry is rarely easy. The ailing economy has tempered consumers' spending habits, and most people don't exactly treat new LPs as necessities. How do you weather this storm of spending less? It's time for you to try marketing your music, through your music.

Sound Promotion

At first, the concept of using music – the same thing you're trying to sell – might sound laughable, even ludicrous. Once you get the hang of it, though, you'll be wondering why you didn't start doing it sooner.

One of the great things about MP3s is that they're so flexible. The tabula rasa and blank sheet of the music world, you can put anything and everything into an MP3 file. This makes the medium quite ideal for promoting anything from a new album to your gig next week. It's like the paper flier of the audio industry.

Unlike paper fliers, however, free MP3 downloads have no need to get reproduced a few thousand times and then manually handed out to people on the street. Record the file once, make it available to about a dozen websites and then you're good to go. In fact, you'll even have people coming to you because you're offering something for free.

Making Your MP3 Downloads Marketable

If you're familiar with some of the basics in modern marketing, you can apply the same concepts here. After all, it's practically the same exercise, only you're using free MP3 downloads instead of billboards and newsletters.

First things first: have something to advertise. Should the listener want to know more about you or your band, the MP3 should explain how to do it. A quick plug of your website – even your Facebook or MySpace page will do – for example, is a good idea. You may also want to give your gig schedule for the next few months, if that's available.

Add the necessary information as a quick sound bite at the start or end of the track. That way, it's almost unavoidable that the listener will hear what you have to say every time the track is played. You could also pause while playing, the same way bands and artists do in between sets of live performances.

See to it that your free MP3 download will be found by people who will appreciate your music. You may want to start by covering a well-known classic in your genre and then putting your own twist to it. That'll get you instant attention, even as an unknown artist. You could also use your own song, but be sure to put two or three keywords in the file name like 'ska' or 'alt rock' to help listeners find you.

MP3 Marketing Works

The idea here is to give a face and a story to an artist that would otherwise be just a name to the listener. By giving details about artist websites and gigs, you reach out to your listeners and make you more accessible to them. Even when you don't have any albums to sell just yet, this is a good strategy to establish the fan base that will buy those albums when the time comes.