Greg Wilson is a prominent creative writer and music veteran with over 20 years of music industry professional experience. His knowledge and expertise extends from all aspects of the music industry including production, audio and video, promotion, music business strategy, music industry philosophy and music industry economics. For more information, please visit: Music Promotion
If you are a novice at getting your music to the masses then you are about to get a crash course on music promotion. It’s important because unless people know how great the song or CD is, they are never going to walk in and pick it up. There were a few exceptions out there in music history, like the Stones “Sticky Fingers” album or Carly Simon’s “No Secrets”. There were a ton of folks that bought those two without having heard a note because of the cover art. But guess what? That was promotion of a sort as well because the marketing department knew the curiosity would cause sales. And let’s not forget the time-tested payola from days gone by.
We’re going to look at some more conventional – and legal – methods to get you music to the folks that will enjoy it.
Music promotion and music marketing go hand in hand. You certainly wouldn’t target a retirement village for death metal or a college with a crooner like Sinatra so you need to research the intended market before you start promoting.
There are lots of types of music promotion that have been used, direct marketing by sending cards announcing the product or event, radio and television can also work but can be hugely cost prohibitive. However, if you approach a local radio station and offer them free copies of the CD to give away and to allow your band to play an event for them for free, it is amazing how all of a sudden you can be the hottest thing on the airwaves.
The barter system is still very much alive and well in the United States of America and even though it technically reeks of a form of bribery or even a little bit like payola, it is legal and acceptable and it works.
Most people these days are on Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. But how often do they actually use these sights to promote music events or CD releases? They should because the Internet can reach more people in the matter of moments than you could if you had a street team actually working around the clock for a month.
What you need to do is work smarter and not harder and the World Wide Web allows you to do exactly that and reach people across the world that actually might love what you are doing but because they live thousands of miles away, would never hear of you otherwise.
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