How To Promote Your Music in 2024 (A Musicians Guide)

With modern technology and the ease of access to music production programs and tools from your own home, creating music is more accessible than ever-before. Sometimes it can feel like the stars must align for your music to get some attention in today’s incredibly saturated music scene.

We are here to give you tried-and-true methods to promote your music, that if used consistently can help you grow and increase your fanbase.

How To Promote Your Band’s Music in 2024

1: Create The Best Music Possible

Of course the most important step in music promotion is… your music! As a musician you need to first focus on making sure that you have well-structured songs with professional mixing, mastering, and production. If your music doesn’t stand out in quality, first focus on improving production and song-writing before promotion.

2: Social Media

Growing a fanbase on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok is essential for modern day music promotion. Currently, short video content is king and attention-grabbing videos can go unexpectedly viral, many bands have gained thousands of followers and streams from one viral video.

Social Media algorithms are random and hard to predict - the key here is consistency. Try various kinds of content and see what gets the most engagement. Shoot for posting everyday or at least 3-5 times per week and over time your social media will grow and is often better at growing your fanbase than any other method.

3: Create a Website & EPK

Building a professional and well-designed website is a crucial element of promoting your band. A website can be host to social media links, music, info about the band, show/tour locations, and basically be a central location to find everything fans need to know about your music.

An EPK or Media Kit is a landing page that explains who you are, what your band is doing, and your accomplishments, often with links designed for media outlets, press, promoters, and more. Think of it as your band’s portfolio or resume. Here’s how to write an EPK for your band.

4: Playlists!!!

Playlists are one of the best ways to rack up streams and gain new listeners. Creating public playlists in your genre and sprinkling in your music can be a great way to attract new listeners and grow passively. If you aren’t already pitching songs to Spotify Editorials, Spotify For Artists is an incredible way to potentially get thousands of streams from some of the biggest playlists in the world.

Another great way to increase your streaming promotion efforts is to reach out to playlist curators in your genre and pitch your song to be added to their playlist.

One thing to keep in mind when pitching your music to playlists is to make sure that the playlist has real listeners and not bots. Paying for bot streams or “fake streams” is never a good idea and violates Spotify’s Terms of Service. Fake streams can lead to your music being removed, less exposure on Spotify, and in general can hurt your band in the long run much more than it helps. If a playlist or service promises an exact amount of streams within a set amount of time and has a social media that doesn't make sense with their playlist likes/streams, chances are its too good to be true. Be careful, there are some predatory services out there that take advantage of artists.

5: Press & Blog Coverage

Contacting publications like music blogs and magazines is an excellent form of advertising that can increase your music’s exposure, build up hype around your band, and also add credibility that can take your band’s digital footprint up a notch. Hiring a PR executive to handle your band’s coverage is a good option for band’s with a bigger budget but reaching out to music outlets independently is also a great option if you don’t mind researching and contacting music publications yourself.

Make sure that you have a recently updated EPK that makes everything easier for bloggers and journalists to cover you. If you are looking for press coverage, The Metalverse is one of the biggest independent music blogs and we love highlighting talented rising musicians! If you are looking for professional blog coverage or a press release campaign, you can contact us here.

6: Live Shows

Performing your music live is an excellent way to reach new fans and get your music out to new people. Book shows with exciting artists in your area and focus on having tight, energetic live shows that will leave an impact on show-attendees. Always give every show your all and think of what you can do to improve your live show and stand out more and you can quickly grow a dedicated base of fans.

Once you reach the point of selling out local venues, look for other venues you can take your show to and travel to new locations while continuing to spread your music!

7: Create A Good Team

Running a band can become like a full-time job with band members needing to be proficient in songwriting, content-creation, artwork, marketing, networking, and more. If you have one member doing all the work it is really easy to get burnt-out, but if you can surround yourself with like-minded and driven people who all contribute, you will have much more time to focus on the aspects of your band that each person is best at. Working together as a team can make success go from feeling impossible to much more realistic and do-able with consistent hard work.

8: Staying Relevant

With the booming popularity of social media, attention spans are shorter than ever. To successfully promote your band you have to essentially be a content creator and a musician. If you want to create and keep a dedicated base of fans you have to stay engaging and keep your listeners active. Posting regular content like social media posts and music videos can help increase your brand awareness - industry professionals recommend releasing a single every 3-months. Long gaps between releases can lead to people forgetting to check out your music, but if you are always releasing music, fans will be excited and looking for a release every few months.

9: Work With Other Artists

Networking in your local music scene is a great way to get shows, make connections, and collaborate with other artists. Creating a song that features another band/musician is an incredible way to reach more people in your genre. When you collaborate with another artist you are both going to reach each other’s audiences and potentially grow your fanbase exponentially.

10: Monetize

There are tons of expenses like traveling, production costs, subscription fees… etc, so monetizing your band should be a top priority to mitigate these costs. As most musicians quickly discover, streaming royalties are pretty low and likely won’t be covering much. Some other ways to make money with your band are social media monetization (once you build up enough), creating and selling merch online/in-person, website ads, and subscription content services like Patreon where you can offer exclusive content or early music leaks.

Closing Remarks

In today’s digital age it is more possible than ever to be successful while staying completely independent from a label and keeping all of your own profit. If you stay consistent and work hard you can grow your band to new heights that never would’ve been possible to do by yourself in the past.

What do you want to see us cover next? What do you think of these tips, let us know in the comments!

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