Top 5 Marketing Strategies for Musicians

Author: Marc Plotkin, Guest Contributor

So you’ve made some music that you think is awesome, and now you’d like to maximize the number of people to enjoy it? Don’t just expect them to find you. Here are some things I suggest:

1. Define the audience who LOVES your music. Do this based on observation, *not* assumption.

I have good and bad news for you. The bad news is that your music is not for everyone. As much as you think it is, it just isn’t. The good news is, I 100% believe that there is an audience for you. But it’s on you to properly identify that audience and to not be misled merely by what you’re most familiar with or who you may prefer. We don’t get to pick our audiences. If you’re still thinking, “no way, my music is for everyone, I’m gonna market it to everyone,” I wish you good luck but promise you that when you market to everyone, you market to no one. When you’re starting, it’s crucial to purposely pick an audience to target so a specific community can build around you and your music. It may expand from there, but no one ever started and successfully scaled their audience by targeting “everyone.” Look at any successful example, and you’ll notice that they chose to be exclusive to a particular audience in the early days.

So if you buy that, the question is, WHO should you be targeting?

There’s a term heavily used in the startup world called Product/Market Fit, which essentially boils down to answering the question, “Have you identified the people who most enjoy what you’ve made?” I love starting with Product/Market Fit (let’s call it Music/Market Fit for our purposes 😎) because it has nothing to do with hitting big numbers. Most creative endeavors seeking a large audience fail because they attempt to hit big numbers without arriving at what Music/Market Fit is for their project. You don’t want to spend time/money on things like running ads, hiring publicists, etc., to ultimately be targeting the wrong group of people. So to avoid this, run experiments to identify WHO your audience is before attempting to scale to reach a lot of people. I even recommend doing this entire process before officially releasing music. There’s no one way to arrive at Music/Market Fit, but one consistent thing I’ve seen across hundreds of projects and releases is that the audience you assume you’ll have, is rarely accurate. So come up with an experiment that will make it easy to isolate who LOVES your music (not your buddy who says “nice job” to your song, but the person whose eyes light up and can’t stop telling you how much they loved your song). Then go deep into learning about where their attention is so you can ultimately reverse-engineer it. Do this with enough people until a pattern emerges amongst the answers from those who love your music.

So, for example, if I play my song for 30 people, 10 of them seem to love it genuinely, and then when I ask them some follow-up questions (How do you find out about new music? Which Spotify playlists are you following? What are the top 3 most streamed artists for you? Etc.) I notice that 7 out of the ten folks who love the song say they love listening to Artist X, follow Influencer Y on Instagram to learn about new music, and are more likely to find me via one of a few independent playlists rather than reading some blog, etc. ← I now have specific things I can target and may have landed on my Music/Market Fit! Alternatively, if I get ten different answers from those that love my music...I’m still at Square 1. If this happens, we need to up the sample size until patterns emerge, which they eventually will.

2. Map out the places/people that would reach *more* of the audience that you just defined.

Ok, so now we know WHO you should be targeting. This is huge! But we don’t want just to reach the people that fit those criteria and are ones to whom you already have access. We want people who fit those criteria and don’t realize yet that they would love you! This is where I’m often perplexed when early-stage artists say that their only marketing strategy is posting on their own social media channels...that’s great, but unless I already follow you or happen upon a hashtag that you use, I’m probably not going to see it!

What we need to do to reach those people who don’t already follow you is use what we learned in part 1 to define who/what/where that hypothetical audience is already following...which artists, which influencers, which publications, etc. We will be using those as places to find our target audience. List out all the sources whose current audience matches your target future audience!

3. Don’t go to the crowded channels, and let yourself be more than just music.

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect." - Mark Twain

There’s no need to try to squeeze through the same door that everyone else is trying to get in. Want to pitch a Spotify playlist that has millions of followers? It’s going to be crowded. How about instead you identify a handful of smaller playlists that, when you put together, add up to the numbers of one of those big ones? Want to pitch your music in a super-efficient way, like with SubmitHub or any of the paid music-pitching services? If it’s super-efficient, that means it’s going to be super-crowded.

You also don’t need to pitch yourself to music-related outlets solely. Sure, most of us think of music blogs and playlists when promoting new music. But is the fact that you’ve created a new piece of music the only thing to talk about in a story about your music? Look at the songs you wrote. Look at your life. If you just made an album all about how you’ve struggled with depression, sure you could hit up a music blog...but what if you hit up a mental health influencer or podcast? How many musicians do you think those people hear from? Suddenly the fact that you’re a musician reaching out to those people can make you stand out from the crowd. If I’m listening to that mental health podcast and I think hearing you talk about what you’ve dealt with sounds interesting, and I Google your name to find out you’re a musician, I’m definitely checking out your stuff because I’ve identified with something you care about that I also care about! The existence of your music isn’t what brings people to your music; it’s the alignment of what you believe and care about.

4. Want to make sure you’ll be happy with your release results? Get quantitative.

Ask any musician what their goal is for a particular release and you get the same answer. “Sky’s the limit! I want it to reach as many people as possible!” Duh. But here’s the problem with that...we can’t reverse engineer “Sky’s the limit!” - but if someone says, “If my new song can reach 10,000 people in the first couple weeks, I’ll be thrilled.” *now* we have something with which we can work. I encourage you to define a specific goal like this, create a plan to reach that number, and don’t pull the trigger on releasing until you can see how that plan would work on paper. This is the difference between people who (regardless of the goal they pick) are truly satisfied with how a release goes versus those who are constantly disappointed (even if the numbers they hit are big!).

I’m a big fan of getting quantitative here to ensure success. Let’s roll with that 10,000 listener example…

In my music/market fit experiments I mentioned before, let’s hypothetically say that I learned that my audience (the people in the experiment that rated my song the highest) follows these three Instagram accounts in common:

IG 1 - 5k followers

IG 2 - 45k followers

IG 3 - 20k followers

Let’s say we plan to reach out to each of these IG accounts and make our case for them to shout out our upcoming release (I’ll go over best practices for doing that next), and they agree that they will. That doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll hit my 10k listener goal. Out of that total addressable audience of 70k people, I shouldn’t assume that more than 5% of their followers will for sure see the post about my record (it’s often a higher rate, but let’s be conservative to make sure we hit our goal), so that gets us 3,500 people who will see the post about our song. But that still hasn’t brought us any listers! We still need those people to either click a link from the post/story/bio or choose to look us up in Spotify/Apple Music themselves. Again, let’s be conservative and say maybe 5% of those people do that...5% of 3,500 is 175. So even if my release is being promoted to a total audience of 70k people, I shouldn’t plan on that converting into more than 175 listens...so to hit my 10k listeners goal, I have a ways to go!

I don’t say that to discourage you; quite the opposite. This gives you a sense of how much planning ahead of time you have to do to have release goals go well and hit your targets. If I wanted to stick with that 10k goal, those three Instagram accounts clearly aren’t enough. So better that I know that before my release than during or after! Knowing that now, I’m going to go back to my music/market fit data and make sure I can add a bunch more sources to target in addition to those three IG accounts. If that list grew to 20-25 large outlets (IG accounts, Playlist, Blogs, Podcasts, etc.), then we’d probably be in the ballpark of the goal. The great news is that this is super easy to figure out for yourself because these numbers are public! You can see how many followers a person or brand has. Use that to inform your planning.

5. Make professional friendships (not “connections”).

The music industry is notoriously transactional. Here’s how this often goes; an artist identifies someone who has a large audience and is a fit with their music, so they reach out to that influencer/blogger/playlister for the first time ever with the relatively big ask of, “You don’t know me but will you shout out my song to your audience of hundreds of thousands of people?” 🙄

How would this make you feel? I feel dirty just from writing that. We don’t want our first impression to be in the context of asking for an unwarrantedly large amount of help! It’s a bad look. Dare I say it’s plain rude? Let’s try this in a more humane way.

The best time to make a new professional relationship is WAY before you need anything from them. So if you think you’re going to want to pitch your song to music journalist X in a few months, I’d start to build that relationship NOW, and not base it on asking for help. A great method I always recommend is to look at someone’s professional background (LinkedIn). Did music journalist X work as a talent buyer at some venue in NYC before writing for music blog Y? What if you reached out to them and asked them a question about that? How did they find working in live music helped them pivot to their work in journalism? Are there any lessons from the first job that they’ve carried over to the second? You get the idea. ← The big difference between these questions and just hitting someone up to check out and review your song is that you’re asking about THEM. This is a massively different experience emotionally. Ask questions you’re actually interested in and genuinely try to make a real professional friendship here, not just some “connection.” People do for their friends, not their connections. Use their answers to your questions as a jumping-off point to ask subsequent questions about their work. This whole conversation may even open other doors you didn’t see coming!

Assuming you’re not dealing with a complete narcissistic (statistically quite rare), what should inevitably happen is that after you’ve shown enough interest in THEM, they will be genuinely interested in YOU. So after a few rounds of questions (whether via email or over coffee), that journalist will probably be thinking, “Woah, I’ve told this person a million things about myself, they know my dog’s middle name now, but what’s their deal? I’m going to ask what they’re up to.” Now you have an opening to talk to them about your music in the context of them WANTING to hear about it, as opposed to you forcing it on them with cold emails. Feels different, right? Feels way better.

In conclusion:

These all take serious time and effort. These are the opposite of (fictional) shortcuts. Callout the shortcuts and put in the work the right way.

About The Author

Marc Plotkin is an American Songwriting Award-Winning Artist, a Grammy Shortlisted Producer, a Bloomberg BusinessWeek Top 25 Entrepreneur, and a Professor at New York University's Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music.

Alongside his music career, Marc is a successful technology entrepreneur. In 2010 Marc co-founded DecisionDesk, the first cloud-based system that allowed Universities to accept multimedia audition recordings alongside student applications. Marc brought DecisionDesk to hundreds of Universities worldwide, leading to hundreds of thousands of students using it annually to get their self-made music and films to Universities for consideration for acceptance. Embark later acquired DecisionDesk. In 2014, Marc founded Wifi Music School, an online marketplace that provided the opportunity for students to take private music lessons exclusively over Skype with some of the best music teachers in the world. Wifi Music School was later acquired by Flint Hills Music.

Learn more about Marc by visiting www.marcplotkin.com.