How Marketing Strategies for Musicians in 2024 Are Made?

Talented musicians always want their music to be on top, especially when they have the opportunity to get solid royalties for streams. Artists expect to receive streams immediately after the release, so their songs will get higher in major charts and even appear in genre-related playlists due to high engagement. 

On Spotify, mixes like Discover Weekly are generated for each user due to their preferences. If your music gets attention and engagement, it may be put into somebody's personalized playlist. A playlist appearance is a great way to boost your music and establish your presence on the platform, especially if you expect your new music to be on top.

Today, we can see the peak competitiveness on music platforms, as new artists appear on the horizon, chasing the dream of becoming successful. To achieve that, they use various approaches to share content, build new contacts, collaborate with other musicians, and do everything to get on top. Still, using single methods may not be effective. Combining various processes into a strategy would be more effective from a long-term perspective, which we will discuss in our article. You'll find out:

• What are the most important components of the music marketing strategy?
• What tools and platforms should be used for music marketing?
• How to establish a connection with your audience?

The music business is tough only if you don't know what to do. We give you a roadmap and explain how to get your music heard by presenting key takeaways from marketing strategies for musicians. 

Why Is Music Marketing Strategy Significant for Your Success?

One of the biggest misconceptions is that marketing strategies are made only to get streams on the platform you are originally based on. Once you effectively market your music, you open yourself multiple channels for revenue, getting in touch with promoters, distributors, and other major players in the industry. With an effective approach to digital marketing, you increase your value as a musician. Moreover, you open yourself to more perspectives for career development.

There are 4 key P`s of successful marketing strategy:

• Promotion (how you share your content)
• Price (how much do you get for your music)
• Place (where do you distribute your music)
• Product (the songs you publish and promote)

To ensure your strategy works well, you have to follow essential steps. In the end, all pieces of the puzzle will be brought together, and you will see the growth.

Key Criteria for a Successful Music Marketing Strategy in 2024

This diagram represents some of the most important elements that should be included when developing a marketing strategy. Let's break down how these apply to musicians specifically.

Commitment - Essential Element of the Marketing Strategy

Consistency is key for any type of marketing, and music marketing is not an exception. Since it's a long game, you have to be constantly involved in your career development. For example, around 5,5 million on Spotify have published less than 10 songs on their profiles. This brings us to two possible scenarios:

• They lost interest in their music career development.
• They quit because they don't have a plan of action, and they simply stop after seeing the first results, which are not as big as they expect. 

Anyway, the best possible option for you is to avoid both scenarios and never stop your development to develop a personalized marketing strategy based on modern tendencies.

Decide What Product You Deliver

One of the key components of any marketing strategy is a product. You have to understand what product you deliver. Once you identify yourself as a songwriter/musician, your final product will be a released song or an album. If you identify yourself as a DJ, your product will be a gig or a concert, which later turns into a concert tour, giving you pace for multiple tours. 

Get a License

Most creators forget about this point, but getting a license for your product is one of the most crucial parts for musicians. Moreover, a license on the product will significantly increase your income. For example, Eminem's song Venom became commercially successful, reaching the top 10 ranks in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Greece. The license allows others to use your music in games, TV promos, commercials, movies, etc., and you will get paid for each usage. 

Set Clear Goals

A marketing plan should always include goals. Once you decide to develop your brand without a clear purpose, your methods may not be as successful as you expect. However, when you understand why you are pushing your music using social media and developing a personal brand, the process becomes clear and enjoyable. For example, if you're primary goal is to achieve 1 million listens on Spotify, you can identify steps needed to achieve this goal (increase your audience, share songs on music-related forums, increase social media activity, etc.). 

Once the goal of your music promotion strategy is to increase the number of listeners, you should intensify social media promotion by increasing the number of posts and using all the available formats. Moreover, simply showcasing your songs is not enough. You have to encourage users to follow your profile on the music platform. You must sell your music to your audience on social media as well as present it to the music lovers who don't follow you.

Develop Your Brand to Establish Presence

Today, a music marketing campaign becomes effective once you build it around your presence on a music platform. Whether you have a platform on Spotify, SoundCloud, Apple Music, or anywhere else, use it to your advantage and develop a personal brand. The first thing to do is to create a recognizable profile and optimize SEO. At the beginning of your path, you may not be recognizable, so you have to change that. Listeners who search for new music will find your tracks much faster if you use the needed tags and get a proper description. Pick an image that represents you on the platform (most musicians use the same image for all platforms), and get a recognizable background image. 

As personal brand development goes far beyond just optimizing your music platform profile, you have to optimize your social media profiles and work on your YouTube channel as well. It's essential to keep all the pages to a single design.

A good example of single-style compliance is a YouTube channel of Marshmello and his YouTube channel. His music videos are made with a similar style, using the same fonts and design concepts. It's actually his trademark. 

Decide how you want to use your social media. You can utilize them only for promotion and audience engagement, or share episodes from your personal life, telling exciting stories and sharing what happened in your life. In this article, we shared examples of celebrities using Instagram. Sometimes, artists start with simple posts and then advance their capabilities using editing tools, including AI-based programs for image editing and creating videos.

Social media are essential for establishing your brand and effectively promoting your songs. Every time you release a track or an album, you have to make sure it's visible to a bigger part of your audience.  Utilize available methods of content posting to present your songs. Since you may have different types of audiences on these platforms, you should not limit yourself to using a single platform. Establish your presence on TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook (optional) to make more users recognize you. Moreover, each platform represents its unique audience, so you have to be creative and create various content to impress them. 

Connecting With Your Audience Is a Must

You won't succeed unless you won't understand what your audience wants from you. Once you are a beginner, and you want to keep advancing in this industry, it's essential to stay in touch with your listeners and consider their needs. How to do that? Depending on your approach and the type of product you generate, a connection with the audience can be established in multiple ways. We represented them in the table below.

Understand What Your Audience Likes the Most

Your marketing efforts won't bring the desired effect if you don't know your audience well. The best music marketing strategy is the one adapted to the preferences of the listeners. People may want to hear your music, but it won't happen until you find the right approach to get to them. Every independent artist and every band has an individual approach, using unique promotion techniques. Still, they are all based on key data about the audience.  How to get the most important information about the audience?

• Use built-in tools in social media and music platforms. For example, Spotify for Artists and SoundCloud Next Pro brings access to advanced analytics. Platforms like TikTok and Instagram also provide access to key data about your followers, their activity, age gaps, etc.
  
  
• Launch polls asking users to answer a few questions. With it, you'll be able to know who follows you, what are their average activity time, etc. Based on this information, you can create a more effective marketing strategy and build community around your music.

Receiving information about your followers helps you correct the plan of using marketing channels and make it more advantageous. Music industry professionals had long paths to success analyzing their mistakes, changing approaches, and increasing the number of users who see their content. 

Later, when you get the first followers and reach the first milestones in music streaming, you may think about investing in paid promotion. Some artists consider this ineffective due to multiple reasons, mainly because they don't trust services that offer such options.

Of course, major stars like Drake or 50 Cent don't need paid promotion because their visibility works for them.

 However, if you are not popular enough and you need to push your music on streaming platforms, don't hesitate to make such an investment. On Artist Push, you can effectively promote your music and get organic engagement, so your content will be shown to music fans who enjoy the same genre or search for music similar to yours. Depending on the size of your audience and your final goals, you can pick a needed promotion package and expect significant engagement growth shortly. 

Decide Whether You Want to Sell Merchandise or Not

Merchandise releases also become a part of many marketing strategies for independent artists. You can share T-shirts, hats, jerseys, and accessories representing your unique design. Understand that selling merchandise is not what should be done immediately after launching your marketing strategy.

Picking the right platform for merchandise release is also important. In this video, the author tells about top platforms to promote your goods and make a lot of money from this initiative. Most effective marketing campaigns are based on merch, and you can do so. 

You can do it later after achieving significant success and establishing a presence at least on the local music scene. If the number of people interested in your music is low, there's no sense in such investment. It can be unprofitable, slowing down your progress and making a negative impact on your marketing budget.

Set Timelines for Your Marketing Strategy

Music marketing plans must have clear time frames. Identifying the starting and the ending date of music promotion allows you to:

• Set clear goals.
• Measure your success.
• Precisely analyze your activity and identify gaps.

The optimal length of the marketing strategy is up to 3 months. During this time, you can announce, release, and push several songs to achieve the desired level of activity. When you complete all parts of the plan, you don't need to lower your activity. Take time to analyze your approach and implement changes. A music marketing degree is not necessary as you can build a personalized approach from scratch and develop it all the time. Global trends always change, and you have to consider that to effectively distribute your music among potential listeners.