Indie Music Marketing Tips.
While doing my research on the subject, I’ve seen the enormous changes and the record industry has gone through in the past years. Many feel that all these changes, the illegal downloading etc. may bring the end to the record industry and artists can’t hope for much more than to give their music away. As discussed in my blog Transformation of the Indie Music Industry, lot of barriers within the production, promotion and distribution system were broken for the indie artists with the introduction of digital formats in recording instead of analog formats in the 1980s. When advancement in technology began to break down the previously rigid infrastructure of the recording industry, the strongly held oligopoly of the industry was shaken and almost eliminated after being predominant for over half a century. Internet brought with it an increasing number of affordable and powerful software that made the production costs of music fall drastically in the 1990s, with new technologies making robust recording equipment available to indie musicians. Today, there continues to be a reduction in the necessity of expensive studio time, enabling indie artists and musicians to take the DIY approach in creating music.
This new age of iTunes and Internet Marketing offers unlimited opportunities to bands and musicians that under the ‘old system’ of traditional record labels never would have had a chance. Here are a few success tips for indie musicians and bands that want to make it in the music industry without a major label contract:
Distribution- until very recently, getting any kind of distribution was impossible without a major label contract. iTunes does not take independent artists music. Now this has changed. You can sign up with other more welcoming platforms to get your music into all the major online outlets like iTunes, eMusic, Amazon etc. That’s like instant world wide distribution. With a few mouse clicks, your songs are available from Tokyo, Japan to Novosibirsk, Siberia. And with online sales, there are no returns, no CDs to manufacture, no big advance costs to worry about.
Marketing – there are unlimited ways to market your music on the internet. Your own web site is your first line of defense, if you don’t have a site, get one. Selling your music there is as simple as placing a link back to iTunes. If you need help in creating and maintaining a website, HyperEffects can help you connect with your target audience efficiently. HyperEffects is one stop for your website, marketing and cyber development requirements. It helps you to create a website to display your talent or sell your indie music or indie art.
Then, there’s MySpace, where you can set up an artist site for free and get your music heard, your videos played and more. Marketing yourself on the internet is hard work. Getting people to link to you, getting found in the search engines. etc. Here’s a quick tip: To get found on the net, don’t concentrate on getting the name of the band into the search engines. Remember, nobody knows you yet, so nobody will be searching for “The Rocking Gang” or whatever you are called. Instead, try to get links that point to your style of music. When somebody searches on Google for “Russian Rock Fusion” your band’s name should come up on top. We are following this strategy with www.alansteward.com and it is working quite well.
Radio- A word of advice here. As an independent artist, you are wasting your time trying to market yourself to commercial radio stations. They will NOT play your songs. As discussed in my blog Importance of Radio, it takes millions to tap that market. The average marketing budget for a new major label release is at least 5 million dollars. You can’t compete with that. What you can do, inexpensively and effectively is to market to college radio, internet stations, clubs, jazz programs etc. There are thousands of these outlets and in this day and age it is actually an advantage if your music is not mainstream pop but maybe reggae, jazz, electronica etc. A good service to use to market to these specialty outlets and stations is Radio Direct. They market your music to hundreds of specialty stations and DJs that play YOUR kind of music.
