Promoting Indie Music.
No talent scout will ride into your gig on a white horse to discover and rescue you from the maze of talent that this industry is overflowing with. The indie artists better wake up and realize this. You are the only one who will discover you. Along with high quality music, you will require a lot of hard work, a good website for yourself or the band, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube videos, and as much networking as you can achieve. If you do not have a website yet, there are companies like Hyper Effects that can help you with this.
Hard work, for today’s indie artist means obtaining a larger fan base. Thereafter, finding a good promotion and distribution company that will hopefully get you a good label with world radio contacts that will run an effective campaign for you. As I have written in my blog How to Become a Better Indie Artist, getting a publisher for your work helps indie artists. Producers charge exorbitantly, true, get them still. They will make sure you are connected to someone who knows more than you about making records. It is always good to know the experts. You get to learn by absorbing all the knowledge and become better at art. You would rather make great records than collect musical instruments with the money that you plan to save.
There are many radio promotion companies but they will charge around $2500 for a 350-station college radio campaign. What is required for an indie artist is a record label that has its own radio promotion arm that will split the costs of promotion with them. During these times the artist will have to be prepared to split promotion costs or die a slow death. Realise the need of the hour and be savvy enough to grab such opportunity, if you find it. Forget complaining about paying for your own promotion. If a label is willing to split the cost of promotion you better jump and grab the deal on that deal. I understand that today’s generation is listening to music via YouTube and other direct streaming platforms.
Lately, websites dedicated to music blogs and the digital curation of new music have been emerging and gaining popularity. This has become an effective platform for indie artists to promote and sell their work, because most of these are created and visited by music lovers. It is interesting to note that these platforms also serve as digital music magazines that have dedicated writers and generate a separate revenue stream. Because these sites have dedicated experts constantly writing about new trends and releases in the music industry, they also play an important role in building a reputation for an indie artist or indie band. New releases are shared, talked about and stamped ‘approved’ on such sites and are helpful for indie artists in expanding their fan-base and advertising new projects.
Peer-to peer file sharing services may have actually helped assist in establishing a market for digital singles even before legal means of selling them existed. As discussed in my blog Indie Music- Trends, applications such as Napster had user friendly interfaces that allowed illegal downloaders to search the names of virtually any individual song and download it practically instantaneously. The advent of the iTunes store enabled consumers to purchase single songs from their extensive library legally, conveniently and with guaranteed high quality, for a relatively low price of 99 cents. In this way, they were able to take advantage of this newfound demand for individual songs while helping record labels recover at least a portion of sales displacement due to piracy. The effects of the Internet on the recording industry cannot be limited to piracy and the introduction of legal distribution. Several aspects in the rise of social media make it another key element represented by the rise of the Internet. Using social media outlets, artists have begun to release free music directly to their fans, a practice that, although helps promote acts and expand their fan base, probably has mixed results in terms of record sales.
I am going to come back with more on this subject soon. Please share your experiences in the comments section and I will add them to my future blogs.
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.
