I've used many methods to promote my music from social media to blogs to live performances but I want to talk about ways I've promoted that often aren't thought about and that go unnoticed. So here it is my favorite way of promoting my music .
1. Market yourself as a Business: What this means is get out of the bubble that everyone else is promoting in and standout. Promote to other businesses that will promote your music on their larger platforms. Over the years I have used my brand Cymphani Music Productions and I have given away beats to Cyphers, Rap Battles, Award Shows and all types of events as prizes. By doing this people started to contact me for beats to use on their bigger platforms and I became a sponsor for the event. My only term would be to have my logo placed on the flyer so that my brand was promoted as well. This is one way that I Marketed myself as a business. Other ways included agreeing to have my music in youtube videos, radio shows, background music for podcast and I even use my music in Platforms I myself have built. (We will talk about this later) But, by making my music available to bigger platforms I myself was promoted on a larger scale. I did this by building relationships with the Event Planners and Platform owners as an artist you can do this by building relationships with DJs, TV Channels and more established musicians.
2. Create Your Own Platform: Since I've started I've always had a platform to showcase other Artist music as well as my own. My first website was called "CC's World" it was a social networking website that artist could network with each other and I would interview artist that went to my college and share different music from the artist and I also shared my own music on the website. This was in 2008. There has always been a natural urge for me to share the work of other Independent Musicians and today I host the music of artist from all over on my platform called Indy Artist Connect. This platform is for artist of all types and even hosts the Memphis YouTube show 901 Indy Underground another platform that Indy Artist can be interviewed on to showcase their work. Through these platforms I promote others as well as myself and this grows my brand as a business and a Producer. Also if you build a relationship with others in the scene you can always pitch your ideas for them to use on their platform under the condition that you also be apart of it sometimes.
3. Be More than a Musician: Being a musician is great but when growing your brand you want to identify what else it is that you're good at that will draw people in. The purpose of this is establishing your target market. For me it's educating Indy artists about getting paid in the business. This allows me to get directly in front of my target market which is Artist. Artist need beats but they also need help with the business side of music. I often have consultations at home and now when an artist books a consultation they learn about my music production and even other services I offer. Also when the artist leaves the consultation they also are emailed the information we discussed. Trust and fans are built from these consultations because the artist knows I'm here to help.
4. Invest in Yourself: Last but not least is Investing in yourself. Invest in Marketing, Publicity, Promotion. Invest in anything you need to grow yourself as a brand. If you need a website and you don't know how to create one pay to have it done professionally. Pay for professional graphics and videos, pay for quality in your music. It's hard enough being independent so you want everything you do to build awareness around your brand and grow it. This is how PR works when you can't afford PR. And it may seem like a lot of work but the more you're out here grinding the more everything will come together.
Other things you can do to promote your music is by building a website and posting unique content on a regular basis, throw your own events, do a lot of live shows and collect a lot of footage on and off stage. There are lots of ways to promote your music but these 4 tips have really grown me other the years so hopefully these methods work for you as well. As always. I'm here to help #CymphaniSpeaks.
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