The Marketing Side of Music

[tomcat_meow]

Hello All, I've been involved with my son's recording studio and helping him out with everything from building bass traps to vocal room, and figuring out acoustics. I've also been involved in websites and seo getting them to rank in google. So my son has a really decent recording studio now and he is seriously growing the business gaining new clients doing recording, editing and mastering. He wants to make a video for each song now and of course then marketing clients who are fairly new to the music industry or want better quality by building a social network. So I'm looking into the marketing side as I have experience with my own business not related to music. I have a small manufacturing factory and rank well in google. What I'd like to start with this thread is a list of places forums, websites, blogs, vblogs etc where a producer of music could get the word out on a new song. Of course there is youtube and vevo, soundcloud, twitter, facebook. But I'm looking for hidden jems like this forum where there are a large number of producers and marketers. Let's collaborate of places where we can all gain exposure and share tips on the marketing side of things. I know you can buy views and likes on youtube if you want to short circuit appearances but that still doesn't get the real organic exposure that builds over time. So I guess I'm asking everyone .... you put out a new song, beat whatever how do you promote it? Please be specific with links and addresses so we can all get there and use them for our next project or even projects that so far haven't organically grown like we would like them to.

 

[MusicHelper]

I'm new on here so i cant share links but hiphopmakers.com has a list of forums to check out on its website. You can just type into google "hiphopmakers forum" and a list of 8 will come up.

 

[SFTRAXX]

Paid advertising on sites relevant to your target audience is your best bet.

If you have the marketing budget, I'd go straight to WSHH (Assuming the Hip Hop audience is your target demographic) and buy some ad space...

 

[localspace]

That sounds like a cool operation you have going.. makes me wish my dad had musical sense

I don't promote my own music, but have worked in the industry so I'm talking from that experience.
Using social for promoting music is kinda overrated.. Social is to promote people, not products is my rule of thumb. The artist can use it to promote themselves and to interface more with their fans.

In order to get an audience you have to be where people 'discover' music, and generally that's their streaming service of choice (spotify, pandora, etc) and YouTube.
The time when people use to troll around sites like Soundcloud or Myspace to 'find new music' is pretty much gone, don't bank on it.

In your case, I'd probably focus on getting my stuff on iTunes, Spotify, a couple of other big streamers and back that up with a strong presence on YouTube. For YouTube
I wouldn't focus so much on music videos, but things more like vlogging. Have vignettes about artists, interviews, film studio sessions..etc.. (promote the people, not the product).
At first people won't buy much of your stuff on iTunes, but when they do, it's there.. easy to find and get.. plus, they'll immediately see you have catalog and not just one nice track or something.

You should look at services that help get your music out on those services. Having your stuff in the content ID system on Youtube means it'll get recognised and you automatically get
that click-through to iTunes and other stores below your video, etc.. There's things like Tunecore that can do that, but I hear a lot of people have bad experiences with them, getting their music out of it especially.
But it is pretty handy.. aggregators like that saves you the trouble of getting barcodes, ISRC codes and can get you on the bigger stores that really wouldn't deal with you otherwise. There's a whole bunch
of them, usually they specialise in one or more genres. Like Beatport has (or had, things move fast) it's own service for smaller dance labels. Some labels are moving into it as well.