20 Music Marketing Ideas to Boost Your Career

Sometimes it’s fun to do a quick video to stimulate your brain and give you some ideas on what else you could be thinking about. In this video, I’m gonna give you 20 music marketing ideas that I think are a little outside the box in under 18 minutes. I hope you enjoy it!

Seriously, you have to stop telling people to just stream your song. This is some of the most concussed lazy music marketing. The only reason people listen to music is it makes them feel a way they’d rather be feeling. So anytime you’re encouraging someone to listen to your music, tell them how they could be feeling if they put on your song as it’s a way better sell. Try things like this:

Sink into the sadness abyss with my new song “Longing for Timothy Chalamet.”

Get ready to topple the capitalist system with my new track “Radicalized by a Hulu Doc.”

It’s time to rock the party and turn up with my new track “Dabbing on the Way to Death.”

Embrace the loneliness with my new song “Beer Pong with Myself.”

Every one of these prompts will get you more listens than just telling people to listen to a song they have no clue how it will make them feel. Think of the emotion your song brings and tell them how they could be feeling if they listened.

Take Advantage of YouTube Premiere

One of the most under-discussed opportunities musicians don’t take advantage of is the YouTube Premiere. With the click of one button and the length of your song, you can really up your stream numbers. The YouTube Premiere has two advantages:

First, it goes into the subscription feed, so when people are browsing through their subscriptions, they could see you’re releasing a song and even click to get reminded about it. This allows your single to create awareness before it’s out in the feed and afterwards, increasing the chances it gets heard. It also sends notifications to subscribers who have them enabled when it’s actually out.

Second, the real advantage it gives is that you can have a chat in the premiere and do bonding with fans, starting to create deeper bonds with them so they talk to their friends about you and spread the word about your music. Just be sure to let your followers know you will be hanging out in the chat during the premiere. You can even lengthen your video with outtakes to entice people to come and then trim them out in YouTube’s back end afterwards.

How Often Should You Release Music?

A lot of people ask me how often you should release music. Since the number one thing that could pluck you out of obscurity is Spotify playlist placements, you can only submit to one of those at a time. Spotify themselves recommend giving at least one week notice at minimum. So releasing any more than bi-weekly is dumb since you’re losing out on that free potential lottery ticket you could win if you get on a big playlist.

But then we get into the balance of being the little musician who cried song. If you release music too often, it becomes uneventful. This is why you see most of the artists blowing up today releasing a song every two months. You can continually remind them to listen to it and build a relationship with it, but most of all, it makes it important and not disposable. In a world with 60,000 songs being uploaded every day to Spotify, you need people to feel a song is important from you to want to give it a chance. Putting out 20 to 50 songs a year just doesn’t do that.

Go Beyond the Mirror

Okay, let’s get this straight: whether it’s a song, your music video idea, or marketing for your song, the execution’s important. But the reality is the ideas are usually safe and boring and they don’t go far enough, which is why they fail. The key to getting the best ideas is to have a blue sky period. I learned this technique from the writing room of “The Office” which they use to come up with all their crazy ideas.

It’s where you call out ideas and no one’s allowed to call them dumb. Instead, you’re only allowed to move past them or build upon the idea to make it as imaginative and beyond what anyone would normally think of. Meaning you can take the idea further, but there’s no negative commentary allowed during this period since we want creativity rewarded, not discouraged. You want to encourage the most out-there ideas and then once the period’s over, then you reign them in—or you don’t if the out-there idea is the right one.

Make a Credits Post

One of the most easy posts you can make that I see so many musicians sleep on, which will improve the reach of your song and get you shares along with getting your song in front of the people most likely to listen to them, is a credits post. Simply make a carousel on Instagram or a TikTok where you list off the credits of who worked on your song and be sure to tag everyone using the tag function on either platform.

On the screen now, you can see the way FKA Twigs did this on her last album. You could also make a tweet and do the same and use the image you used on Instagram as a picture in the post. When you make the TikTok of the song, be sure to mention something special about each person’s contribution and increase the likelihood of them sharing it to their audience. This is a perfect release date post that is likely to have the people you worked with share it, and when they share it, their fans will likely listen to your track since they are fans after all.

Surpass the Mirror

One of the reasons people aren’t connecting with what you’re doing musically is you’re doing what I call “the mirror,” which is the minimum expected effort required. All of your favorite artists go beyond the mirror in songwriting, performances, and their creative endeavors, which is why you enjoy them. But you are probably doing what you see as passable, aka the mirror.

Here’s a real-world example of the mirror: if you’re making a music video, you may say, “Ah, I only have to film for one day and then maybe do five hours of editing,” but if you go past that, that’s often what makes exceptional content. Here’s some examples of surpassing the mirror:

OK Go in their classic viral videos were all cause no other group of awkward white guys was going to learn to do those dance routines to get attention. The whole sad boy rap genre loves to do these really sick videos all made with drones and high-def cameras, but Echo 2k’s video for “Peroxide” took it where the competition wanted—a goddamn wind farm in the sea. Guppy and Fraxium aka Food House’s video for “Thoth Moser” went further than all the people trying to do the extremely online thing when they took it to a whole other level and went way past the mirror.

Stop Teasing Your Music

Teasing your music is killing your progress and growing your fan base. I know a lot of you probably think it helps your music to write the cringy posts of “10 days” and I know you see your favorite artists do this and want to pretend you’re important to millions of people just like them, but you’re not. Let’s remember every time you make a post you’re balancing annoying people versus giving them value, and they unfollow you when you don’t give them any value after too many posts of worthless drivel.

You have to hope every time you actually get someone’s attention and they are willing to click a link and grow their relationship with you, you can deliver them something they enjoy, which a teaser never does. This is why you should never promote your songs in advance. Instead, entice them to listen to something that if they click it, it may actually have them listening over and over again. No one’s marking their calendar to hear your song in a few days, so give them immediate satisfaction.

Quality Over Quantity

When you’re thinking about how often you release music, the first consideration should be: do you have enough good material worth putting the effort into promoting it? Since the most important thing is consistently sustaining your promotion, if you do have a handful of songs ready to go in advance, then we have to remember the instinct can be to just drop one every week. But the problem is that doesn’t make people feel any of those songs are important, and they don’t seem important to you since you just keep dropping them without making a big deal out of them.

You’re not making a music video, you’re not going on and on about the story of the song. My data, as well as experience, as well as what I see with artists blowing up, is releasing a song every two months by making a music video, a lyric video, and continually telling stories. It makes people feel like they should be paying attention since you’re making a big deal out of it. Putting out a song every seven days? Well, that feels like you’re just throwing [ __ ] at the wall and desperate. Sorry.

Don’t Get Discouraged by Initial Numbers

One of the main ways musicians make themselves miserable for no good reason—and trust me, there’s plenty of reasons to be miserable—is they get depressed when their streams don’t blow up on day one. When the fact is, if your song actually bangs, the numbers will be way bigger a week later. I mean, even Spotify said this in a recent slideshow: 53% of releases peak more than seven days after release.

Even though there’s this myth that songs blow up on TikTok overnight or blow up on the same day, instead they blow up from consistent sustained promotion where you’re continually reminding people to listen to your music. So many people reach despair when it’s not going well, but allow me to remind you of the horrible fact that Lil Nas X has recorded the most popular song of all time and it did nothing the first day it was out. But he kept pushing it and telling stories around it until it did.

Remember, the difference in how big your fan base will always be is how much you push and sustain promotion for nine to eighteen months. This is the most determinative factor. So don’t get down when things aren’t changing on release date and keep pushing. Take the temperature after a week of really pushing hard, not a few hours.

Release Singles in the Right Order

You’re not releasing singles in the right order. You ever notice how often times when your favorite band comes out with a new song, it’s just kind of mids, not particularly your favorite song of theirs? But then single two and three and then four just keep getting better and better. That’s called focus tracks, and as you keep releasing them, you’ll hopefully be picking up more followers and getting a more and more engaged audience.

So when you get to your best material, it has the highest likelihood of blowing up and putting up big numbers on the board and then igniting interest in it along with all that material you were releasing before. While we can’t ever fully tell what songs will blow up, it makes sense to try to order them in the order of the one with the most potential coming later in the cycle. This is also helpful since if the audience keeps hearing about you, it improves the chance that they’ll give this one a shot.

Promote Old Songs with New Releases

New songs are the best way to promote your old songs. So many of you write me or comment on my YouTube videos that you really want to promote songs you released that you really don’t feel got their due. And I get it, you pour your heart out and believe in them and you want to see those numbers go up. Well, aside from re-releasing them and hoping the algorithm and playlist placements along with a new splash of attention will help you get them noticed, the thing I tell everyone is the best way to promote your old songs is releasing more songs.

I see it constantly that an artist gets attention for one song, but then the fans find that song that didn’t take off, and all of a sudden that song starts to get its due. Tons of artists and probably some of your favorite artists got a new push to an old song when audiences found it, but they find them because you draw attention to yourself with the best marketing tool possible: a new song.

Stop Seeing the Music Business as a “Shoot Your Shot” Situation

Whenever I’m talking to musicians, they’re talking about getting an opportunity for a manager to listen to them or an A&R or a booking agent who wants to talk to them. They mention shooting their shot. This is totally the wrong mindset. When I’m out with friends in the music biz, we always talk about that we will often meet an artist and they’ll ask to work with us and we say no at first, but then we come around.

Hell, every band I ever managed asked numerous times before I said yes. This is because once you’re on our radar, we want to see you doing cool things, working hard on your own, and most of all, continuing to make good music. It’s not a shot, but instead, we want to see you play a game for a while to develop a relationship with you and make sure you’re not insane. So keep us updated when you meet us, and as you keep growing and ascending, let us know. And remember, it’s not just one shot, it’s about developing a relationship.

How to Get More People to Your Shows

So many of you wonder how you can do one of those shows that finally gets you in front of the right people so you can finally start building a local audience. Here’s a trick I’ve done with a few artists over the years. Even if you’re in a small town, they have events where large groups of people gather. Convince a local bar or club near the event to let you do a show that’s billed as the after-party for this event or the pre-party.

This works especially well if you find it around your audience niche. Like, if you do prog rock, doing this for after the Renaissance Fair. If you make 2000’s emo, do it at the Hot Topic sale. If you make Imagine Dragons-style cringe rock, do it around a sporting event. You get my point. Build your event as the pre-party or after-party and flyer that extensively, especially if it’s a multi-day event. Get there the day before. People are always looking for where to turn up and keep the party going. Be that party and enjoy the rewards.

Spotify Music + Talk DJ Sets and Artist Playlists

This is why Spotify Music + Talk DJ sets and your artist playlists matter to grow your music. Okay, so by the reaction to one of my latest YouTube videos, a lot of you didn’t get that the only way an algorithm can learn to recommend you is by seeing similar users listen to you or share you and tag you. One of the ways you can get massive growth is to find a bunch of artists that are similar to you in sound but slightly bigger and one week put them on your Spotify artist playlist.

Then tweet and share on Instagram you updated that playlist while tagging those artists so they hopefully share it themselves. Then the next week, do a Spotify Music and Talk DJ set and share it the same way. This will hopefully get the fans to tune in and like you and then start getting the algorithm to see you as intertwined with them and recommend you. Just don’t go tagging huge artists and think that will help. Leave Drake alone, please.

Post Content Throughout the Day

Social media doesn’t have a perfect time. There are people who read social media in the morning, the afternoon, the evening, and even at midnight. Which we all also have to remember, if you’re on the East Coast, is the evening for California. You need to post content about your big announcements all through the day and across multiple days so your audience actually sees it.

This feeds at midnight when your song drops. Make a post and interact with the night owls. Then rise and shine in the morning and get up and post first thing. Then around lunchtime, you need to remind again. And then around dinnertime, it’s time to give that crowd one more reminder. Whenever you do something big, these reminders can be reposting the story of a fan listening to it or a retweet of a compliment onto just retweeting your own posts and making what was a grid post on Instagram now a story.

So many musicians concern themselves with being annoying and that’s smart, but for your big announcements, take a day or two to really make a big noise so everyone hears it. And if you’re tasteful normally, you’ll keep the follows.

Using TikTok Sounds

Using TikTok sounds is crucial to getting you in front of potential fans’ eyes. Sounds are just as good as hashtags in getting your TikToks in front of potential fans who love your micro-genre of music. If you notice a sound trending that’s similar to a sound you should start putting in your videos as soon as possible. This also goes for if a song is really popping off in your genre right now. Even if the song is only being used a little, TikTok takes the songs people have liked before and continuously serves it to them, targeting the potential fans with the most susceptibility to liking your music.

If you click on that little revolving vinyl-like button down in the corner, you can click and see how many people are using this song. And fun fact, even if you don’t want the song to play in your video, you can use it as kind of a hashtag thing by turning it down so it’s inaudible and still get the same benefits from it.

Focus on Spotify

Spotify is the only streaming audio platform you should be concentrating on. On my YouTube channel, I just put up my annual free thorough video on how to promote yourself on Spotify. And there was one thing I said that shocked a lot of viewers. A lot of musicians talk like spending time promoting their music on Apple Music or even worse,