5 Tricks Promoting Your Music Online

The Internet is a whole new world of promotional opportunities. Essentially everything you thought you knew about the business can be thrown out the window when you log into MySpace or any of a dozen other social networks to find new fans. Those bands that fail to make the essential adjustment are doomed to fail until they realize just how different everything is. For the rest of you, here are 5 essential tips that help you look beyond the basics of Music Marketing to find what you can really accomplish online.

Be a Fan

As a musician, your goals have been to spread your music, find new fans and build new audiences. You want to land gigs, sell CDs, and hopefully attract the attention of a major label. Sure, you still listen to other peoples’ music, but do you take the time to get truly invested in it like you once did. Probably not. To be successful online, you have to be a fan like you once were. Write reviews of albums, contact other bands and share experiences and cross promote until you can’t see straight anymore. The Internet is the very definition of a network. Market to it in that manner to take advantage of how interconnected everyone is.

Simplify

It’s a misconception that you need the biggest, flashiest, most powerful website on the planet to be seen by potential fans. In fact, as the Internet has matured, the desire for fancy, flash-filled websites has reversed. It’s the reason Facebook has become so popular in recent months - it is clean and straightforward. Break it down a bit - don’t overwhelm you visitors with videos, images, and applications. They take too long to load and ruin the whole experience.

Short and Sweet

They say you have about 3 seconds to capture the attention of a visitor and 10 more seconds to hold it. You have even less time as a band on MySpace. After all, there are a few million other bands to choose from and they all have their own messages. So, make yours quick, sweet, and to the point. Don’t give a bunch of facts about your music - be clever and pounce on the sensibilities of your listeners. If you know what they want - humor, philosophy, politics, anger - and give it to them, they will read more.

Be a Buddy

Talk to your fans. It might take time, and it might be downright mindnumbing to repeat the same answers you’ve given a few hundred times, but those listeners make you who you are. Create a blog, respond to comments and hold conversations. Humanize yourselves to the point that your fans will keep coming back to see what you have to say next.

Get Viral

It’s a familiar phrase and there’s good reason for it - everyone uses viral marketing these days. Remember that band with the treadmill music video? That video got more than 26 million views and was named one of the videos of the year by a dozen different news outlets for 2006! Guess what? The band made the video on their own - without approval or support from their label, and it helped them go platinum in record sales. It was a genius marketing ploy and has since been duplicated by dozens of different bands on YouTube, MySpace TV, and a dozen other sites. Think outside the box and try to develop something that will spread like wild fire.

If you build the right toolbox of new ideas and fresh approaches, even the convoluted world of Internet marketing can result in amazing returns for your band and its music.