Advice from a Music Marketer

This from a music promotion marketing company:

We get a lot of questions from independent musicians about growing your fan base. We’d like to share some answers that we think will help you. How Do You Grow A Fanbase From Zero? First of all, no one starts from zero. You have family. You have friends. They have family. They have friends. They count. Justin Bieber’s mom decided to put his performance on YouTube. A year later the videos were seen by talent manager Scooter Braun, who signed Bieber. Starting with friends and family works. How Do Your Grow From Your Base of Your Friends and Family? Focus on three things. Live performances, social media and Spotify. Get to one hundred followers on each platform. That is enough to get people to come to your live shows. Some of the new people who see you live will follow you. Every like and share you get, introduces your music to new people. All of whom can listen to your Spotify streams. Every time you drop a release on Spotify perform it live and promote it on social. I’m Slowly Growing My Following. Now What? Stay active on social. Keep creating new music. Get better at your craft. Even the greatest musicians never stop improving. In fact, that is one of the things that makes them great. “I feel that I’m making the best music I’ve ever made. The more I go through in life the better my music gets…” — Boosie Badazz And Then? Create a marketing plan for each new release. If you have a following and are creating good music, then a new release is a big deal. Treat it like one. Market it professionally. Soon, someone will tell you, “This is the best song you’ve ever released.” The more followers you have, when that happens, the more people will say, "This is your best song ever." The more people who will stream it, the more people who will come to your shows and the more people who will share your music.

The one thing I’d change is get your music out on multiple streaming plaforms AND sites sites like Bandcamp, Mirlo.space and jam.coop. Give your audience a place to buy your music outright, instead of the pitiful returns from streaming platforms. And DON’T do Spotify! Spotify is the worst of the worst. And their share of the streaming space is only 30%. So the whole other 70% of the market is open to you, most of which pays better than Spotify, mostly significantly more.

And don’t forget the possibilities of merch sales. If you have a reasonably large fan base, upsell them on things than remind them of you.