How To Market Your Music Online

Marketing your music online is one of the most important parts of an artists career. You can have the best music on planet earth, but if nobody hears it, you can’t make a career from it. We decided to put together an easy guide on how to market your music online. We will break down the ins-and-outs of the music industry and how to really get your music to the masses. We have marketed music for independent artists which has led to over 1 Million digital downloads! So, enough talk, lets get into it.

 1. Your Material.

By this point we are sure that you have professionally recorded, mixed and mastered your material. But believe it or not, many artists haven’t. Musicians tend to believe that having good music is enough, when it isn’t. Sure your melodies and production sound good, but is it recorded properly? With the ever-expanding home studio setups, it is getting even easier to create music.
Just because you can hit record and sing doesn’t mean it is recorded properly. Before you move on to the next steps, invest in your craft and make sure that your production is up-to-par with what you hear on the radio. Also, make sure that it is properly mixed and mastered. It is not worth marketing your music if a program director at a radio station won’t spin your records due to its quality. Sound quality is key!

 2. Your Image

 Every band/artist that becomes successful owes it in part due to their image. They stand out from the rest, they have that “it” factor. Your image is what the audience sees before anything else, so it has to be something they want to engage in and relate to. Make sure your image says what your music is about and why you’re different from the million other musicians in your genre. Try to create a “persona” that reflects who you are as an individual and highlight that through your style of music. Your image will be key in marketing your music, in fact it is the most important part.

3. Your Online Presence

 Having an online presence is extremely important before investing in your online marketing strategy. Having a professional looking website and EPK (Electronic Press Kit) is vital for potential fans to engage and learn more about you. All of your images and music should be easily streamed and downloadable. You can create an easy yet professional looking website at GoDaddy.com. It will cost a little money but it will make you and your band look like the professionals you are.

Once you have your website established, make sure to properly get it Search Engine Optimized (SEO). SEO allows users to easily find you on top search engines like Google and Bing. This makes it easy for fans to find your music just by typing in your song title or band name in search engines.
Setting up artist websites at Reverbnation, Soundcloud and DatPiff are essential for any musician. They extend your reach on the web and offer excellent marketing strategies to get your music out to the masses. These are great ways to establish an online presence. Always remember, the more you flood the internet with your content, the more you will get noticed!

4. Your Social Media Presence

 Setting up proper social media websites is also key in today’s every changing world. Make sure that you have the right images and music uploaded to your social networks for streaming and downloading.  If you don’t have it already, take time to set up a Facebook fan page, a Twitter and Instagram accounts. Make sure to be up to date with other social media channels such as Vine and implement your music and brand so the social media world can follow and keep in touch. This is one of the easiest and cost effective ways to market and get your music to a new audience.

 5. Your Online Visuals

Creating music videos for your tracks are essential in marketing your music. Having visuals to go along with your music is a great way to help fans connect visually with you. Setting up band YouTube and Vevo accounts is extremely important. Even if you don’t currently have the budget to to make a professional music video, setting up picture slides of you and your band with your music in the background will help get you noticed.
YouTube is a very powerful form of marketing, many top industry professionals utilize these websites for promoting with great results. The coolest thing is that YouTube and Vevo will actually pay you for putting advertisements on your vids. This is a great way to make money and get noticed! Applying the same videos to your social media and artists websites will also increase the demand for your music. Try to find innovative ways to catch the listeners attention and make viral videos.

6. Your Digital Distribution

  Nowadays it is really easy to distribute your music on all the major online retailers like iTunes, Rhapsody, Napster, etc. There are a ton of companies that will send your music to all these retailers at a cheap price. Our personal favorites are Mondotunes and CDBaby. Both have great rates and are well respected in the music industry. Many major labels like Sony and Universal use them to distribute their material digitally. This is an important step when it comes to marketing and getting your music next to the worlds largest digital distributors.

7. Your Advertising Campaigns

Setting up a Google Adwords account is a great way to learn how to market your music online. Google is very effiecient when it comes to putting targeted ads on websites. You can easily set up an ad campaign using keywords for your genre of music and demographics. You will have to invest some money but there is no better way to market your music on a small budget online. We have used Google Adwords with great results. It may take a little time to learn how to use it but check out the cool video below to help you learn more.

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Characteristics of Music

Music comes from the Ancient Greek muses, who were the nine goddesses of art and science.  Music actually began around 500 B.C. when Pythagoras experimented with acoustics and how math related to tones formed from plucking strings.  The main form of music during the Middle Ages was the Gregorian chant, named for Pope Gregory I.  This music was used in the Catholic Churches to enhance the services.  It consisted of a sacred Latin text sung by monks without instrumentation.  The chant is sung in a monophonic texture, which means there is only one line of music.  It has a free-flowing rhythm with little or no set beat.  The chants were originally all passed through oral tradition, but the chants became so numerous that the monks began to notate them.  

During the Renaissance Period, vocal music was still more important then instrumental.  A humanistic interest in language created a close relationship between words and music during this time.  Composers began to write music to give deeper meaning and emotion to the words in their songs.  They wrote in a style referred to as word painting, where the music and words combine to form a representation of poetic images.  Renaissance music is very emotional music, although to us it seems to be much calmer.  This is because the emotion is expressed in a balanced way, without extreme contrasts of dynamics, tone color, and rhythm.  Renaissance music has a mostly polyphonic texture, which means there are many lines of music being played at the same time.  As opposed to medieval times, this music has a more full sound, because the bass register was used, expanding the range of music to about four octaves.  Each line of melody has rhythmic independence, giving Renaissance music a more flowing rhythm and not a sharply defined beat.  The melodies are also easy to sing because they move along scales with few large leaps.

Unlike the previous two periods in music, the Baroque Age was a time of unity.  Most musical pieces of this time expressed one mood throughout the whole piece.  These moods were conveyed through a musical language with specific rhythms and melodic patterns.  One exception to the unified mood is vocal music.  There would be drastic changes in emotion, but they would still convey one mood for a long period in the piece.  One thing that helps the unity of mood was the continuity of rhythm of this time.  The rhythm is maintained throughout the entire piece creating a drive and feel of forward motion that goes uninterrupted.  Along with mood and rhythm, the melody is also continuous.  The melodies tend to be varied throughout the piece and many are elaborate and difficult to sing or remember.  They do not give an impression of balance and symmetry; many times a short opening phrase is followed by a longer one with a flow of rapid notes.  Dynamics are in the same category with the other characteristics; they are usually continuous.  The dynamics in Baroque music have a term called terraced dynamics.  This means that the dynamics usually stay the same for a while, but shift suddenly.  Much of the Baroque music was played in a polyphonic texture with multiple melodic lines.  People of this time believed that music could move the listener in more ways than one.  Opera was a major ideal for this belief.

The Classical Period of music differs from the Baroque Age in that is does not value the fluidity and smoothness of the individual elements of music.  There are contrasts of mood; many of the pieces in classical music will convey numerous moods.  The moods may be a gradual change or a sudden change, depending on the composer, but the composer always has a firm control.  Rhythm is another element that is varied in classical music.   Unlike the Baroque Age of fluid rhythm that rarely changes, classical composers used unexpected pauses, syncopations, and frequent changes in length of the notes.  The texture in classical music in mainly homophonic, meaning there is a main melody backed with a progression of chords, although, like the rhythm, it can also change unexpectedly.  The melodies in classical music have an easy tune to remember.  Although they may be complex compositions, there is usually a basic melody to follow.  They are often balanced and symmetrical with two phrases of the same length.  The widespread use of dynamic change comes from the composer’s interests in expressing their different layers of emotions.  The crescendo and decrescendo became increasingly used to get the audience more involved.  The gradual shift from using a piano instead of the harpsichord came from this desire to have more dynamic changes.  Unlike the harpsichord, the piano allows the player to adjust the dynamic by pressing harder or softer on the keys.  Most classical composers began to want to control their own music, not make music according to what someone else wanted.

Music in Society

Towards the end of the Middle Ages, about the 12th and 13th centuries, music began to move outside of the church.  French nobles called troubadours and trouveres were among the first to have written secular songs.  Music of this time was contained among the nobility, with court minstrels performing for them.  There were also wandering minstrels who would perform music and acrobatics in castles, taverns, and town squares.  These people were among the lowest social class, along with prostitutes and slaves, but they were important because they passed along information, since there were no newspapers.

Music was becoming more popular during this time.  Much of this was due to the invention of the printing press, which could circulate copies of music.  The number of composers also began to increase.  The Renaissance had the ideal of the “universal man” and believed that every educated person was to be trained in music.  Musicians still worked in the churches, courts, and towns.  The size of church choirs grew.  But unlike the Middle Ages where just a few soloists performed in the church, an entire male choir would now sing.  Music was still important in the church, although it has shifted more to the courts.  The kings, princes, and dukes were all fine composers.  One court alone might have had ten to sixty composers consisting of vocalists and instrumentalists.  There was a music director for each court that would compose and direct the court’s performers.  The town musicians would perform for civic processions, weddings, and religious services.  Musicians now had a higher status in society with better pay, and they wanted to be known and sought credit for their work.

During the eighteenth century, the economy began rising and people starting making more money. The prospering middle class could afford larger homes, nicer clothes and better food.  They also wanted aristocratic luxuries such as theatre, literature, and music.  The middle class had a great impact on music in the Classical Period.  The palace concerts were usually closed to the middle class, so public concerts were held.  Many people were not satisfied with always going to concerts to listen to music; they wanted it in their homes as well.  They wanted their children to take music lessons and play as well as the aristocratic children.  Many composers wrote music to appease the public and their music was often easy enough for amateur musicians to play 

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MUSIC HELP YOUR BRAIN

Music therapy has been practiced for decades as a way to treat neurological conditions from Parkinson's to Alzheimer's to anxiety and depression. Now, advances in neuroscience and brain imaging are revealing what's actually happening in the brain as patients listen to music or play instruments and why the therapy works. "It's been substantiated only in the last year or two that music therapy can help restore the loss of expressive language in patients with aphasia" following brain injury from stroke, says Oliver Sacks, the noted neurologist and professor at Columbia University, who explored the link between music and the brain in his recent book Musicophilia. Beyond improving movement and speech, he says, music can trigger the release of mood-altering brain chemicals and once-lost memories and emotions.

Actually playing music, which requires coordinating muscle movements and developing an ear for timing, can also bring dramatic results. The workshop uses traditional drum ensembles, in which groups of participants play percussion pieces, as one form of therapy for patients with a variety of cognitive and physical disabilities, including Parkinson's disease.
Indeed, research on the effects of music therapy in Parkinson's patients has found motor control to be better in those who participated in group music sessions—improvisation with pianos, drums, cymbals, and xylophones—than in people who underwent traditional physical therapy.
Because the area of the brain that processes music overlaps with speech networks, neurologists have found that a technique called melodic intonation therapy is effective at retraining patients to speak by transferring existing neuronal pathways or creating new ones.

We all like to pump up the tunes when we’re powering through our to-do lists, right? But when it comes to creative work, loud music may not be the best option. Even more than low noise levels, ambient noise apparently gets our creative juices flowing, and doesn’t put us off the way high levels of noise do. In high noise levels, however, our creative thinking is impaired because we’re overwhelmed and struggle to process information efficiently.

Research on the effects of music during exercise has been done for years. In 1911, an American researcher, Leonard Ayres, found that cyclists pedaled faster while listening to music than they did in silence.

This happens because listening to music can drown out our brain’s cries of fatigue. As our body realizes we’re tired and wants to stop exercising, it sends signals to the brain to stop for a break.

What have you noticed about how music affects you?

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