Welcome to the biggest open ended question ever! For the sake of putting some stakes in the ground, lets make a broad definition of what we mean here: Promoting music is the process of promoting and selling products and services. It is pretty plain that if noone knows about you and your music, it will be very difficult get established. Marketing these days is a vast ever evolving topic. Some possible marketing channels include printed materials (newspapers and magazines), blogs, social networking, posting videos on a dedicated website, pay-per-click, joint ventures and events, and signage. With so many options available today such as affiliate marketing, competitions, cost per action, engagements, Facebook, Iphone Apps, podcasts, search engine optimization, Twitter and Video marketing one has to wonder where it will all end?…. What is the very best starting point? When you start to think about your music and the best way to promote it, what methods come to mind ? Preparing a “press kit” before you have established yourself as an artist is a complete and utter waste of time. There is always a group of “front line” fans, the ones who live, sleep and breathe your music; this is a group to promote your music to. Your niche has a specific group of buisness people around it. And It makes the answer for that! And the best way to promote yourself to these people is to become part of their conversation and engage with them. OK, consequently you want to know how to endorse music, but why would you want to market physically to these people? While just starting, one must try to direct their sermon towards the choir, trying to convince those people who already want to see you succeed. Think about people you are familiar with that love music, but only those that live and breathe a certain style of music. They are in the front line of the gig, they wear like the artists they akin to, they are in streak to catch their shirt autographed, they are in forums discussing….is that clear? In my own experience, the best way to get started is to get this first line of people interested. If you try to get people interested who are occasional music consumers or even those who hardly ever consume music (my mum for example), getting people to become fans and word-of-mouth marketers can be very difficult. As an alternative, focuses on those in the facade line, once these public are into your harmony, you can then move up the hierarchy to more standard music clients. Not only do you want to advertise yourself to the front line of promoters and fans, you also wat to promote your music to a group called the Godfathers. Those who control various media properties and media channels, known as the Godfathers, need content/talent in order to make money – ie they have a vested interest in investing in and nurturing talent.. With these citizens on your side, they will endorse your music to their “channels” and this serves three main purposes: You get experience You get reliability by being featured on “professional” looking media channels. You get the music industry (those who have businesses that make money via music and artists) talking about you – others may try to contact you, once they’ve seen other business owners working with you…. So dont waste time trying to promote music to people who dont care. Moving step by step to success is a matter of starting small and staying focused.
Lots of good reading here, thanks! I was searching on bing when I found your post, I’m going to add your feed to Google Reader, I look forward to more from you.