Promotion: Thoughts and Experiences

Sadly, in today's world to get your music heard it is insufficient to just create music that you believe has a market, as with digitalisation and tools and knowledge to produce music now being widely available, the sheer amount of new music and artists resulted in overwhelming supply versus nearly unchanged levels of demand. Most importantly, it has become ever so difficult to outroar a pool of screaming musicians.

I have always been too submissive to be a good salesperson. I always use the excuse that the only thing I can do acceptably well is producing, I am not particularly good at writing or performing, let alone promotion. On one hand, this is a good thing, as I can focus on what I enjoy doing the most, challenge myself in what I want to improve in while retaining the joy of creating something out of nothing, without the weight of expectations on my shoulders. On the other hand, you might start wondering what is music without an audience, let alone the fact that it is an expensive hobby! I am not even going to bring up the shameful memories of how much I have spent on guitars (multiplied by the sets of strings they require) while being a mediocre guitarist, if that, but you also have to pay for subscriptions to the distributor, cloud storage, etc, so it would be nice if you could recoup some of that expenditure, right?

So your options are: get out there, gig, network on repeat, keep spreading the word, do music videos, content that people interact with and promote, promote, promote. Again, I am going to start with my excuses here: gigging - you need a band, no one is interested in a guy with an acoustic guitar unless your name is Ed Sheeran. Go ahead, find bandmates, that are reliable, can play their instruments, willing to learn your songs and happy to coordinate rehearsal sessions. In London, while likley most of you have full time jobs. Far from impossible, I know, perhaps in the future. Networking I am not even going to elaborate much, let's just say I am not the most extravert of persons when it comes to these things. Spreading the word - I am not only a useless sales person, but actually dislike the idea of selling to a degree.

I think that in today's world my music style has become somewhat underground, which in a way is fortunate, as it's not the mainstream where everyone wants to stand out, but more of a niche in the sense that there likely are established channels and forums around where my audience gathers, it is just the case of finding them and making a connection. Me thinks. Ok, for this, obviously you need to do your homework, research before you go and find the channel that's fit for your music. And then promote.

What have I done? For my first three releases, including "Reach into your Soul", I have only pushed promotions out via my social media platforms, whereas for “Eternal Allies” I did a promo campaign, which also involved paid promotions via SubmitHub and Musosoup. They both have pros and cons, and here are my observations: 

SubmitHub lets you chose who you want to submit your music to (on a per song basis); you can chose by category (as in label, playlist curator, etc.) genre, location, ratings and many more. You can send a song for their consideration for around £1-3 each which is not a bad deal, considering they also have to give you written feedback if you don't hit the mark. I submitted 2-3 songs to around 15-17 curators/radios in total, of which 1 aired one of my songs on their online radio once. Still not bad if you are looking at the success rate, plus some of the feedback I received was definitely genuine and constructive. In terms of ROI? Not so sure. I would like to emphasise however, that I am aware of the quality of my work not being on the higher end of the scale and I aim to remain objective at all times, so I am not blaming the service or the curators. At the end of the day they are there to judge your music, right? If they don't like it, it's likely you are not doing something right.

I also had a crack at Musosoup, which works somewhat differently from SubmitHub, as you submit an album, they help you create a Q&A-based press release using a form, then push it out to content creators based on your preferences in terms of genre, channel (i.e. whether you are looking for reviews, Instagram or Facebook promos, etc.) and so on. Then you sit and wait for offers to come in. And they do. I received around 20-25 in a few weeks' time, ranging from around £3-5 to around £50, depending on the size of their audience, the effort required for the campaign (e.g. review of 500 words). I have opted mainly for blog reviews and a few social media promos, which were all done to a good standard, but I still found these to very much be blanket marketing; to me it seemed as though they would make an offer to technically anyone, who matches their wider genre and the aforementioned preferences. It would make sense as to them making an offer doesn’t cost anything, plus to get to this stage you would have paid a nominal fee of around £23 to Musosoup - so there is some filtering in place. The key point is though, that unless you are talking of social media promos, where it is easier to see the size of a given channel's audience, it is rather difficult to measure exposure of these reviews and consequently the ROI as well. Nevertheless, my preference is still blogs as opposed to social media (I am old school, I know) as I think that although the content shared on social media might reach a wider audience, blogs (well, most of them) tend to place more emphasis on generating quality content to keep their audience engaged and differentiate themselves from others. Quality over quantity. Also, it is now just as easy to buy followers on social media (even I received offers whereby I could buy 5000 listens for $5), therefore, somewhat contradictory to my previous point, measuring actual audience can be just as much of a guesswork as Elon Musk measuring the non-bot part of the Twitter-community.

All in all, I spent around £150 for the promotion of “Eternal Allies” - any traction? I am afraid not much, or at least no measurable change in number of listeners or streams. If anything, the initial listening stats were lower than those of “Lockdown EP” and “Reach into your Soul.” That's not to say that the campaign has been throwing good money after bad, but to me clearly shows why targeted marketing is so vital. I suppose one explanation is that my contacts on social media have now got used to the fact that I have started releasing music and lost interest by now as the novelty value has faded, but the promo campaign failed to bring in enough new listeners to make up their numbers. Just to illustrate, my own social media platforms have an audience of around 600 people. Also, I think I am a particularly complicated case here, as I too prefer targeted marketing (SubmitHub) but at the same time would like my album treated as a whole, rather than having to pitch individual songs. Is there a platform that combines the two? I shall be sure to write about it if I find one! 

So what will I do next time round? Likely something similar, if anything at all, perhaps even more targeted. As for gigging, networking and the rest? Errm, with a few exceptions, perhaps not this time, I am afraid. Being a one-man-band, my main focus for now will probably remain on trying to improve the quality of my music first and foremost. At least the risk of me ever having to worry about expectations remains incredibly low and I can continue to enjoy the freedom of being able to just create music.