I’m an independent rapper and content creator. I’m also a tech nerd and spend countless hours researching and trying different apps that I don’t actually need and won’t actually use. However occasionally I discover apps that bring me and my career(s) a ton of value and that I use constantly. I’ll save you the time-wasting and share the 3 free apps created for music artists that I’ve recently started to use daily to give my music career super powers.
Spearheaded by rapper Joyner Lucas, Tully is an app that allows artists to play beats/instrumentals, write lyrics, and record vocal tracks all within one screen. The app includes a lot of nuanced functionality that really makes it shine (like the ability to loop and repeat any part of the beat while you’re working).
If you’re like me (or the old me) you’re listening to beats in one app and switching between another to write lyrics. If you’re really savvy you might be making your own scratch tracks using some basic recording app before hitting the studio. The Tully app does a great job at saving you time, adding convenience, and streamlining the pre-production process for rappers and songwriters.
I made an in-depth how to and review video for the Tully app that you can check out on YouTube.
If you’re successful (or going to be) as an artist in 2019 then you know that social media, streaming services, and playlists are where you should be focusing your attention to grow you fan base.
Are you tired of sorting through SoundCloud Pulse, Spotify for Artists, Apple Music for Artists, YouTube Studio, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and probably more just to track metric data on how well your marketing and promotional efforts are performing? So was I. Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a free app that let you access a snapshot of all of this data and then some? Wouldn’t it be even cooler if this app also helped you find and identify online influencers that are talking about you and playlists that are featuring your music? ForTunes does that.
Feature.fm is a self service advertising platform for the music industry. It’s a web app so it only runs in the browser but the mobile experience works just as well as most native apps. Running advertising campaigns does cost money of course but the amount of engagement and attention you can extract using their platform is greatly under priced in my opinion. It’s one of the best advertising options for independent artists with limited budgets (again, in my opinion, and I’m not a representative of or affiliate with Feature.fm in any way).
Signing up for the service is free, and even if you don’t use the advertising platform it includes some extra free features that I use constantly such as shareable and trackable landing pages that automatically route viewers to listen to your music in their favorite music services. Like this.
Although not an app specifically for music artists SendPulse is an amazing service for artists trying to build and communicate with an exclusive list of fans (which artists should be doing in 2019). Traditional email lists are becoming dated and less valuable but I’d argue that artists should still be building them, just with a more modern approach.
SendPulse allows artist to build a database of fans that opt in to receive communication from them and makes it easy to reach this audience with your messaging not just through email but also through SMS and social media simultaneously.