Guerrilla Promotion; Building Better MI Relationships

Contacting music industry professionals can be easy if you have the right approach. Unfortunately, many independent artists do not use the right approach and have limited success. The Guerrilla Promotion tips in this post are designed to help musicians that find it difficult to get in touch with or to work with music industry professionals. If you find yourself leaving a lot of message that don’t get returned, or cant get people on the phone, this article may help.

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Music Promotion Tip: Create An Encyclopedia of Your Music Niche

In the past I have touched on the idea that you need to be a great source of information for your fans to have them coming back day after day. But recently I’ve come up with a new way to think about this idea to make things a bit more clear for you.

This is where the “Encyclopedia” concept comes in, because that word conjures up positive images in the mind of your fans right away.

Setting this up is simple…

You would have your own website with information about what you are up to, and then have another section called something like…

“The Death Metal Encyclopedia – Everything Your Need to Know About Everything!”

…or whatever kind of music that you play.

In this section you would make it your business to create the definitive guide to your music niche, and in the process you will start to build up a loyal following of aficionados who find your site through multiple google rankings. They will start to rely on you to keep them up to date with all the latest information.

You can keep track of your music news using the Google Music Alerts method that I talked about in a recent post.

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A Lesson in Music Industry Success Prevention.

If your ship came in, would you be smart and frugal enough to ship out on it or simply shit on it? Let’s keep in mind how hard it is to monetize music these days…

If a recording artist could invest $1000 to make between $10K and $70K in 4 months, would he turn it down? Even if you could invest $1000 for the following exposure for your debut CD, with no real guesstimates on download sales, would you turn it down?

Here’s one recording artist who did.

What would you have done if such an offer, like the one briefly described above, dropped out of the sky nine months after you:

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The Virtual Tour, Part I (OR: How Your Band Can Tour the World from Your Living Room)

A virtual music tour is similar to a traditional tour in that the band/musicians make several appearances, and in several locations, in an attempt to promote and sell their music. On a traditional tour, musicians make contact with clubs, bars or other suitable venues (suitable venues: house parties, small music festivals, state fairs, and Geri’s Bat Mitzvah) to book live shows. They then travel to each city, spend time at each location playing their music and possibly spending time with the audience in an effort to sell their music and merchandise. Many musicians will agree, for the effort and expense involved, touring and playing live doesn’t sell many CD’s or music downloads. (Although it can be a heck of a lot of fun, if you have the money.)

A virtual tour is very similar to the traditional live tour. The biggest difference being, there are no extensive travel, no travel related expenses, no need to try to figure out how to take 2, 6, or 12 weeks off work. Virtual tours are accomplished 100 percent over the Internet.

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Where the Music Industry Went Wrong: Why Indie Musicians Are Struggling to Sell Their Music

There are three reasons why local, indie musicians are not achieving the levels of success they desire in the music industry. In this article, I will give a short overview of these three reasons and the role the music industry has played. If you are an indie artist and you are struggling to sell your music, if you are struggling to get promotion and publicity, then it is probably because of at least one of these three reasons.

Three Reasons why most indie musicians are struggling to sell their music:
Reason # 1. Indie musicians have forgotten or are not aware of, the true value and power of music.

Reason # 2. Indie musicians do not communicate the value of their music or they do so poorly. This reason aims at how musicians market and promote their music. This reason also explains why most musicians are not able to network effectively at industry events and get the attention of music executives and the press. I will discuss this reason in a later article in this series.

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Facebook Has Fan Pages: Use Them!

Here at Music Without Labels & Beat-Play, LLC we currently represent 320 independent musicians, offering free promotion. There are currently way too many artists today not utilizing social media the right way to promote their music. Facebook has had fan pages for close to 2 years now so don’t represent your band under a “personal” profile. Take a look at the reasons why it is not beneficial to build your music recognition on Facebook through a personal page.

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BandPages Turn Facebook into a Viable Home for Musicians

RootMusic is proud to announce the launch of BandPage Plus, an extended version of the BandPage Basic tool that launched last month with great success. BandPage Plus enables bands to personalize their BandPage so the look and feel of their Facebook presence matches their music and individual style. By utilizing BandPage Plus musicians can easily create a fan page that includes the option to upload a custom banner and edit the background and text colors via a simple visual editor.

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Does posting up flyers really get people to go to shows?

Remember the first time you ever put up flyers for a show? I’ll bet you were probably pretty excited.

I know I was. I felt that if we put up enough flyers that even if half of one percent of all the people who saw the flyer went to the show then we’d be pack the venue and be well on our way to being famous within a few months. So we posted flyers everywhere. Big ones. Eye catching flyers that everyone would take notice of. How could it not work?! We were going to be huge.

So what happened? All our friends showed up for the first couple of shows and we had a great time. So we kept putting up flyers. More, bigger, better etc. After a while we realized that we weren’t getting anyone coming to our shows from our flyers, so we started to lose interest in putting them up. There were conflicting opinions as to whether or not they served any purpose. We never really got the whole thing worked out.

So what’s the deal? Do flyers work or not?

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