How to Become a Profitable Musician

Posted on September 16, 2020August 3, 2023 by Thomas Ferriere

Whether or not you’re a Musical Rebel Without a Cause, when it comes to something as important to your career as branding, you need to be a Man (or Woman) with a Plan.

These tips for aspiring indie artists can help you do just that.

1. Determine Your Artist Brand

Before you get down to the ABCs of Analytics, Business, and Contacts, you need to nail down an even more important existential question – who are you as an artist, anyway? Sugary pop stars, brooding jazz musicians, and experimental indie players all attract different audiences.

SEO-friendliness and search efficiency are the game’s name in online music marketing.

Distilling your identity into genres and easy search terms can make it easier for those interested in music like yours to find, listen to, and hopefully download and buy it. Ensure that your brand’s style, iconography, fonts, and other aesthetic emblems are consistent.

Embrace the word “brand.” It may initially offend your artistic sensibilities, but in today’s online age, “branding” can be the indie equivalent of your artistic “signature.” This is how people will identify you as “you” artistically. When figuring out the best way to sell music online, you need to ensure that you have a consistent musical and aesthetic style.

2. Establish an Online Presence

However, you first need to establish a solid online presence to sell music online. That means setting up social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and other major platforms and music-specific sites such as Spotify and SoundCloud.

To break free of the music business and make it on your own as an indie artist, however, you need to ensure that your online presence and the fiscal side of your work complement each other. For example, if you’re posting a picture of yourself working or a slice of life content, you might include a link to your main website, online store, and all. If you’re posting a song, you’ll want to include a link to Spotify, SoundCloud, iTunes, or other services that carry your music.

That way, if viewers and followers like what they see and hear, they can engage with even more of your content and perhaps even download and pay for it all the easier.

Make no mistake, that ease is key. In this social media-driven, media-saturated age, attention spans are shorter than ever. A hard or convoluted buying process may put some prospective buyers off. The easier you make it for people to access your music and links to downloads, the more likely they are to do so and pay you in the process.

They get a more pleasant user experience, and you get more conversions for your work – it’s a win-win.

3. Set up Payment Methods

The great artists of the past were often supported by patrons. Many of today’s YouTube stars are paid by Patreon, and the same goes for indie musicians. Allowing people to directly contribute to your work financially also allows you to more easily take commissions, be paid for gigs, and give you another potential revenue stream.

In fact, diversifying your revenue streams by setting up multiple methods of getting paid is one of the most important steps you can take. To remain an “indie” artist, you have to remain financially and artistically “independent.” Instead of some fat cats in the music business signing checks, monetizing your YouTube videos, putting out songs on Spotify and Soundcloud, setting up a Patreon, and selling merchandise online can help you retain that independence.

4. Constancy Is Key

One of the great mortal sins in online entertainment is languishing and falling behind trends. Again, attention spans are shorter today, and you don’t want people to forget about you. Therefore, you must do everything necessary to ensure that you stay on your fans’ minds.

As such, posting once or twice a week simply won’t cut it. Even posting once a day is too little. You should post at least a few times throughout the day, with fresh content each time.

Setting up themes for different days or times of day (i.e., “Throwback Thursday” posts of old videos and photos, and mixing “polished” songs with rawer, more “slice of life” content from your daily routine) along with announcements can help fill out your upload schedule.

5. Consider Online Concerts

One reason a YouTube channel is especially important for musicians is that it obviously opens the door to the possibility of you uploading content. However, with COVID silencing mass concerts for the immediate future, streamed concerts on YouTube have also become a popular alternative.

Even if you don’t directly monetize these, they can still be lucrative. Posting links to your website, Spotify, and other accounts, direct links to particular songs you’ll feature in your set, or even extra merchandise such as shirts can make it easier for fans to listen and support you.

Check out different platforms’ livestream options, since many offer different ways to monetize this emerging form of performing. For example, YouTube offers Superchat, where people can donate while watching, while both it and other sites allow advertisers to advertise on live streams, giving you yet another potential revenue stream.

Between quarantine restrictions and all the strife in the world today, people are looking for an escape as much as ever. That’s part of the joy of being a musician, being able to give people that respite – which is why you deserve a reprieve from financial worries as well.

These tips can help do just that and put you in a good position to monetize your music to get the payday you deserve.

Voice Marketing: How to Develop Voice Strategy for Your Music

Posted on July 31, 2020August 3, 2023 by Thomas Ferriere

It’s a Brave New Smarthome World, and Alexa’s here to tell us all about it! It is estimated that as many as 45 million voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa (and her sometimes awkwardly-less-kind Yandex comrade Alisa) are in use at present, and that number is only projected to grow as the technology becomes better, more affordable, and integrated into our lives.

They’re also becoming more integrated into the music scene (and not just with St. Louis Blues fan’s “Alexa Play Gloria!” posts last year). It’s also influencing the way we market music.

With that in mind, let’s look at how you can make Alexa and other home voice assistants work for you with a smarter music marketing strategy targeted at smart home usage.

1. Know Your Audience

First and foremost, you have to know your audience. What kind of smartphone users are they likely to be? What are they likely to ask Alexa and any other voice assistant for help, and what will they say?

We’ll get into the voice command aspect of things in a moment, but for now, it’s worth noting that different audiences are interested in different kinds of content – and you need to make it worthwhile. For example, U2 recorded behind-the-scenes commentary and released it with their music for Alexa. Fans could access both the songs and these extra goodies, naturally boosting the number of times they were likely to search and recommend fellow fan friends to do the same.

This is exactly the kind of strategy needed in today’s interconnected world. You need to know what your audience wants and how to deliver it to them in such a way that they, in turn, want to share it with others. That’s how you go viral, and it’s also how you score a bit better on your voice devices’ music marketing.

2. Advertising for Mom and Dad

One of the biggest obstacles to advertising online has always been the age barrier. Let’s face it – if you’re over 50, chances are you’re much more likely to feel social media, apps, and other aspects of the Internet are less intuitive than those who grew up with them.

That being said, voice assistants buck that trend largely due to the “voice” part. Even if “the Karens” in your life don’t know a thing about Instagram’s interface, anyone can say, “Hey, Alexa….”

That makes voice assistants much more accessible, making them such an attractive marketing choice for musicians looking to get their music out to people.

It also means that there’s nothing wrong from a songwriting and singing perspective with a little retro chic. Mom and Dad may not care about Billie Eilish, but they may sing along with Ringo every time it gets to “Billy Shears” on Sgt. Pepper, so keying into nostalgia trips and music business mainstays like that is a great way to get older audiences to listen to you.

3. Advertising for Shared Audiences

This, in turn, brings us to the all-important factor of finding a way to reach shared audiences. Smart homes are shared by the whole home, so you want to make sure that you appeal to as many people in a potential family of listeners as possible. That doesn’t mean you should go against your core demographic, of course, but it does mean that in crafting the words you use to market your songs, you should consider a wider audience and keep in mind how not just your fans but everyday people might use Alexa.

4. Get on Playlists

This brings us to playlists – you need to be on them at all costs. This is one of if not the biggest ways to score new listens and fans from people who may not have even heard of you in the first place but experienced you as part of a playlist.

Anonymous people across the country and globe may not know you, but they know “Soft Rock,” or “Pop Music,” or “Easy Listening,” and they search for it. We’ll get more into what and how they search in a moment, but for now, suffice it to say that appearing on these banner playlists that cover whole genres of music can be a great way to expose yourself to a new audience.

The same goes for Artist playlists that include others. Organically-Generated Playlists on “Artists Like Famous Artist X” are crucial for getting exposure, so do what you can to make your songs and search terms organic playlist-friendly.

5. Know How We Speak (and Type)

You’re likely to find differences in how websites tell you to list your search terms for your songs, and that makes sense. On the one hand, voice assistant technology is built around us speaking, which encourages search results that mirror the way we speak. You don’t speak like a robot, with choppy, imperfect grammar, but you may type like one when searching for something online.

Therein lies the dilemma – when using voice assistants, you want to target naturally-sounding phrases, but for online-based searches, you need to use SEO keywords, which sound more robotic.

6. Test Your Search Results in Yourself

Last but not least, you should always take the time to test your search results in yourself. That goes for any search engine, of course, but it is especially true regarding voice assistants. It’s one thing to have an idea in your mind of how you “should” appear on playlists, but quite another to actually make that work. You may think that you have worded things naturally, but you yourself say something quite different when requesting things from your voice assistant.

Try speaking to your voice assistant, note what works and what kind of grammatical structures and phrases you use, read about what others do, and model your search phrases accordingly.

Doing all this can give you the best chance of making your content more accessible in an era where new fans are a simple “Hey, Alexa…” away.

Spotify Music Marketing: Spotify Ad Studio for Musicians

Posted on July 31, 2020August 3, 2023 by Thomas Ferriere

It’s the age-old struggle of musicians everywhere – how to translate their skills with music into something that can put bread on the table and hopefully earn them a bit more. That’s part of the point of a platform like Spotify. Not only can you get your music out there less expensively and to a wider audience than ever before, but it also opens up all manner of advertising opportunities that can help pay the bills to keep you jamming for years to come.

Of course, there’s every chance you’ve heard this song and dance before and don’t feel inclined to hit “Repeat.” After all, it’s notoriously difficult to make it big as an artist, even with online mediums democratizing the process a bit more. You may not have to deal with sleazy managers and the gatekeepers of The Music Industry™, but that doesn’t mean that you can automatically get people to click on your songs and translate them into an artistic and advertising success.

That’s why you’ll want to take a look at this guide to doing just that and boost your advertising game on Spotify Ad Studio.

1. Understanding Ads and Metrics

Spotify has responded to criticisms from its creators that its platform is hard to advertise on with Ad Studio, a new extension on the site that allows you to advertise and gain extra money for your songs.

Of course, as with any launch, there were immediately some questions, namely how to keep track of clicks, listeners, and other vital metrics, which are important for crafting any strategy.

Spotify’s new setup allows marketing via several kinds of advertisements, including:

Display ads
Audio ads
Video ads
Brand podcasts
Sponsored playlists
Organic playlists

It also distinguishes between Pre-Exposed and Already-Extant Listeners to help you see if your band (and brand) is growing. The former category refers to Spotify listeners who listened to a song 28 days before they heard the ad. If they have, they qualify as a Listener, but if not, they are a New Listener – an important distinction to make as it might mean they’re new to the band and brand, which can help both track data on conversions made after that first exposure to both.

The conversion window is pretty wide at 14 days since nobody wants to interrupt a great song by clicking on an ad immediately. What’s more, we live in an age of replaying songs over and over if we really like them, so a user might replay a song a few times if they like it, developing a greater bond with the song and band before finally deciding hey, why not click that ad in the corner?

2. The Importance of Playlists

There’s no denying it – getting on playlists is one of the biggest and most significant steps you can take toward launching yourself toward Spotify stardom and starting to see some real money come back your way. According to Spotify’s Ad Studio Guide, users are likelier to continue listening to you if they add you to a playlist. That’s pretty common sense, but what really makes that significant is that users who streamed songs multiple times within that 14-day conversion window were twice as likely to continue listening to artists 30 days after they’d heard or seen the ad.

In short, if you can get added to people’s playlists, you can increase your chances of being heard (and multiple times at that) while simultaneously improving your conversion rate.

Getting listed on organic playlists by having music that meshes with Spotify’s algorithms for crafting them is already a great way to get free exposure, so this is where you should focus your efforts.

3. Interest-Based and Real-Time Targeting

There are two main advertising approaches on Spotify – interest and real-time context targeting.

The former is just what it sounds like, targeting people based on their interests. Every musician crafts an image and eventually a brand for themselves, and like molten metal filling a cast, fans often fit right into that mold.

Taylor Swift fans have a very different average age range and set of interests than, say your average Punk, Goth, or Grunge band.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t exceptions or that people can’t like more than one kind of music, but simply that the kind of bubbly, perky ads targeted at Tay-Tay’s Teenage Girl to Millennial Woman core demographic probably won’t score as well with Kanye West or Heavy Metal fans. Of course, if you already know some of your fans’ core interests from your own interactions with them or past marketing deals, this can help bolster your targeted ads all the more and help you and the company advertising boost your chances at scoring conversions.

Real-Time Targeting, by contrast, works to time ads to the optimal time of day. You may be more receptive to ads about coffee or yoga in the morning, for example, or different food products around lunch and dinner time. Timing is everything in art, and it’s true of marketing as well, making Real-Time Advertising on Spotify so critical to your overall music marketing efforts.

4. Target Your Audio Advertising

You’re a musician, so audio ads are where it’s at. Spotify offers guidelines on how to boost your audio advertising, with one of their most important pieces of advice to target the audio in your ads by considering your speaker.

Soke ads are better suited to different speakers. For example, if you’re running an ad for women’s clothing or beauty products, you definitely want a woman and not some creepy old man reading that ad.

The same goes for advertising your band in advertisements as well. Oftentimes, it’s best to use your voice and the familiarity of using the first-person. That said, you can also recruit friends or professionals to read different forms of the same ad for different regions.

For example, if you’re going to drop a new song or album or have tour dates to announce, getting people to read the advertisement in English, Spanish, French, German, Hebrew, Arabic, or whatever other language fits the region in question can help you connect that much more with your audience. Following these steps, you can up your promotional and advertiser money game on Spotify.

10 Best Online Tools for Small Business Marketing

Posted on May 14, 2020August 3, 2023 by Thomas Ferriere

Small businesses often struggle to compete against larger companies in their industries. The right marketing techniques help level the playing field.

Unfortunately, you may not have the budget for a skilled marketing agency. If you want to remain competitive, consider using the following 10 best online tools for small business marketing.

1. Google My Business

Every small business should take the time to verify and update its Google My Business (GMB) listing. Your GMB listing includes basic business details, such as your address, phone number, and website. It is also a powerful tool for helping to drive organic traffic to your website.

When Google detects local intent, Google uses GMB listings in Google Maps search results and search results for regular Google searches.

Managing your GMB account allows you to view and respond to customer reviews. Maintaining your online reputation helps improve your overall SEO score.

2. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the most used analytics platform for small businesses and entrepreneurs. It has a user-friendly dashboard that displays all your key metrics. You can also integrate your marketing goals to keep better track of your return on investment.

Before launching your next marketing campaign, make sure that you add the Google Analytics tracking code to your website. This allows Google to track metrics on your website, including bounce rates, referral sources, and visitor behavior.

Use the data available on Google Analytics to fine-tune your marketing efforts. If you are not getting the traffic you want, the insight on Google Analytics may help you find the problem.

3. MailChimp

Email marketing remains the most cost-effective type of online marketing, and MailChimp is one of the most affordable options. MailChimp is an email marketing platform with over 12 million customers. You can set up and manage simple or complex email marketing campaigns, helping to bring visitors back to your website.

MailChimp has multiple plans, including a free one for those with less than 2000 email subscribers. When you first start marketing, you are unlikely to surpass 2000 subscribers, which allows you to use the free plan to start marketing your products and services.

4. HubSpot

HubSpot is a comprehensive marketing platform that combines email marketing and advanced customer relationship management (CRM) solutions.

Compared to expensive CRM platforms like SalesForce, HubSpot provides an affordable way to manage client contact info. You can also use it as a replacement for MailChimp when you exceed the requirements of the free plan.

Along with email marketing and CRM tools, HubSpot includes a suite of marketing tools. You can use it to improve the SEO of your blog posts and web pages. It also has tools for creating landing pages, lead magnets, and more.

5. HootSuite

Social media is an important part of most marketing strategies. HootSuite makes it easier to manage your social media posts.

With HootSuite, you can schedule social media posts on popular platforms like Facebook and Twitter. This eliminates the need to generate a new post daily to maintain your posting schedule.

Scheduling the posts also makes it easier to coordinate with marketing campaigns. For example, you may want to time the release of a post on Facebook with a special offer on your website.

6. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo helps you understand more about your customers and competition. You can find out what posts people are reading in your industry and what types of content resonate most with your target audience.

Marketers frequently use BuzzSumo to discover trending topics and find subjects for blog posts. By choosing popular topics, your blog posts and marketing content may receive more views.

7. Canva

Adding images or infographics to your blog posts and web pages helps to break up the content, making it easier to scan. Unfortunately, stock images are often costly.

Canva provides a simple solution for generating high-quality graphics and infographics for your website’s marketing material. Canva has a free option to test it out before upgrading to a paid plan.

With the paid plan, you can create teams and gain access to additional images and editing options. Using a drag-and-drop interface, anyone can create beautiful graphics to make more visually appealing content.

8. Local Finder Website SEO AUDIT

Local Finder provides a free SEO tool for identifying issues that may hurt your overall search rankings.

After entering your website URL, Local Finder LLC will crawl your website and find broken links, redirects, duplicate content, and other issues that Google tends to penalize sites for. When the scan is complete, you will have a list of recommended fixes for boosting your SEO score.

Check your website HERE

9. Survey Monkey

Marketing campaigns require user research. You should understand your target audience to better tailor your marketing content to their needs. Surveys provide one of the easiest solutions for gaining more insight directly from your customers.

Survey Monkey is a platform for creating and analyzing user surveys. You can create simple or complex surveys and embed them on your website or in emails. Along with surveys, Survey Monkey helps you generate user testimonials and reviews.

10. Trello

The last tool on this list is a productivity and collaboration tool. Trello works on any device, allowing employees to easily share ideas and collaborate. You can link to any online documents from the Trello dashboard, create to-do lists, and manage complex projects.

Projects and lists are organized into boards. With one glance, you can get a complete overview of pending tasks for different projects. Project managers can quickly delegate tasks, request progress updates, and view submitted work.

Trello has a free plan and a paid business plan. The free plan allows you to create up to 10 team boards and includes simple task automation features. With the paid business plan, you can create unlimited boards and add unlimited users.

These are just 10 of the most used tools for small business marketing. If these tools do not meet your specific small business needs, dozens of others are at your disposal.