The problem with using the Internet to promote yourself and your new musical masterpiece is the millions on artists/bands that are doing exactly the same thing. So to start off with try to make your presence known, it’s ok to use sites such as MySpace to promote your music like many other do, but, you still need more to help you on your way, as we have mentioned in an earlier post you need to choose the right OMD site to host your music, and believe me there are far too many to choose from.
So after you have your OMD (Online Music Distribution) website hosting your music, where do you go from there, simple really, now you need to promote your music even more, we do highly recommend that you start your own “official” website, there are plenty of free hosts out there but to stand any real chance for quality we would recommend paid hosting such as EvoHosting or Streamline.net, two sites that we have and are still using, with no real problems.
Now what?
Well, you have got to get out there and promote yourselves over the net, join music based forums such as our very own Indie Music Forums and the extremely popular IndieHangout to post about your new releases and about yourselves and your music, this way you can get feedback on your music from other artists and the general public using the forums.
Build a fan base!
We have found that ReverbNation is great for building a loyal fan base, you can even limit tracks so that fans can only stream and/or download certain tracks, ReverbNation also offers a FanReach system that enable you to keep in touch with fans via email and much more.
Selling your CDS!
Now this is a tricky one, sometimes it just doesn’t matter how great your music is, it just won’t sell if it’s not in the right place, so, we would recommend getting your CD listed at CDBaby, they will send your music out to sites such as iTunes, Napster, PayPlay and stack more, this will seriously help you promote your music that bit further to the masses, especially with iTunes, but, remember some genres of music do sell better than others and your sales do depend on your genre.
Keep Promoting Yourself
Never give up promoting your music and your band, keep your fans up to date even if you haven’t released anything for a while, let them know what you are working on or any future projects that you have on the way, even if you have a rough unfinished track let your fans hear it and get some feedback, fans love to be part of the process of your music making abilities.
Start an “official” blog to keep everyone on the net up to date, get yourself a free blog at sites such as Blogger or the very popular Wordpress. Ping your posts to the mass of RSS services on the net to let even more people stumble onto your works of art, every little helps.
Create your own “official” merchandise to sell on your website or at venues you may play, always make sure they have your own touch with a unique logo, moto etc so that when people walk around in one of your T-Shirts everyone can see your info clearly and may even get home and look you up on the net, sometimes even a good idea to add your web address on there somewhere, just to help them on their way ;)
Use sites such as CafePress and/or Zazzle for your merchandise as only items needed are produced and purchasing your own items you usually get a discount, so that’s even better for promo work at venues, or even getting a T-Shirt for yourself and walking around it it. We would personally recommend Zazzle as everything is more more customizable for you and anyone purchasing your “merch”, you’ll also find that the top bands such as Black Eyed Peas, The Who and Rob Zombie etc use Zazzle so it can’t be bad ;)
Promote, promote, promote! Never give up, even if you play venues sell your CDs, Merchandise etc to more people.
