Tuning Your Sound

Marketing is the First Part

So, you finally decided to start making music right out of the comfort of your own home, great! However, I’m imagining you have a lot of questions, like where do I post my music? What will get people to listen to my songs? When should I do a live performance? Why do I need a social media presence? First of all, slow down. There’s a lot to cover if you want to become a successful musician with a die-hard fan base. Before you start trying to push your music to the masses, make sure you understand your intentions and back it up with a strategy.

What’s Your Goal?

Having a goal to aim for is always good to benchmark your achievements and have something to aim for in your process. A good goal is within reasonable parameters and can be measured with some metric. If it’s too hard, you might feel discouraged from even trying to achieve it. If it’s too easy, you won’t see any growth from it. As for measurement, you can never really know if you met your goal if there’s no solid evidence. Adding specific measurements can also prevent you from changing the meaning of success, or “moving the goal posts around.”

The answer to “what’s your goal?” initially sounds kind of obvious: you want people to listen to your music. It’s a nice goal to have but not a lot to work with. There are a lot of outstanding questions about the goal that might confuse or frustrate you as you work towards it. So, let’s break it down further. Maybe your goal is to get a specific number of listeners on a platform. Or, you want a specific number of followers. The idea here is specifics: “I want 20 followers by the end of the month” or “I want 50 unique listeners for my songs.” With these goals in mind, we can start planning the strategy.

Imagine Your Buyer

Maintaining the thought about listeners, you should consider who you want listening to your music. Obviously, how are you supposed to know how to cater to your audience if you don’t know who they are? The best marketing plans come with what’s known as a buyer persona; a representation of your ideal buyer. In this case, it’s someone who you can imagine would be interested in your music or you as a musician.

Think about the person who’s going to listen to your music. How old are they? Where are they from? What platform are they using? What social media platforms are they on, if any? Answering some of these questions might come easier than others. However, answering them all can help you gain insight into what your buyers are interested in that can help you figure out how to reach them. One way to help you answer these questions is finding where you belong on the musical spectrum.

Define Your Sound

If you’ve been obsessed with music for as long as me, then you know all about genres. For those who need a refresher, genres are how music is differentiated and put into groups based on musical similarities and significances. For example, pop, rock, and rap are all genres of music. You can probably even hear what all those genres sound like. Genres further diversify into sub-genres like pop-punk or K-pop. Genres are like musical markets: there are people looking for a specific style or type of music. Identifying with a genre allows you to reach those markets and find people who would love your music based on your style.

Now Comes the Fun Part

At this point, you set your goal to reach and identified who you’re trying to reach with your music. You’re off to an amazing start. It’s important to have a good foundation for your marketing so you can build off it when you do things like post on social media, interact with your fans, promote new releases, and more. We got all the preparation done, now we can start working on the execution and promoting your sound.

References

Scott, D. M. (2022). The new rules of marketing & PR : how to use content marketing, podcasting, social media, AI, live video, and newsjacking to reach buyers directly (Eighth Edition). Wiley.