How I Think About Marketing Music
Thoughts from a former music publicist on what matters, what doesn't, and how to draw in fans.
How We Feel Marketing Music
From the moment I began playing in bands, I heard anti-marketing sentiment from my fellow artists. You probably have too, depending on your age. “I’m not good at the marketing stuff” or “the music should speak for itself” or “marketing is cheap and gross and bad, etc”. In rehearsal spaces in the early 00’s, these kinds of sentiments seemed ubiquitous.
In the last decade, a new generation of marketing-focused artists has emerged, empowered and intoxicated by the promise of democratized access to fans that the internet seems to have provided. Being a savvy marketer has gone from being seen as sleazy to being a point of pride for many independent musicians. We see some artists flex their abilities to rig the algorithm, learn new platforms, and rack up followers, breeding a new generation of musician/influencer hybrids. Some artists have sizable social media followings, many of which are heavily focused on their fashion, lifestyle, and tutorial videos, with their music serving almost as an afterthought. We’ve all seen countless independent artists make reel after reel asking people to follow and like their videos so they can trigger the algorithm and get more views, etc.
I’m not any kind of purist and I’m all in favor of mediums changing alongside evolving technology, but don’t we want to release music that people really listen to? Don’t we want the deep satisfaction of writing a song that becomes somebody’s favorite song? Maybe even lots of somebodies? Don’t we want our music to enrich the lives of others?
If releasing music people listen to is the goal, both marketing philosophies, the old school anti-sell-out philosophy and the new-school mentality of the marketing growth hacker, have missed the point.
My hope in writing this is to offer a third perspective, one that connects sharing the truest music of our hearts in the most honest and compelling way possible, to nurture and enrich your life as an artist, creatively and financially, so you can wake up every morning with purpose. My hope is that you feel deep satisfaction from having dedicated your life to music.
Before you get your tube socks in a scrunch, I know there have been musicians who created lucrative careers from scratch via social media. And independent artists certainly can get value from social media platforms. But there are also many, many artists—signed, well-funded artists with teams of professional experts spending money and precious, precious time trying to break on social media and failing miserably. People more experienced and better-funded than you are failing.
Fortunately, you have a superpower that isn’t part of their marketing plans. It’s free, but it’s fickle and it’s sitting between your lungs. I promise, this is a post about marketing.
But First, A Social Media Rant
Social media companies want us to believe that they’re the key to our music finding fans and growing. I personally hate the vertical video scroll and see it as a somewhat necessary evil for artists — you should have somewhere where people can easily find you and see what you’re about — but I also think it makes for a shitty artist discovery platform.
It’s a very poor top of your funnel, since users, your potential fans, aren’t specifically there to discover music, and are essentially there to get inundated with a fine-tuned algorithmic slurry designed specifically to get them to buy a Masterclass subscription and anti-stress supplements. I honestly can’t imagine a more difficult environment to connect with potential music fans.
At best, the vertical scroll pushes savvy artists to contort their creative offerings into a format that serves the needs of the platform, not the creative north of the project or the needs of fans. At worst, it’s a classic pay to play scheme, where artists pump money in, often not fully understanding how the ad platform works, don’t gain much by way of true engaged fans, and then blame themselves.
For The Love Of Music
I love marketing because I love music. I love discovering music that is just right for my ears, that makes me feel connected. I love, LOVE, learning the stories of the incredible artists who make the music I love, how it came to them, and learning about the often seemingly magical ways that my favorite records were born.
I became a music publicist by accident as a way to bring in extra cash for the recording studio I was hired to manage in the early 2010’s. You could do it too, anyone can. Being a music publicist is famously stressful and difficult, and like most stressful, difficult work, it’s pretty easy to break into since it’s a job almost nobody wants to do.
The decade I spent promoting records afforded me many wonderful friendships and experiences, including the invaluable opportunity to look under the hood at how music is promoted, which records get press, who is actually making money through their music, and most importantly, how. I also gained considerable experience in marketing by promoting my own services to the artists and labels I worked with, which in turn, made me a much more effective marketer of music.
During my years working as a publicist, I helped usher well over 500 records out into the world. I’ve worked with signed touring bands with big budgets and tiny little baby nobody bands with forty instagram followers. The bands who typically netted the most money weren’t the ones who received the most press or worked with the fanciest labels. They were the ones who did their own weird thing and inspired and nurtured cult-like communities of superfans.
Superfans
First, let’s define fans. Fans are people who love your music and listen to it. They go to your shows and buy your merch. They’re not your friends (though they can become your friends) and they’re not people who have heard of your band or show up to hang out because you’re playing on a cool bill. Fandom isn’t passive.
Superfans are the ones who show up to your shows repeatedly, share your music, buy your merch, and tell their friends about your music. They are the people who will drive the economic engine of your career in music. They deserve your respect and gratitude and consideration.
How To Get Superfans
In order to get superfans, your music needs to be able to connect deeply with people. The best ways to connect deeply with people are to inspire strong emotions like love, nostalgia, rage, defiance, joy. Stuff like that.
There’s no right or wrong way to make music, but if you don’t yet have superfans, your music probably needs to deliver more of whatever emotions it gives people or deliver its message more clearly.
This doesn’t necessarily mean play louder, sing more dramatically, but it does mean you must find the special place inside of you that your music comes from and be brave enough to fully embody the story, the meaning, the energy of your music in everything you do.
I believe fully that each artist has everything you need to create art that connects deeply with at least some people. I don’t care if you’ve never played a show in your life or your voice sounds like a dog’s butt. The only thing standing between you and bringing that magic into the world is a dedication to channeling what is truest for you in every aspect of your work and the courage to share it with minimal embellishment or distraction, over and over and over. The more you create something radically true, the easier your music will become to market.
Falling In Love With Music
We love music because it offers us a hit of distilled emotion. Even (perhaps especially) instrumental and abstract music communicates intense emotional meaning that has the power to transport us in countless ways and reconnect us to even our most tender and tucked-away feelings. It encourages us to dance, rage, swoon, strut, sulk, and express the full range of our humanity.
It’s impossible to create music that people connect to intensely unless it is produced from a place of your own intense feelings. Please read that again.
My first and most basic piece of advice when it comes to making marketable music is to love what you do and do what you love. I can already hear you rolling your eyes and thinking yes, duh obviously and skipping to the next part, but not so fast, you little smartypants. I have met hundreds of musicians who are in projects, motivated largely by the fact that they think the project is viable or making a kind of music that they think likable. I’d go as far as to say that I come across that more often than I do musicians who are deeply truly madly in love with what they’re creating.
I’m not saying necessarily that you need to burn your current project to the ground, but a lot of times projects veer away from their true creative north in pursuit of critical acclaim, fitting into a scene, hopes of making it, etc. Many times the joy can be sucked out of a project slowly over years - death by a thousand cuts style.
Regardless of who your project is made up of, the secret ingredient to getting you out of your creative rut, off the “how am I going to make it!” hamster wheel, and into the hearts of fans, is joy, or as we sometimes call it in music, play.
Falling in love with the music that the muse/universe/god whatever wants to send through you is one of the greatest joys I believe we can experience as humans and setting that as your very first marketing goal will set you up for a long, and deeply satisfying artist journey. The day to day of how you conduct your business won’t deplete you as much, and your commitment to your own creative source can act as your guiding light when you face bumps in the road, tough decisions, creative ruts, and disappointments.
True Passion Is Easy To Market
The whole thing of making music you love may sound like something you should write on a pillow, but this is the best marketing advice I can give you. Making music you truly madly deeply love has many benefits, here are a few of them:
A Real Story
Part of being a professional musician is showing up and presenting your work, whether it’s on stage or in an interview or in video content of one kind or another. Having a strong emotional connection to your work will mean that you can show up and be the person who represents your music with sincere confidence because you’re deeply connected to its value. This will save you from feeling like you have to make up a persona because all you’ll have to do is show up and talk about something that makes you genuinely excited. “I love records with these tones and samples, so I wanted to use some of my favorites” etc. The more fun you have the better. Nothing is more gratifying for fans than witnessing the artists they love sharing how they pulled off making something they delight in. Aim to take so much pleasure in what you’re making that you feel like you’re getting away with something every time you release music.
Relatability
If your music is coming from a sincere place and you’re generous enough with helping your fans find their way into your music (more on that later) it will be relatable and people will use your music again and again to process their own experiences and feelings. Your sincerity will nurture your fans’ trust in you as someone who can speak to and furnish their lives with the excellent concentrated human emotion juice you create. Emotion juice. Wow, sorry.
Knowing Your Fans
If what you make is deeply connected to your truest self, it certainly wont’ be for everyone, but the job of finding and relating to fans gets much easier when you just need to find the other freaks like you. Where are they? I don’t know. Where do you go? What do they like? I don’t know, what do you like?
Lighting The Way
Good music marketing helps fans find inroads they can take to better understand and appreciate a record. I remember when Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky came out, a much softer, more subdued record after the spacetime-destroying A Ghost Is Born. On the first listen, I thought to myself, wow what a boring Wilco record. But some weeks later I learned that it was written after the death of Jeff Tweedy’s mom. I didn’t even read an interview or a press release or anything, I just absorbed that fact and went back to listen again. Because I knew what I was listening for, I had a completely different experience of the record. Good music marketing has the ability to help listeners find their way into the music, to understand it and to access the hidden treasures it offers.
Deeply Connected
Good marketing gives customers a compelling and honest idea of the experience they’ll have with the thing they’re being sold. It has to be grounded in the true offering of whatever is being marketed.
Music marketing of any kind can be transcendent when it grows naturally out of what the music offers. Is your music about freedom? Train hop across the country busking. Share your experience with your fans by posting daily stories of your travels that you’ve written on diner napkins. Ask members of your mailing list to meet you for coffee in different cities.
Is your music about taking down the system? Set up your PA outside an oil company’s shareholder meeting, scream as loud as you can and get arrested. Bring your music out of phones and into real life (and then, honestly, back into phones) but help people understand how your music is a character in this world. Help it take up space in ways that are meaningful and deeply connected to your message.
I hope these perspectives are helpful. I always welcome questions, challenges, gripes, and hugs in the comments!
Hope you all have a great weekend,
Cass
Absolutely. We need artists to bring us cool new things to try, even if we don’t get it at first or it isn’t for us. Social media rewards artists for staying put and essentially taking orders from the algorithm. It’s some dystopian shit.
This is spot on. Especially the part about “falling in love with music”. I want to add something from my experience to it: As soon as you have just a tiny bit of success on social media, because you have been at the right place at the right time, you’re in danger to step into a trap: you start having your audience in mind and start asking yourself questions like “Will they like it? What do they want?” and slowly but steady you lose connection to what YOU love and start doing what THEY love. And then you become part of the machine.