In this video, I show you The 10 Music Marketing Strategies You’ll Ever Need in 2021.

The way in which you market your music in 2021 is a little different than it was in 2020.  you see each year the game changes, and you need to be able to adapt, learn  and apply those changes systemically.

So, what we’ve done is  recorded a live stream video for the new strategies in 2021 and have also written a blog post for context simply outlining but those 10 strategies are.

We hope you enjoy it and feel free to leave any comments below this article.

Decide Whether You Are Looking To Make Money With Your Music?

The first thing you need to do is decide that you actually want to make money with your music, which sounds really strange doesn’t it?  However, once you understand that the steps and the actions you take have a dramatic affect on both you and your music, you’ll start to understand why we suggest making a decision today. 

The vast majority of musicians are quite fuzzy about this and don’t really know which side of the fence they are on when it comes to their music. But, It’s so important to decide if this is something you want to do so that the actions going forward shape and craft your music marketing strategy.

Define Your Audience

Now, when we say define your audience you first need to find out exactly which platform they are on.

You can do this in a number of ways,  but the first one we suggest is heading over to the Instagram platform and entering the genre hashtag that your music applies to. This would then give you a great idea of just how many people are on this platform talking about your genre of music.

It’s a lot harder to do this on platforms like Twitter since they don’t use hashtags in the same way,  but what you could do do is type in in two to three major artists in your genre of music and see how much engagement they are receiving on Twitter. 

Unfortunately, Twitter doesn’t supply us with the age range of our followers, but Instagram does. In order to get hold of these stats  you would need to change your Instagram account to a business account which is free to do. Once you have changed it over to a business account,  you’ll be able to click on the insights button on your mobile app,  click on see audiences and from there you should be able to see the age range of your fanbase or followers. 

Note: You will also be able to see the gender of your audience too!

Once you have this information you are now in the position to craft your content for this demographic which is so important.

Once you start posting content on social media, the idea then is to communicate with your followers by replying to your comments and in turn clicking on their profile,  going into their feed and leaving comments on their posts.

If you receive several comments of people liking your music,  this is the best time to go into your direct messages and either communicate with them on there by leaving a text comment or better still leave a voice message which can be done on both Instagram and Twitter.

Decide Which Social Media Platform You Will Focus On

It’s never easy trying to decide which social media platform used to focus on.  it might seem like a straightforward choice at first, but what you need to consider is which platform are the majority of your fans on and the one that you’re using at the moment.  Is that getting enough engagement?

If it falls into both these camps and you’re good to go. However if it doesn’t, you have a decision to make.

I will always recommend focusing 90-95% of your time on one platform. This is because so many of us spread ourselves too thin that we end up doing a bad job and all of them. However, if you learn to focus that amount of time I’m just one platform your start reaping the benefits.

Analyse the Market

Now,  when we say analyse the market will try not to be too technical here. It’s simply a case of running a poll on Instagram stories or on Twitter to find out which genre of music your fans are listening to.

This by no way means  that you have to change the genre of music that you make,  but it is a good idea to know and understand the different types of genre music that your fans are in too. Even though you’re not making this music yourself,  it doesn’t stop you from sharing really cool videos or articles from musicians within a genre.

This will also help you figure out exactly where you fit in. This will probably apply to the new musicians out there.

Create an Action Plan

Start setting some music goals 

What are you looking to achieve with your music in 2021? This is probably the best place to start before you start writing down your goals. 

You might want to achieve a certain amount of Spotify streams,  apple streams,  or even a certain amount of downloads on websites like Bandcamp? Whatever it is that you are looking to achieve you need to be crystal clear.

The next thing you need to think about is now you know what you’re looking to achieve how are you going to go about achieving it?

Now, this comes back to my original point of making a decision,  because whatever decision you decide to make will change your actions going forward.  this will vary from the amount of time you want to spend doing this, when you are going to do this (for example are you going to give up some of your weekend?). These are questions you need to ask because if you’re not clear with them it’s going to be very hard to achieve them.

You also need to think about your action plan from a monthly perspective.  Are you looking to release a track every month if that’s the case you need to plan for it by placing them into monthly chunks. So, the idea is as soon as you come out of launching a track you go into launching another one.  

Being organised and having some sort of launch structure will really help with your action plan. If you haven’t got one already I recommend you download our music release checklist.  This ensures that you don’t forget anything and that you do things at the right time while you’re in the process of producing and releasing your next track.

Also, as part of your music marketing strategy in 2021, you’ll probably need to increase the amount of PR, advertising, content curation, touring, social media posting and also networking.

You won’t go into too much detail within this article but it is recommended that you use a spreadsheet to keep track of everything.

Build a Community Around You & Your Music

As you probably realise,  with the emergence of streaming platforms your music is more of a commodity than it used to be. With the sheer amount of songs and tracks uploaded to the streaming platforms daily, it is extremely hard to be unique and stand out from the crowd.

For that reason, we recommend building a community around both you and your music. This might sound like quite a difficult thing to do but it’s actually very simple.

The idea is to build an asset that is likely to be a website that you own where you send potential and existing fans. From there we recommend getting them to sign up to your email list that allows you the ability to communicate with them away from the social media platforms.

With so many accounts being banned on a daily basis by the social media platforms,  losing access to your followers would have a massive effect and how you could actually communicate with your followers or fans. 

Then, once you’re able to  start collecting names on emails you’ll be able to communicate with your fan email list on a weekly basis.

This means every time you upload something to YouTube or if you have a new track launch or even going into the studio you’ll be able to update them with the press of a button.

Go LIVE

There’s no better music marketing strategy in 2021 than going live. Of course, performing in venues it’s quite difficult at the moment for obvious reasons. but we would recommend and that you go live on platforms like YouTube,  Facebook,  Instagram, and Twitter so you’re able to build an audience until you can go live in a physical venue.

The most important thing about going live is the fact that you can engage and interact with your fans in real-time. You also have the ability to ask and answer questions in real-time too. 

This means you’re able to get to know your fans on a much deeper level than you ever would have been able to simply just posting a few text tweets or post on Instagram. This is very powerful!

The other added benefit about going live online is the fact that it sends a notification to all the people that follow you or have subscribed that you are actually live.

If you have subscribers on YouTube they will either receive a notification or the next time they log on to YouTube there’s a strong possibility that they will see either a reminder or your video replay.