At the time of writing this article Ed Sheeran has spent an astonishing 54 weeks in the UK singles chart with the song Thinking Out Loud. In doing so he’s accrued 980,000 sales and 1.6 million streams. Some hefty numbers. One of the reasons for this longevity is the ‘long term’ approach applied to the marketing of his music.
The track charted the week the album came out (where it was purchased and bought by fans), but was only released and promoted as a single to non fans several months later. Factors such as his UK tour, a promotional video and some time later an appearance on the UK X Factor all helped create sustained interest and a slow climb to the top of the UK charts. And it’s been hanging around for months since then!
So, as we move towards a world of streaming, your emphasis shouldn’t be on a ‘first week flurry’ of marketing activity. You should be thinking about how to create sustained listening over time which highlights your music and gets people drawn to your streaming catalogue. Yes, you’ll need to promote your music around release time but you’ll need to be thinking of ways to sustain interest in your music. New videos for old songs would be such an example for an independent artist such as yourself. It’s been a couple of months since my own album release and I’m about to start creating a video for an album track just to remind people that it’s out there and can be streamed or purchased.
As we move forward into the streaming age the emphasis for artists will be to get their music featured on influential playlists and to encourage people to add it to their personal playlists where its continued consumption over time will continue to generate revenue.
Got any questions about this post or how you can better market yourself?
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60 Second Music Marketing 