With so much music for free on Spotify and YouTube these platforms for music discovery are becoming platforms for free consumption. People can easily listen to all your music  without ever buying anything.  If you are trying to make money from music this is a problem.

Great for discovering music. Not great for selling music.

Creating A Narrative

We therefore have to create a ‘narrative’ or story around our music releases.  We do this to get our audience and fans more interested and engaged about our music in the hope that they’ll feel a stronger bond to us (and will hopefully spend money on the music when it is released).

I read a good example of this in an article on the Indie Con 2016 music conference.  Music Business Worldwide editor Tim Ingham cited an example of games developer Jonathan Blow’s tweeting a picture of a big bottle of urine!

This picture is a ‘story’ and proof of Blow’s commitment to finishing coding his game. It spoke of the fact his was so ‘into it’, he wouldn’t stop for anything.  We was obsessive and passionate about his work and this ‘symbol’ of his commitment made him a hero to his audience.

Why Should Your Fans Care About Your Music?

When you release music and you say ‘here is my new stuff…please listen’ your audience’s and the media’s response loud and clear might very well be…“why should I?”. What you need to be able to do is demonstrate through your marketing messages why people should give a damn.

Think about ways that you can show your passion, your commitment and your sacrifices. What is your ‘bottle’ in other words. If you can find ways of doing that you’ll go some way to make people sit up and pay more attention to what you are doing.

As an independent artist you should definitely read the article in full here.

Got any questions about this post or how you can better market yourself?

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