As regular followers will know, one of the reasons for starting this music marketing blog was to share some of the knowledge that I have gained ‘in the field’ as a DIY artist.  I’ve spent another 12 months touring, playing festivals etc so I thought I’d reflect on the past year to see what advice I could pass on to my fellow indies.

New Music Equals Growth

As my band have been celebrating 10 years with an anniversary DVD project I haven’t been able to release any new music.  Consequently, we didn’t see as much growth as we did in 2016.  If you want growth, I still believe that releasing new music with an appropriate marketing campaign to promote it is the best way to achieve that.

You should always be aiming for growth, and new music is the best way to achieve that.

Festivals Help You Get New Fans

A good festival slot can put you in front of a whole new audience which can lead to growth.  We played a few new festivals and picked up new fans who came to see us on tour later in the year.  Seek out all the ‘good’ festival submissions you can.

If you do well on festival slots, you can pick up a lot of new fans.

Film Your Exploits

We returned to played the main stage of a large festival and took our own film crew to capture our set.  This gave us plenty of footage we can use over the next twelve months as promo material.  By uploading the footage to Facebook I can pay to show the footage to fans of the festival.  Anyone who watches say 50% of the video I can target them with an ad for a future event of piece of merchandise.

Planning Is Key

The majority of my band’s events and releases are planned approximately twelve months ahead.  Next year’s summer tour is already on sale, the winter tour 2018 is already booked. Planning so far ahead allows you to ‘work to’ specific dates (tour announces, music releaes) and makes the ‘running’ of the band a whole lot smoother. We’ve already started thinking about artwork for the winter tour.  Have you got your 2018 planned out yet?  Now’s the time to start scheduling.

Old To You, New To Them

I did a separate blog on this earlier in the year.  Whilst I didn’t release any new music I did create new videos for old songs.  The last two videos I created for old songs have acheived 291,000 views on Facebook.  Remember it doesn’t’ matter is the song is old, people who are non fans won’t have heard it! It will be new to them.

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

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