Music Promotion Is An Asset Your Music Career Can’t Live Without

• Save

• Save

photo: AMW Group Inc.

As the Business Development Director at AMW Group, the number one question I hear most is: how do I get new music heard?

The following article comes from AMW Group, a proud partner of DMN.

It’s a reasonable question, coming from someone who wants to bring music to the masses.  In the age of digital media, it has become increasingly simple to distribute music. As a result of the increased competition, it’s making it more challenging to get new material noticed.

It’s important to know what you’re getting into when you are setting up a promotional campaign for your music. Do a bit of basic research about what music promotion is, what it entails, and what you can reasonably expect to pay. It might surprise you. It’s common for people to blur the lines between publicity, marketing, and general artist management. While each agency is a bit different, many of the same basic principles apply.

So what is music promotion and why is it important?

Promotion is a broad term that encompasses marketing related activities including paid advertising and publicity. It defines how you’re presented and perceived by not only the media but the public as well. We utilize a wide range of promotional tactics in our campaigns including billboard ads, playlisting, radio jingles, influencers, social media tools and more. In this article, I will focus on our music pr and publicity services.

Let’s take a closer look at this widely used approach. A publicist will help you set up the best version of your bio (your origin story, basically), increase awareness of your brand to the public, and save you a lot of time and work with your media outreach.

While there’s no “perfect time” to start publicity, there are a few items you should have lined up first.

• Professional material — In order to get awareness, you need to have something to promote. If you want to be taken seriously as a professional, you need to present professional material to the world. This means well written, professionally mixed and recorded music. Get other people to listen to it who will give you honest feedback and make edits as necessary. This important step is what separates true artists from people who mistakenly think music is an easy way to make money.

• Professional photos — Selfies, screenshots from videos, and blurry bathroom photos are not ever going to drive interest in your brand. Not on social media, not as cover art for your album, and certainly not in any media-related outreach. This is non-negotiable.

• An idea of how you want your brand portrayed — While it’s true that a good publicist can help you define your brand, you should absolutely have an idea at least of how you want your brand to be portrayed. Nobody knows you better than you. It’s your music and your brand at the end of the day, don’t let anyone else take that away from you.

Not every campaign has to be “go big or go home,” the great thing about publicity is that it’s buildable.

You can use each small piece of publicity you get to make the next piece bigger and better. Once you’ve got a campaign started, here is what you can generally expect:

• Incremental growth on social media — Social media is a huge part of any brand these days. You can keep your audience continually updated on events and releases through social media, as well as get to know them on a more personal level. As a brand, you need to do your part to engage with your audience on a regular basis, once they’ve found you on social media or you will lose them just as quickly. The social media management services at AMW range from simple consultation and strategy to a fully customizable take over of your social media so that you can grow your brand without losing momentum.

• Brand awareness — Obviously, every brand wants people to know they exist. That’s how you make money and connections. AMW employs talented writers and publicists who will create unique, stand out press releases for your brand. We will also release them across our ever-growing network that includes thousands of journalists nationwide.

• Alliance creation — A publicist can build connections between your brand and more established tastemakers in your field. This causes your audience and theirs to view you as an influencer in your field as well. We can help you find influencers and artists in your field who support your music by introducing you to their own fans.

• Staying power — Publicity has better-staying power out in the world than ads alone. That’s because the goal of publicity is to build positive relationships with the world around you, which are only fleeting if you don’t maintain them i.e. social media engagement. Consistent promotion and work to support it mean that your Google search results will go up, which is important if you want to be viewed as a leader in your industry.

• Music placement — Your music can be placed strategically in coordination with your coverage within a campaign. This helps your music to garner more attention as it is being placed. AMW Group’s Spotify playlist placement is available as a part of some of our campaigns or as an add on to any of our other promotions. Our clients get access to a variety of genre-specific playlists and curators.

The artists who become successful, no matter where they start out, are the people who treat their music as a business.

A large part of a successful business is setting up and maintaining positive customer relations. Every relationship, business or otherwise, takes time and care. The professionals at AMW Group are ready to help you on the road to a prosperous music career.