Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Red Hot Music Promotion Pointers

By Frank Scherer


One glaring shortcoming that a lot of people who create music share, is that they fail to recognize just how important the promotion end of what they do is. They may be great at what they do when it comes time to create the music but all too often the most creative of them all seem to fall short on the business end. In fact the worst of them can even have the notion that somehow the listeners will track them down. That all have to do is create the music and wait.

What you have to understand is that there is music and there's business, and you can do music without doing business. Or you can do business and not the music but if you want to make money doing music you're going to have to do music, and business both together. You see, to accomplish your long-term goals something is going to have to bring in money to pay the bills. If it isn't music that's going to bring in the money then you're going to have to get a regular job.

So of course there's the Internet now and the options and venues for promoting music online only continue to expand. Now for sure it would be a smart move to get a website up but today that's only the just the beginning. For instance promoting on social networking sites is huge now, and there's an art to it the can't be explained in just a paragraph or two. There's also now Internet radio stations that hold great potential achieving growth.

At the same time though with so many people focusing on the Internet, what many of them have failed to take into account is all that a local fan base can do for them. You see long before there was the Internet, this is where up in the coming musicians would start out. Cultivating a local fan base. Local fans tend to be loyal and enthusiastic. They'll actually buy your CDs and merchandising material, share it with their friends, and there's also some that work for you for free to help you promote.

Local high schools and colleges for instance are great places to promote your music, and if you get in a big enough following there you could use that to leverage your way into local radio stations. So consider passing out promotional literature and sample CDs at both these venues but make sure you do one thing first. That is that you should check in the school administrators office to see what their policies are with regards to what you're doing.

Then another proven tactic you can use to promote and sell your CDs, is to keep track of when big-name musical acts are playing in the city you live in or one near you. The line of people standing outside of these events waiting to get in is a veritable gold mine not just for promoting your music but also selling CDs. They've come for music, have money in their pocket that they intend to spend on music, and they're all stuck standing there until the doors open.




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