5 Marketing Tips for Small and Independent Musicians

It can be tough to gain an audience, market yourself, and grow as a small musician all while creating music you love. At Aux we want you to focus on creating music you love so we have compiled some tips and tricks all musicians can utilise. Here is a list of five tips to ease the stresses of marketing.

1. Social Media Strategy

Social media is one of the most powerful marketing resources at the fingertips of musicians. First it is important to create a variety of profiles across different platforms; the best platforms for musicians include Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. Consistency on social media is key and will help grow and continually engage your audience. Reels on Instagram and Tiktoks are a must as they tend to yield some of the highest reach and engagement rates. While reels and TikToks are important, creating them is sometimes daunting. Some good ideas for Tiktoks and reels include videos of live performances, sharing your creative process with the audience, and teasing new releases with snippets. Keep your fans coming back for more with visually appealing social pages, consistent content, and building excitement around upcoming releases. Social media is also a valuable tool for making connections and meeting other musicians in your local scene. Some key takeaways here are consistency of content, unique engaging reels, and most importantly just be you.

2. Gigging

Playing your music live is a fantastic way to gain experience, make connections, and gain a wider audience. When starting out performing live try and understand your local scene and play gigs with artists that share some common sounds. It is likely if you focus on appearing at gigs like this you will gain new fans through their enthusiasm for your style of music. That being said, open mic nights and new music gigs with a wide variety of artists regardless of genre will also be important to play. While playing live can help you gain a larger audience, it can also help you make connections with other artists. As someone once said its not what you know, its who you know. Gigs are also a good way to financially sustain yourself in a world where streaming royalties account for pennies.

3. Create a website

Creating a band or artist website is a great way to market yourself as it is a place to showcase of all of your work. Your website can contain links to your live performances, links to digital service providers (DSPs) such as iTunes or Spotify, merch, tour dates, and more. Websites are a way for fans to find everything having to do with you. By creating a usable, intuitive, and aesthetically authentic website you can convey a professional image and provide easier access to your music.

4. Making Connections

Throughout this blog the significance of connections has been mentioned multiple times. Connections are essential for many things but as a small artist they can be a good building block in your career. By meeting and connecting with people in your local scene it can lead to musical collaborations, business partners and more. Friends you make can help you put together gigs, record tracks, and give you inspiration.

5. Share your music with radio and blogs

Sharing your latest track to your fans and marketing it on your socials is great, but it is important to send your music to places that can play it or share it with a wider audience. One of the best platforms to do this on is BBC introducing. This is a section of BBC radio that is dedicated to showcasing new tracks from small artists. Anyone can upload a track on their website and there is a possibility they will play it on air. Radio stations are great for finding a new potentially untapped audience. Also sharing your music with blogs makes it possible that they will write a piece on your new track or album. By making connections with music blogs artists are able to get their name in more places, promote their music, and gain fans. Interviews are also a great way to get in blogs and further promote yourself.