Music is one of the ways artists express themselves. It’s deeply emotional and personal– and that’s what connects them with their listeners. The digitization of the music industry gave aspiring musicians more opportunities. Musicians can easily build their home recording studio. As a result, it led to an unfathomable amount of new music. Every day, new songs are uploaded to streaming platforms. With much new music, it is a struggle for new artists to find an audience. Every artist wants their masterpiece to be heard. But with the competition in the music industry, how can you reach your target audience? Let us help you. There are 5 strategies on how you can promote your music effectively. Assign Roles Within the Band or Hire a Marketing Team How do you make your music? Are you a soloist? If you are a soloist, it is best to hire a marketing team. You can work with freelancers or contractors to help you get started. Meanwhile, it is different for bands; you are not alone. You have members you can assign roles with. Determine who will manage the band’s website, update the social media accounts, create content, and supervise the marketing. The key here is to know who is good at the assigned role and whether they are interested to learn about the assigned role. But, it does not mean you have to force your band member into doing something they are uncomfortable with. There’s always a chance that no one knows about the marketing tasks. After you have determined each other’s strengths and no one wants to take a role, outsource them. Nonetheless, hiring a marketing team gives you more time to focus on making music. Use Social Media and Other Platforms Regularly engaging with your fans is an essential part of sustaining a meaningful career in the music industry. Whether you have a few dedicated ones or millions of fans, you need to build a connection between them. Some platforms are artist-friendly, such as HUDL Music. These platforms support independent musicians in promoting their music. HUDLmusic aims to provide independent artists with an online community free from heavy fees. Moreover, there are several social media platforms where you can post regularly: Facebook: The last few years have been difficult for musicians to promote their music on Facebook. You have to work on a budget with the Ads Manager. Although it is a powerful ad tool, you have to dedicate time to test and optimize the ads. Twitter: It’s the best platform to provide real-time updates to your fans. You can have quick and short interactions with them. Moreover, it’s easy to find people who talk about your music and have conversations with them. Instagram: The best place to build your visual brand. You can share your photos and videos quickly on Instagram. Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon Music: Today, most listeners use these streaming services to listen to their favorite songs. These streaming services will also promote you to listeners who enjoy music with the same genre as yours. Being featured in playlists is a golden opportunity. It feels like a free music promotion. You will reach the right audience. YouTube: The second-largest search engine after Google and one of the best platforms to discover music. You can also upload your music videos on YouTube. You can upload demos among these platforms and gather feedback from listeners before investing in them for professional production. Having an opportunity for free music marketing is already a golden moment for independent musicians. Create a Website Aside from promoting your music through social media, an official artist website will be not only your home but also your fan’s. An artist’s website is an essential component in conveying your story to the world. Your website is not only a place for official announcements. It is where your new and avid fans resonate with the story you are telling through your music and website. Unlike in social media, their attention towards the content in your website is undivided. Everything they see on your website is all about you. It allows them to know more about your journey through life and the music industry. Take advantage of a good content marketing strategy. Aside from your music, you can post videos and blog posts to build a deeper relationship with your fans. Putting a lot of time and thought into non-musical content will give a lasting impression. Some artists add daily vlogs, journal blogs, behind-the-scenes content, or any content that helps their fans know more about them. If other artists can, why not? It will ultimately result in new fans learning about you and your music. Today, the music industry has never been as competitive as before. Fans and listeners need more than your music to become interested. They want the narrative of your music. Thus, create a website to better shape your identity and convey your journey as an artist and human. If you are not sure how to start, define your artistic identity. Tell your audience your song’s meaning, the moment you made it, and how you are doing with your career. These narratives are an eye-opener to your fans. Use Email Marketing Aside from your social media followers, the best way to update them is through a newsletter. Email marketing is the least expensive but highly effective digital marketing strategy. Place newsletter signup on your website to collect their email address. But, not all web visitors will leave their email address easily. How can you convince them? Follow the swap strategy. Giving a freebie or discount in exchange for their email address works well. Aside from discounts or freebies, give them exclusive content. It will leave an impression on your fans and help you build a deeper relationship with them. Send out newsletters weekly with exclusive content to remind them about you and your music. Upload Vlogs with Behind the Scenes Content Video content is a powerful promotional tool. But, what’s the best content to share? Behind the scenes– it’s always been fascinating to fans, and they will always find it interesting to watch the recording process, especially if your song comes with a music video! Fans love to see how the concepts are put together. As music conveys personal journeys, the hard work to create it gives more insight to fans and gain new fans. Moreover, you can turn your video content into a DVD or upload it on YouTube. You can monetize it to help cover the costs of creating your song and music video. Final Thoughts As we speak, these strategies are the most effective ones in promoting your music. Music marketing is essential to let everyone who wants to share their talent and story through music. Whether it is paid marketing or free music marketing, focus all your efforts on reaching out to your fans and new audience.

When an artist dies, typically their catalog sees a massive spike in streaming and music sales. When it was reported MF DOOM passed away in January, his music saw a 870 percent increase in streams, while Juice WRLD’s music was streamed over 40 million times on the day of his death in December 2019. Although DMX’s music sales and album streams exploded by over 1000 percent following his April 9 passing, it doesn’t appear his new posthumous album Exodus is going to experience that same kind of play. According to early predictions from Hits Daily Double, Exodus is expected to move between 28,000 to 32,000 total album-equivalent units, with 12,000 to 14,000 of those coming from pure album sales. That still means he could end up in the Billboard 200 Top 10, but it won’t be the No. 1 album some people thought it would be. Related Article: Stream The Late Great DMX's New Album Exodus Exodus arrived on Friday (May 28) with features from JAY-Z, Nas, Lil Wayne, Snoop Dogg and The LOX, among others. Even though DMX originally stated Pop Smoke would make a posthumous appearance on the 13-track project, he wound up not making the cut. Speaking to The Breakfast Club last week, Swizz explained, “They used the verse already. I know X wouldn’t want an old verse. We fought for it.” He also said the verse was “pulled out of nowhere” then added, “It was two verses and both of them was used. We went to get another verse and it was used.” Exodus marked DMX’s eighth studio album and first effort since 2012’s Undisputed. Full article at HipHopDX

Ahead of the release of the TMN 30 Under 30 shortlist tomorrow, last year’s Readers’ Choice winner, Josh Simons, reflects on how much has changed in 10 years, why creatives have more control than ever, and why a couple of years in the music industry is like a lifetime. It was only 10 years ago, almost to the day, when Inertia Records released my band Buchanan’s first EP to physical stores all around the country. It was an exciting time. We had spent a year building a team focused on moving units off JB Hi Fi shelves into CD players and cars around Australia, off the back of an all-too-important triple j radio addition. We also made the front page of the iTunes Store – Spotify was yet to launch for another 13 months. Fast forward just two years to 2013 as we were getting ready to release our debut album, Human Spring. The physical release was a mere footnote and collectable for fans who pre-ordered it via PledgeMusic, and all our energy was now focused on securing editorial love from Spotify, with streams overnight seemingly the new metric of success and virality. In hindsight, it was an awkward if not unfortunate time to be a breaking artist, as the industry was going through its most significant adjustment in over a decade, and independent artists were forced to adapt or die. The point? Two years is a very long time in the music industry. The role of technology in music Ten years on from that first EP release and I am now the CEO of Vampr, a music-tech self-service platform helping artists network, build a team, distribute their music and publish their works. The relationship between music and technology has historically been a double-edged sword. On the one hand, Napster killed CD sales, turning the music industry on its head; on the other hand, music-tech has since made it cheaper than ever to create original world-class tracks, distribute your release and build a fan base – all from the comfort of your bedroom. In many respects the vision for Vampr, and one of the problems we are trying to solve, came about from my frustration as an artist dealing with the constantly moving goal posts that technology and innovation presented. Think you’ve mastered your Facebook game? Move aside, it’s all about TikTok now. As an artist, it was both necessary and exhausting just trying to keep up. Even now managing my legacy catalogue, it can still be a hassle trying to keep up with 10+ accounts in the name of ensuring my music is accessible on all the latest platforms. Distributor? Tick. Neighbouring rights collection service? Tick. Getting verified on Spotify? Linking your Apple Music artist account to your distributor profile? Posting variations of the same content to all your various social media accounts? It’s a helluva lot of work for anyone, let alone artists, who in an ideal world would be left alone to focus squarely on creating the best music and live show experience possible. So where’s the good news in all of this? In the past couple years we have begun moving real-time through a revolution which is seeing many of these services and tools converging – and the end result is there’s possibly never been a more exciting time to be an artist. Bundling and the convergence of music-tech tools As with most industries, when a service becomes replicable enough, the costs come down for all parties, and competitors inevitably emerge in droves, driving down costs even further. Take music distribution for example: for less than $1,000 you could start up a music distribution company and offer distribution services to emerging artists. The secret sauce, and the path to profit, will likely be your artist acquisition strategy which will usually resemble some kind of artist services offering, to give you a competitive edge. For artists, this is great news, as the cost of distribution is now negligible in your overall release budget. So when companies like LANDR, which started out as an online mastering solution for independent artists, delve into the space of music distribution, it isn’t all that surprising. As an artist, if I can log in to one less platform to handle all my musical affairs, not only am I saving time, but I’m probably also saving money by not paying an additional service provider. If I have a viral hit on TikTok and am not yet signed to a label, why might I entertain an offer from a major? It may very well include a handsome advance, however it may also lock me into a five-plus album deal all-the-while sacrificing ~50% of my future profits. On the other hand, I could instead secure a proportional-to-existing-success advance from a distribution company offering financial services, while keeping 90% of my royalties in perpetuity. This is the future which artists now live in – it’s a future of opportunity and choice. I firmly believe that many of the next Olivia Rodrigos or Justin Biebers will remain independent accordingly. Midia Research has confirmed as much in multiple reports showing royalties paid out to independent artists increasing as a proportion of the entire recorded music industry year over year for the past several years. This is the two-sided opportunity we’ve been tapping into with Vampr. The likes of LANDR, Splice, Songtradr or any number of other music-tech companies will almost certainly keep adding to their list of artist services – often through M&A – in a bid to keep users glued to the brand, and while that’s a great thing for the indie artists already using those platforms, our firm belief is that for early-stage musicians, the first step in a sustainable career is making life-changing connections. In practice, this means offering them a niche social network designed to serve musicians’ needs first, from which all these other services can later be offered as add-ons as their career evolves and demands it. Self-service, as opposed to artist services from a label or distributor, is now a truly viable and exciting career option and choice for independent musicians. People come to Vampr early in their career because the vast majority of creatives either require or are in desperate need of that magical collaborative partner who they can start writing and producing music with. Or perhaps they’re further along in their career and in search of a larger team and network to help take their vision to market. Either way, the solutions exist already, but it’s merely step one in a much longer journey. The inevitable next step, and it’s already happening, is the convergence of these self-service artist tools onto a single platform; an opportunity with limitless potential, and perhaps the next major revolution (or ‘major’ upset) to face the music industry. To bring it full circle and speak from my artist perspective: If something like a Vampr acted as my incubation space, where I was able to build a network horizontally and manage all my socials, and then that same network began to offer distribution, a marketplace, publishing solutions, master classes and advance payments based off of my performance data – well that becomes a no-brainer. We’re in an era of music-tech convergence and artist control – what a great time it is to be independent. Article by Josh Simons Full article at The Music Network

ZAAY is back with a new freestyle titled 'Gemini Forever Freestyle'. Stream ZAAY Gemini Forever Freestyle below...

Bryson Gray is back with a new track titled 'NO MASK NO VAX' featuring Forgiato Blow. ALBUM "BOLD AS A LION:SESAON 1" RELEASES JUNE 4TH ON ALL PLATFORMS! Stream Bryson Gray Ft. Forgiato Blow - NO MASK NO VAX

Traps-N-Trunks is back with the Memorial Day 2021 Edition of their 'Strictly 4 The Traps N Trunks' mixtape series. The 23-track project features Starlito, Pooh Shiesty, Moneybagg Yo, Gucci Mane, 42 Dugg, Mista Cain, YFN Lucci, and more. For slots & hosting: 404.576.8375 / kdough@trapsntrunks.com

New music video from 1017 records new recording artist Big WalkDog titled 'Came From Da Bottom'. Watch Big WalkDog Came From Da Bottom below...

Discover new music from recording artist Token with his new single 'Token' produced by Ronny J. Stream Token Chit Chat below...

"This one is for my roots and for my home. so glad i got to have my boy Kalan.FrFr hop on this with me. let’s run this up for the west coast!!" - Destiny Rogers Stream Destiny Rogers Ft. Kalan.FrFr West Like below...

DMX passed away on April 9 at White Plains Hospital in New York after he’d reportedly relapsed and suffered a drug overdose, triggering a fatal heart attack. In the weeks following the “Where The Hood At” rapper’s untimely death, his record label Def Jam has already delivered a posthumous prayer EP in an effort to help his fans and supporters mourn and celebrate his life. With the careful guidance of Grammy Award-winning producer Swizz Beatz, the estate of DMX is delivering Exodus following the release of the projects lead single “Hood Blues” featuring Griselda MCs Benny The Butcher, Conway The Machine and Westside Gunn. With additional features from JAY-Z, Nas, Snoop Dogg, Moneybagg Yo and more, Jim Jones has already stamped Exodus as a classic. Stream DMX Exodus below...