#196 - 7 Ways To Effectively Promote Music In 2023

1. Capture the emotional response to your live music

Clips of artists performing to someone have proven to be successful. This could be a parent, girlfriend, music teacher or a stranger. The key is to capture their emotional response to your music. This provides viewers with an immediate emotional hook, and short cut to how they should also respond to your music.

2. Capture attention

In the entertainment industry, anything that isn’t entertaining will be skipped. Your audiences vote with their thumbs, and unless your content is thumb-stopping you will be forgotten. Psychological research indicates that you have just 3 seconds to grab the viewers’ attention so have no quiet gaps at the start of your content.

3. Build your brand with visual consistency

Look to add some kind of visual consistency to every clip. Think of this as your brand style or sign-off. This provides viewers with a simple way to remember you. Viewers want familiarity and format. Maybe you always perform in the same place, or maybe your content always starts in the same way.

4. Stop, collaborate and listen!

Collaboration is nothing new in music, when two artists with two differing fan bases collide it greatly expands your potential reach. In the entertainment age, the collaboration doesn’t even have to be limited to another musician, persuading an influencer to feature in and help share your content can really make the difference.

5. Engage the eyes before the ears

TikTok is one of the few automatic ‘sound-on’ social media platforms, and even so, many people will still find themselves watching early in the morning, late and night or on the train without sound. Across all social media 80% of social video content is viewed with the sound off. This means before you engage the ears, you have to engage the eyes. Adding subtitles to the start of your clips allows viewers to quickly understand the relevance of the content to them and decide whether they want to watch it.

6. Make content fit for format!

It’s no surprise that the best-performing content was made for the format. So don’t expect a square video created for Instagram Feed to be blowing up in Reels, Stories or on TikTok.

7. Cover trending tunes

There is always time for an unexpected cover version. Like collaboration, cover versions are not a new tactic for musicians to launch themselves into the world. After all, it’s much easier to get people to watch a video containing a familiar song that they love, than an unknown track. The difference this time around is TikTok will tell you which familiar songs are blowing up, allowing you to jump on the bandwagon and add your take. Once people have engaged with your cover, it’s time to introduce your original music into the mix.