Music Marketing: 3 Creative Strategies To Get New Fans To Your Music

By Dariel Figueroa

As a music artist, the number one commodity in your arsenal is your Brand. The best way to strengthen it? A must-have product, or in other words, a killer song with a targeted, multi-faceted music marketing strategy.

A lot can be said when it comes to developing a strategy for your music, but we’ll save that discussion for another post. In this article, we’re digging deep into the creative spirit to stir up some ideas for marketing your next banger (hopefully with a MaxxBeats beat!).

It doesn’t matter where you funnel your audience (e.g. website, Spotify, Apple Music, etc.) as all of our suggestions, if thoughtfully applied, will give you a serious edge over other artists relying on static artwork and stale music marketing ideas.

The examples below represent a starting point for your creative process. Think about what you’re saying in your track, identify the themes and primary elements of the story you’re telling (every song is a story), then apply or combine a few ideas and see where that takes you.

Remember: You can have the dopest music in the world, but if no one wants to hear or access your work, then you might as well perform in an empty room.

1.) Interactive 360-Degree Album Cover

We know that having dope artwork for your album or single is a key component of the marketing push for Spotify & Apple Music streams. But, how many of you have strayed from the simple static graphic or two? I’m guessing not many.

There are better ways to grab your audience’s attention. With the right idea and proper technology and/or experts backing the play, you can turn the mundane into the magical and help ensure your project gets the eyeballs you need to fuel your musical career and passion.

A 360-degree image is a digital image that presents a scrollable panoramic view and may be your first stop in interactive art territory as it utilizes one of the most accessible technologies on this list: your camera phone.

For many phones, the panoramic feature installed on your camera will give you the ability to stitch together a continuous shot in order to create a 360-degree landscape.

Expert Tip:

You don’t have to stop at creating just a 360-degree image. How about a few digital elements thrown in there? That’s right. You can actually embed stuff like music players, links, and images inside your 360-degree landscape.

This is perfect for album and single cover artwork with all of your respective promo material—music video, mp3, etc.—embedded inside the image. You can also host this image on its own website so your audience has one single destination for all the media surrounding your music release.

(The single web destination approach is even better when you consider the re-marketing potential should you properly pixel your site. We’ll go more in-depth with this in another post.)

The potential for a deep and rich interactive experience that’ll compel your audience to dive deeper into your personal story is off the charts here. Make sure you have a clear picture of the story you want to tell with your song and music marketing material.

Each element in your music’s interactive artwork should tell a little piece of your story with the entirety of it displaying the—no pun intended—full picture.

2.) Immersive Audio Experience

You might be saying, “Well, my music is an immersive audio experience,” and you’d be right. But, we’re not talking about songs here. We’re talking about leveraging the growing use of voice-activated technology, audio-only communities, and narrative audio experiences like the true crime podcast you might be addicted to right now.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself as you put together your music marketing strategy:

• Is there any way I can utilize Amazon Alexa skills to help bring awareness to my project?
• Which audio-only communities (e.g. Clubhouse) can I funnel my tribe into, or is my tribe already prevalent in an audio-only community already?
• Which narrative in my project is the strongest? Would this story benefit from a peripheral audio experience that helps promote my single? If so, how would I create and place this experience?

Don’t try to do all these at once. Pick one tactic, the one that best fits your music’s story, and test the technology along with your audience’s response to it.

Music marketing is all about using what works and throwing the rest away. To that end, you should test every tactic before rolling it out on a larger scale. Always test to ensure a ROI (return on investment) before you toss your music marketing budget at your release.

3.) AR Scavenger Hunt

Scavenger hunts have recently seen a resurgence thanks to AR (augmented reality) technology. If you’re unfamiliar with AR, chances are you have some of the required tech on your phone already (this is especially true for those with newer iPhone models).

AR allows the user to place three-dimensional objects in the world via a camera. Popular uses of this have been in social media feeds for awhile now, but we’re finally seeing the extent to which the technology can be used for marketing purposes.

The idea behind an AR scavenger hunt is simple: hide QR codes in plain sight, direct a user towards them, the user interacts with the code via their phone’s camera, and in return they receive an exclusive piece of digital content like your music video or 360-degree album cover.

Rewards can range from NFTs (non-fungible token) to song previews, free downloads, or even tickets to a secret performance. The sky’s the limit when it comes to rewards, but just make sure it’s worth the actual work your fans will put in to find these treasures. There’s nothing worse than finding a dud at the end of a rainbow.