Update Jan 16 2010: Check out my Q&A with a reader which elaborates on this post.
Have you heard of Joe Purdy? Me neither. He made a healthy six-figures last year from his music, bought a house & sold more than 650,000 tracks on iTunes. How?
A good friend of mine was over for dinner last night and we had a chat about his band’s marketing efforts for their upcoming album, and here are some of the ideas that came out of our discussion:
- Maintain a blog/podcast, Twitter account, Facebook group, Myspace presence and any other worthwhile social media tools out there (don’t neglect them!)
- Advertise all the above at shows, in interviews, on the band’s website…EVERYWHERE!
- Give away mp3’s of your music for free (from your website), and encourage people to share it with their friends using the above tools. Maybe even seed it on Bittorrent.
- Never spend a cent on traditional advertising. It costs way too much to cut through the noise these days and the ROI is small.
- Use social media to ‘rally the troops’, crowdsource & interact with your fans – keep them engaged!
- Make damn sure all your music is on iTunes & Amazon. Even though they may have a few mp3’s they got for free from you your true fans will buy your music.
- Have a consistent ‘branding’ from the myspace page to the live show
The bottom line is, these days people have too much choice, and to make matters worse there is too much noise in the world. This means people aren’t listening to you. They are however, listening to their friends and people they trust. The key is finding people who have the Otaku for your music and making it as easy as possible for them to do your marketing for you.
I almost forgot – above all else, make amazing music.
