This post won’t tell you how to become a successful musician in one week, or stuff like “7 secrets for being a rock star” – because that wouldn’t be useful. Although you need a bit of luck, what’s really important is the way you plan and create an effective strategy for promoting your music. Gianluca Abbadessa of Promuovere Musica explains the two concepts you should keep in mind: storytelling and programming.
Storytelling
Wikipedia says:
“Storytelling is the conveying of events in words, and images, often by improvisation or embellishment. Stories or narratives have been shared in every culture as a means of entertainment, education, cultural preservation, and instilling moral values”.
When I talk about “Storytelling in Music Promotion”, I mean using techniques for delivering your music content to the fans that allow them to identify with your values, rather than communicating “This is my new song, please listen to it and tell me what you think about it…”
You’re not an X-Factor music star singing someone else’s songs, and I don’t think you’ll be a worldwide music star if you continue singing “she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah…” or stuff like that. I’m sure you’ve written some love songs, but if you’re trying to build a fanbase you need something individual that immediately affects your potential fans.
You can start by telling your fans how the song you’re promoting was created. For example, you could make a short video about the values that inspired the song, the time you got inspired to write the song down or – even better – use a situation/story/news story your fans already know to help them get a better understanding of what you’re saying.
Don’t tell all: be allusive; don’t talk to the brain, but to all the senses. Maybe your story is not for everybody – just a specific audience who all have the same vision of the world. After distributing your song with this approach on several media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, News Magazine etc.), you’ll be able collect all the feedback, comments (positive and negative) and information about your song from around the web in a unique place. You can use Storify to put all this data together in a story-shaped stream as a gift to your fans.
Programming
Programming is the first thing to do if you’re thinking about which strategy to adopt to promote your music. Why the first one? Because if I were your fan, or ready to appreciate your music, I’d always expect something from you.
You need to use every social media outlet. I suggest you tweet four times a day, write one or two Facebook posts if you can, and post on Google Plus once a day. If you don’t have your own content to promote every day, it can be good to promote someone else’s music in order to create some long term partnerships with other bands and musicians.
You can start by making sure you get the most exposure possible when you tweet your content. This step will create your fanbase on Twitter. Then, post on the famous micro-blogging site when your followers are online, and receptive to your content and information.
How can you make all this work? After creating the most effective strategy and an accurate plan, go further and choose the best tools to implement it: I suggest you to use Tweriod.
Programming also means producing some video content and publishing it on your YouTube channel as frequently as necessary. If you’re thinking about what strategy to adopt on YouTube, exclusivity is the best way to attract the most engaged fans from the crowd: when you decide to collect opt-in emails from people interested in your music with a simple landing page, keep in mind that while some of those people will get away, others will be very happy to receive exclusive video content from you.
Don’t be afraid of creating two separate group of fans: maybe the people who leave their email address will be ready to follow your music, promote your music to their friends, buy your music on iTunes and stream it on Spotify.
Gianluca Abbadessa is the founder of Promuovere Musica (www.promuoveremusica.it), an Italian online project aimed at helping independent musicians use new media to promote their music, sell it and help their fans find them effectively. Promuovere Musica offers new media consultancy, music marketing and promotion services for indie labels, music authors, unsigned bands and musicians. Contact Promuovere Musica viaFacebook, Twitter, Google Plus.