As an independent music artist, what can you do to maximize your music promotion and overall revenue? At last year’s New Music Seminar, Disc Makers and CD Baby president Tony van Veen shared nine music promotion lessons he’s learned that every artist can easily implement to maximize gig sales, drive download purchases, and increase overall music sales. Read more.
From the category archives:
The most important thing to do when dealing with money is to make sure to write EVERYTHING down. A good way to keep tabs is to put all the info in Excel. We divide it into date, gas, food, lodging, salary (how much we pay our musicians), pay (from the venue), CD sales, t-shirts, tips, extra. At the end of each day we total it up. There are two main ways to make money as a band: 1) Guarantees/door/bar percentage, and 2) Selling merchandise. 
Many people have asked us how we transformed our band into a sustainable business, touring 250 days a year. We’ve created a series of videos to help explain what we’ve learned over the past few years in the hopes that it will help you learn how to get gigs and get more good bands out on the road. We’ll explain how to book music gigs that are well attended and pay guarantees, promote your shows, make extra money, build a following, and describe who wants to take your money (and why you shouldn’t let them). 
Music promotion isn’t just about amazing content, it’s about how you share it. Let’s assume you have high quality content, like a music video posted on YouTube that you just spent weeks pouring your heart and soul into, and it hasn’t quite gone viral yet. How can you boost views, downloads, and likes without bugging the heck out of your fans or spending a gazillion dollars on ads? 
MusicStartsHere.org is a website chock full of excellent content and more than 300 interview segments featuring music business insights from songwriters, publishers, artists, musicians, entertainment attorneys, performance rights organizations (PROs), and other music industry veterans. While the site focuses on the music scene in Nashville, the information included can benefit anyone looking to learn more about making a career in music. 
Music videos never seemed like something I should pursue. I never understood how they could translate into sales or revenue, and I certainly didn’t know how to come up with an idea that wasn’t a literal translation of my lyrics – “all I have to say is I love you” only invokes an image of two people running at each other in slow-mo, arms open for an embrace… cheese city. 
An independent artist has to constantly put out material that is going to interest and evoke a response from your audience. So it’s not just releasing music, though certainly you can do that pretty easily – the tools are there for you to put out a song a week if you wanted to. Be it video content or blog content or tour diaries, there are plenty of avenues for you to consistently produce content that will draw your audience in and keep them engaged. 
Email is still one of the best ways to do music promotion for your act. After all, your email mailing list includes folks who want to hear from you, so tell them something! While you’re at it, let’s look at a few things you can do to improve the effectiveness of the email messages you send to your fans. We’ve got 16 tips to help improve your email marketing, plus a video with plenty of information to help you hone your email chops. 
Chris Rockett at interviewed Disc Makers and CD Baby CEO and President Tony van Veen (in which he reveals that Tony is his hero), and the two explore topics ranging from time travel (kind of) to digital music, music distribution, music marketing, and getting a music manager. 
Among all the categories of videos found on YouTube, music is far and away the most popular, accounting for nearly 31% of all videos played through the website. It has also become the prime destination for music discovery by teenagers, with The Wall Street Journal recently reporting that two-thirds of teens listen to music directly from YouTube, more often than other services such as Pandora, Spotify, and MOG. 
Two members of the Squid the Whale band drove 12 hours straight from Michigan to pick up their 1000 CDs in digipaks. 
When you place a link to a YouTube or Vimeo video in your Facebook feed, viewers will have the ability to “like” and “share” that particular post. 
