How To Promote Your Band With No Money…

Someone recently asked me how I would promote their band.

First off, they need good music (which they do).

A fantastic product is usually the best for of marketing and sales.

Why?

It makes referrals and word-of-mouth easy.

But having a fantastic product, is not enough on its own.

Why?

Because why would you leave your brand destiny as reactive in the hands of possibility?

It needs to be combined with proactive marketing and sales to guarantee product success.

Hundreds of thousands of bands have formed and got lost into obscurity.

But the problem is, this bands is not making any money and thus don’t have any money for marketing.

Although they could use loss leaders and self-paying offers to cover the listen acquisition cost, they don’t have anything they are willing to distribute just yet.

It’s a chicken and egg problem.

So what should they do?

A good question they can ask is: What marketing and sales channels are open to them, but specifically, scalable channels because it is a consumer product with low margin?

The channels that come to mind are:

Technology Integrations

This could be used by simply uploading their music to Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or BitTorrent. Or do the same but rename the song titles and thumbnails to mainstream and popular tracks from similar artists to their band, then at the end of the song, have an audio clip telling the listener who you are and request to follow your account. The rationale is that if you target similar artists, their fans may like you also. Think that is insane? Soulja Boy did that exact strategy and attributes it to getting traction.

Publicity

See if they can get a hook (like the name or look of Slim Jesus) and get as much publicity as possible. Or use the previous piggy back naming Technology Integration tactic as the hook. Slim Jesus’ name and his look was what got him mainstream public attention — what 17 years old does that? Someone who is newsworthy does. The news press won’t touch your hook unless you do something no one has ever done before in music, even if it is a perception. For example something different in terms of production, distribution or sale.

Partnerships

See if they can do any collaborations with other artists. Those artists are incentivised to promote any combined the track to their audiences. Even if their collaborations are with unrelated genres, that will also open them up to new cohorts of prospects. T-Pain and Taylor Swift collaborating is a great example of this. In addition to this, they should consider giving their music to anyone that needs music — YouTubers or Podcasters who need intro music for their work.

Content

They should be producing and releasing as much music as humanly possible! Pitbull was prolific for about a year. A lot of his stuff wasn’t great, but some of it was and he got a lot of mainstream attention.