Last updated on August 6th, 2024 at 01:50 am
Want to make a living as a musician?
Today we are going to discuss five marketing strategies that can help you build a loyal fan base in today’s ruthlessly competitive attention economy…
Should Musicians Study Business?
There’s this idea in the music industry that if you care about the business side of things then you must be a sellout who’s only in it for the money.
But the reality is that if you want to be a full-time musician, you need to figure out how to make a living from your music.
And sure, there’s a certain charm in being a starving artist when you are a single person in your early 20s.
But that charm tends to wear off as time goes on. The starving artist lifestyle isn’t sustainable if you want to eventually settle down and have a family. Also, being young and broke can be fun but being middle-aged and broke rarely is!
That’s why so many people give up on making music as they “grow up” and assume adult responsibilities. That doesn’t have to be your story, though.
Mastering the business side of being a musician can help you make enough money to have financial stability. This means that you won’t have to choose between making music and having a family. You’ll have the opportunity to pursue both of these dreams!
And even if you aren’t interested in ever settling down, financial stability can enable you to do what you love, travel the world, and invest in getting better at your art!
So stop listening to people who glorify the starving artist archetype and start studying business.
You want to learn how to:
- Create irresistible offers
- Build sales funnels for those offers
- Drive traffic to those sales funnels
As our co-founder Russell Brunson loves to say: you are just one funnel away from the life that you have always dreamed of!
The Best Way to Sell Music Online
Online marketing is all about generating traffic.
But if you want to make the most out of that traffic, you need to have a system for converting:
- Visitors into leads
- Leads into customers
- Customers into repeat customers
In other words: you need a sales funnel!
We believe that the most effective way to sell anything online – including music! – is the Value Ladder sales funnel that was designed by our co-founder Russell Brunson.
The main idea behind it is that you build trust over time by presenting increasingly more valuable and therefore more expensive offers:
- The Bait stage – This is where you convert the potential customer into a lead by persuading them to give you their email address in exchange for your free offer (your lead magnet).
For a musician, this can mean giving away your music for free, ideally music that they cannot get anywhere else. Say, a free album that’s not on any streaming platforms and isn’t available for sale.
By the way, you can upsell them a CD of that free album on your thank you page!
- The Frontend stage – This is where you convert that lead into a paying customer by persuading them to buy your least valuable and least expensive offer (your frontend offer).
For a musician, this can mean pitching a bundle that includes the CD of your most popular album, bonus songs that aren’t available elsewhere and exclusive content such as behind-the-scenes footage or an interview with you.
This is the “casual fan” stage.
- The Middle stage – This is where you convert that customer into a repeat customer by persuading them to buy a more expensive and more valuable offer (your middle offer).
For a musician, this can mean pitching a bundle that includes CDs of your entire discography, exclusive songs and content plus some merch like a t-shirt or a wall poster.
This is the “regular fan” stage.
- The Backend stage – This is where you pitch your most valuable and most expensive offer (your backend offer).
For a musician, this can mean creating a bundle that includes limited edition CDs of your entire discography, a bunch of exclusive content and bonus music plus some signed merch.
Ideally, it should also include an opportunity to interact with you such as an invitation to a live online Q&A session.
This is the “superfan” stage.
In short, your Value Ladder should be designed to facilitate the progression from someone who just wants to check out your music to a casual fan to a regular fan to a superfan.
On top of these core offers, you should also promote time-sensitive offers such as tickets to live events.
Of course, building your email list will take time, it won’t happen overnight. But the more your list grows, the more control you will have over your career.
Imagine how much easier it would be to make a living as a musician if you had an email list with 100,000 subscribers who are interested in your music.
You could sell music, tickets, and merch directly to them without having to rely on middlemen like record labels, PR agencies, and event promoters!
Best Marketing Strategies for Musicians
Now let’s discuss marketing strategies that you can use to drive traffic to your Value Ladder sales funnel:
Musician Marketing Strategy #1: Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is probably the easiest way to get started because all you need to do is create social media profiles and start posting content.
However, you probably shouldn’t use it as your primary marketing strategy. Why?
Because it works better for musicians who are already popular and have a fan base that wants to know what they are up to.
It can be difficult for unknown artists to build a social media following from scratch because people aren’t interested in them yet.
That being said, you should have a social media presence and use it to promote your free album, share updates and network with other up-and-coming musicians.
As you continue building your fan base, your social media following will grow organically, provided that you are consistent about posting on the major platforms.
Musician Marketing Strategy #2: YouTube Marketing
YouTube marketing can work really well for musicians because it’s one of the most popular streaming platforms out there.
Moreover, its algorithm appears to be designed to show viewers content that is similar to the content that they are already consuming.
This means that if you can harness its power, it can help you get into the recommendations of people who are already listening to similar music.
Finally, the platform also has a paid advertising functionality that allows you to zero in on your target audience and show ads to YouTube users who belong to it.
That can be extremely helpful for musicians because you can use it to play your songs to people who are already listening to similar music.
You can get started by creating a YouTube channel and uploading your publicly available songs (meaning everything except your free album)
Use a stock photo that fits the vibe of the song if you don’t have a music video for it. You can find beautiful copyright-free photos on Unsplash.
Eventually, you can start making your own music videos and also incorporating some “lifestyle” content with behind-the-scenes footage, vlogs, and so on.
Musician Marketing Strategy #3: Facebook Ads
Facebook may not be the most hip social media platform but it has an enormous user base and incredible ad targeting capabilities.
You can promote your most popular song with video ads and encourage people to check out your free album.
Alternatively, you can create several campaigns promoting different songs, see which one brings in the most leads and then double down on it.
Start with a small daily budget, let the campaign run for a while so that you can gather enough data to evaluate its performance, and only start scaling it once you are sure that it works.
Also, if you decide to scale a campaign, do it by gradually increasing its daily budget.
It’s important to be cautious here because ads don’t always scale linearly (e.g. if you put in $1 and get out $2, that doesn’t necessarily mean that putting in $10 will make you $20).
You also need to accept that you will continue burning money on ads until you figure out how to run ads profitably. That’s inevitable and you should see it as a tuition fee that you need to pay to master the skill of paid advertising!
Musician Marketing Strategy #4: Weekly Music Newsletter
You might want to consider starting a free weekly music newsletter where you cover the latest developments in your scene.
That probably won’t appeal to casual listeners but it’s a great way to build an audience of people who are passionate about music.
This can help you connect with other musicians, producers, journalists, venue owners, event promoters, and so on. And who knows what opportunities such connections might bring?
Substack is the most popular newsletter app but you might also want to check out ConvertKit and Ghost.
Social media marketing might come in handy here: you can create a Twitter account, add a link to your newsletter to your bio, and start posting industry news. Make sure to utilize relevant hashtags!
You can also promote your newsletter with Facebook ads by targeting people who are already following profiles, pages, and groups that focus on industry news!
Musician Marketing Strategy #5: Copyright-Free Music
Giving away free value is one of the best ways to build an audience.
We have already discussed how to do it by giving away a free album in exchange for email addresses.
But you can take it to the next level by creating copyright-free music and releasing it on streaming platforms.
Neffex: 6.6M+ YouTube Subscribers in Less Than a Decade
For example, back in 2017 Neffex did a “100 songs in 100 weeks” challenge and made all those songs copyright-free. That led to more than 2 billion independent streams across platforms!
This helped them build an audience before launching their debut album in 2020.
The duo decided to part ways in 2021 but Bryce Savage continued the Neffex project alone and did another “100 songs in 100 weeks” challenge which he concluded in 2023.
He now has 6M+ subscribers on YouTube and releasing a ton of copyright-free music no doubt played a major role in building such a massive audience in less than a decade.
You can type “copyright-free music” into YouTube search to see other musicians that are using this approach.
Why is This Marketing Strategy So Effective?
The reason this marketing strategy is so effective is simple: releasing copyright-free music can help you get other people to promote it for you. How so?
Paying for the right to use existing music or hiring musicians to create it can be expensive.
That’s why game developers, independent filmmakers, theater directors, and even YouTubers and Twitch streamers are constantly looking for copyright-free music for their projects.
And if someone likes your music and decides to use it, it gives you free exposure and helps you reach people that you may not have been able to reach otherwise!
Case Study: How Gabe Schillinger Makes Selling Beats Online
Gabe Schillinger always thought that his big break would come from a record label.
He assumed that all he needed was an opportunity to collaborate with an artist who was already popular. Then, some label would surely notice him and sign him.
But as time went on, he began to realize that even if you do get opportunities like that, they don’t change your life.
Sure, you make some money, but that’s it. Once that money runs out, you are back to struggling to make ends meet, always looking for the next gig to pay the bills.
After a decade of this, chasing gigs started to wear him down. He was 30 years old, still living with his Dad, still unable to afford to live on his own.
When Gabe was young, he would excitedly talk to his family and friends about his dreams of becoming a musician but now he hated the subject and did his best to avoid it. Why?
Because deep down he felt that people around him saw him as a failure. He wasn’t an ambitious young man full of potential anymore, he was a full-grown adult who had failed to realize that potential.
“I just didn’t feel that respect. Honestly, at that point, I didn’t respect myself,” he remembers.
Gabe decided to pivot to selling beats online. He created a beat store, built a social media following and started driving traffic from social media to his store.
While he did make some money that way, it wasn’t enough to move out of his Dad’s house. He felt stuck.
But then one day, when he was scrolling Facebook, a post caught his eye. He clicked on the link but didn’t quite understand what he was looking at.
Apparently, this producer was using something called “ClickFunnels” to sell his beats. Huh?
Gabe didn’t know what that was so he googled it.
This led him down the rabbit hole of online marketing: he learned about building sales funnels, creating irresistible offers, writing copy that converts, and more.
But he didn’t just study the theory and leave it at that, he started implementing what he learned:
“For the first time in my life, I applied some of that creativity and passion that I once only put into my music and started putting it into my marketing as well.”
That allowed him to stabilize his financial situation, move out of his Dad’s house and regain his confidence after a decade of failure. Moreover, in just a few short years he was able to climb to the top of his industry.
Today, Gabe is living the dream: he is making a great living doing what he loves!
Learn to Sell Your Music With Sales Funnels!
Our co-founder Russell Brunson is widely recognized as one of the top sales funnel experts in the world.
He has taught countless artists how use sales funnels to make a living from their art. Want to learn from him?
The best place to start is his best-selling book “DotCom Secrets” where he explains everything you need to know in order to build a sales funnel that converts.
It’s available on Amazon but you can get it directly from us for free. All we ask is that you cover the shipping!