How NOT To Market Your Music

If you're an independent musical artist, you've probably done a lot of research on how to get people to listen to your music. After all, you spend hours making a song that you're proud of, so when you release it and only 3 people listen in the first week, you're upset. There are many ways to market your music, even for free, but theirs one easy way to make sure people never listen to your music.

Its called spamming.

I've seen people share this as a genuine marketing tactic. Just sent people private messages saying hello, and asking them to check out your music online for free. Why wouldn't they, right? Its free, you're asking them in a genuine way.

This is the easiest way to make people hate you, and make people NEVER check out your music.

Think about it from their perspective. They're getting a random message from a stranger, and getting asked to listen to music they've never heard of - you don't know what they like, and you don't know anything about them. On top of this, they don't care that its free, because they probably have Spotify or Apple Music, and every song in the world is accessible to them already.

You heard that right, music is worth so little that free isn't even an enticement anymore.

This kind of music marketing is similar to walking through a city, and having someone shove their free mix tape in your face saying to take it and listen to it. You probably hate those people and turn them down, and even if you took it you probably don't listen. When this happens to me I flat out refuse to even take the CD, and usually they get pissy.

This is because you feel forced into it.

People hate being told what to do, and this is exactly what you're doing when you spam out your Soundcloud links. The worst version of this is when its an obviously copy and pasted message, or a bot produced message - but its still annoying even when its a hand typed message. Even if you go through that persons social profile and compliment them on their stuff, its still not cool.

So please, stop doing this. Everyone hates it, and you're only hurting your reputation in the process.