Marketing Your Music For Free

How do you get people to listen to your music without any money to spend on advertising? How do you market your music for free? Many people struggle with this, and I did as well for a long time. While paid advertising can be very effective, its also not very easy to do it correctly. No matter what your budget for paid music marketing is you'll still want to take advantage of free marketing tactics as well, whether you do them yourself or hire someone to help.

The Obvious Methods

First i'll briefly cover the methods that everyone already talks about to get them out of the way, just in case you aren't familiar with them.

1. Release your music where people listen

2. Make YouTube videos

3. Share your music on social media

For step 1, you need to release your music on all the platforms people actually listen to music on. Don't just release your music on Soundcloud - release it on Spotify, iTunes, Apple Music, YouTube, Deezer, etc. Obviously this isn't free, but this post is about how to market your music for free, not to release it for free - this is a prerequisite to marketing your music. There is no excuse today to not having your music on the popular stores with so many cheap distribution platforms. I use Distrokid to release all my music, and you release unlimited music for one artist for less than $20/year - click here to get 7% off https://distrokid.com/vip/seven/770818

You can afford $20/year, thats like skipping 4 Starbucks visits over the course of an entire year. If you're a kid and you don't have any money, ask your parents or find a way to make $20. If for some extreme circumstance you absolutely can't afford this, I believe some sites offer free distribution in exchange for revenue shares on the music you submit.

For step 2, make a YouTube channel where you bring value in some way. Yes you can upload your tracks to YT with album art as the video, but you should also try to make interesting content as well. Maybe show people how you made your track, or vlog about your process being a music producer. Maybe you have something else non-music related to bring to the table, then you can create a following using that and then promote your music inside that content in other ways. The options are endless.

For step 3, share your music on social media. The same ideas about step 2 apply here, release clips of your tracks, link to your tracks, and share artwork, but also try to provide valuable content in other ways. Don't just spam your links everywhere, people don't want to follow people who do nothing but spam links. Ask your friends to listen to your music and share your posts if they like it, just don't be spammy about it.

Now... lets get into some other less known methods.

Contacting Spotify Playlists

Spotify playlists are a huge part of music promotion in todays music industry. While there are many paid ways to pitch to Spotify playlists, you can actually do this yourself. Search on Spotify for playlists that your music might fit onto, look up the account that made the playlist, and try to find their social media accounts or email address. While this process is technically very easy, its also very time consuming as it can be hard to find the contact information for people on Spotify.

Contacting YouTube Music Channels

YouTube Music channels are also a huge part of music promotion nowadays. The process for this is the same as Spotify playlists, search for music channels in your genre and try to find their contact information. Many large channels will actually include a submission email or website so the process can be much easier than Spotify playlists. When you email these accounts make sure to provide them with a streaming link to your music you want to promote, be professional, and keep your email to less than 6 sentences or so.

Contacting Music Blogs

The same method for Spotify Playlists and YouTube Music channels also applies to music blogs. Find blogs that review or share music similar to what you make, find their contact information, and reach out to them. Finding this blogs is easy, search for reviews of a song by an artist thats similar to your music on Google, check out the blogs that come up, and try to find the people that write the reviews.

Use SubmitHub

SubmitHub has been a very useful tool for me in promoting my own music. Many blogs, Spotify playlists, and YT channels actually exclusively use SubmitHub as their submission method. The way it works is that each submission costs 1-3 credits - you get a certain amount of free credits that replenish after a certain amount of time (I think 2 per day), but you can also buy credits.

Its important to note that not all accounts will accept free credits, and using a free credit doesn't guarantee anything. However its definitely possible to get results using only free credits. If you use paid credits the account you're submitting to has to listen to at least 30 seconds of the track, and if they reject it they have to provide some kind of feedback.

Interact On Social Media

You've all seen the accounts on Instagram that just post fire emoji's everywhere, or comment saying to check out their page - don't be that person, everyone hates that person. A great alternative to this is to actually search for hashtags that relate to your music or brand, and leave valuable comments on their content. Listen to other music producers music on Instagram, and tell them what you like about the track, or how they could make the track better. Find people who have questions in the comments and help them out.

Don't even leave links to your stuff, don't ask them to check out your page, just be a normal person and interact with other people (it is social media after all). A certain amount of people will just check out your page organically, and some people will appreciate your help so much that they follow your accounts and listen to your music. Even if you get minimal results from this in terms of people listening to your music, you will grow your following and you'll make connections online which can help in other ways.

This method can apply to Instagram, Twitter, Soundcloud, and other social platforms. If you're doing it on YouTube you might want to reference videos you've uploaded in some way, but provide value in your comments before you do that.

Use Hypeddit's Promotion Exchange

Hypeddit is a website that offers various music promotion tools for music producers. One aspect of their website is the promotion exchange where you can exchange download gates with other artists. Basically every time you go through someone else's download gate you get a credit, and then you can use that credit to put your own download gate into the system for someone else to check out.

What is a download gate? Well, here's an example of one of mine. https://hypeddit.com/track/beqkho

Basically it offers a free download of a track in exchange for social support of the track in the form of Spotify follows, Soundcloud comments/likes/reposts, social media actions, and more.

This method can lead to followers, reposts, likes, and more depending on how you set up your download gate. Keep in mind that some people will just go through your download gate because they want a credit, and they won't necessarily check out your music. However to do so they will have to go through your download gate, and the extra numbers gained from this can help you reach new fans indirectly. Check it out: https://hypeddit.com

Start Your Own Blog

What are you reading right now? A blog. On the Genera Studios blog my goal is to provide valuable content to help out music creators - in the form of gear reviews, tutorials and more. If you look around you'll notice that at the top of this page I have a link to my Spotify page, i've put a link to one of my YouTube videos, and a link to one of my download gates. However, you'll notice I put them there for a reason - to support the value of this blog post and provide examples of what i'm teaching you.

You can do the same thing, even for free! Just go on Google and search for free blogging websites, they'll be dozens of sites that offer free branded accounts for you to start your own blog. Down the line you can upgrade to get more features, or take the branding off, but it gives you a way to start for no money at all. Goal #1 should always be to provide value, don't just write a generic post with information copied from another website with links of yours spammed throughout. If the posts you're writing don't offer a way to link to your music, then include a small bio at the end of every post with links to your platforms for people to check out if they're interested.

Hopefully this offers you a way to get started marketing your music for free.