by Francesca | Nov 16, 2023 | Music Marketing
Not only does the holiday season bring in the holiday cheer, they also bring more sales than any other time of the year. From merch sales to music streams and social engagement, it’s time optimize your marketing strategy for the holidays. Want in on some tips and tricks to amp up your holiday marketing game? No problem. Here are some holiday marketing tips for musicians…
Holiday Marketing Tips for Musicians
Send Out Holiday Cards To Your Fans
There’s nothing quite like getting a holiday card from someone. Knowing someone was thinking of you and put in the effort to show they care is a one of a kind feeling. If your weird cousin in Alaska can manage to send you a holiday card every year, you can send your own holiday cards to some well deserving fans.
Take note of the top 50 fans who engage with your social media the most, or go live and take the first people to join into consideration. It’s up to you how you’d like to choose who gets one. — (Note: Consider how much money you’re capable of spending on holiday cards and stamps. That, and how much free time you have, will help you decide how many people you can add to your list.)
Here are some great websites to help you create custom cards for the low:
Share Personal Holiday Memories
The holidays have most of us feeling sentimental. Pull on the heart strings on your fans by sharing your own personal holiday memories from your childhood on socials. Go on Instagram Live and share your funniest holiday memories or post some throwback pics from your childhood on Facebook. Just get personal.
By opening up and sharing some personal tidbits, you’ll steal the hearts of existing fans and gain some new ones in the process.
Holiday Themed Livestreams
Since the beginning of the pandemic, artists have been live-streaming like crazy. With the holidays coming in hot, switch up the vibe and try some holiday themed streaming instead! Get festive, decorate your space, and go live to play some holiday classics.
Want to switch it up? Engage your audience with a holiday themed tutorial.
- Go live and wrap presents with your fans
- Cook a holiday meal
- Go on a decorating spree in your house
Whatever you do, sneak in some of your music in the background and don’t forget to promote yourself every now and then.
Host A Giveaway
What better way to engage your audience on any platform than with a holiday giveaway! All you’ll need to do is create posts on socials encouraging your fans to enter and put together the prize.
Consider giving away things like:
- Limited edition holiday merch
- Early download access to your new EP
- Signed vinyl
- A holiday care package (merch, vinyl, CD’s, a holiday card, candy, etc., all in one)
The holidays are about giving back and showing you care. Let your marketing reflect that!
Offer Holiday Sales On Merch
Want sell more merch? Join the Black Friday craziness and do your own deals. Offer discounts on select merch items and promote the sales on socials.
To hype it up and extend your reach even further, try a collaboration with other artists where you all post pics of yourselves doing holiday themed activities in the merch. Another thing you can do is throw in a free gift on top of your discounts.
- For example, every $75 order could get a signed guitar pick or limited edition print included.
Promote with Style
Whatever you do, do it with style. It doesn’t hurt to get a little festive this holiday season, especially with your marketing. Take advantage of the cozy aesthetic and get your audience in the holiday spirit with holiday themed posts on socials, limited edition holiday merch, or even holiday themed ad campaigns.
The more the merrier! 🎁
by Francesca | Nov 16, 2023 | Music Industry, Music Marketing
This year, holiday marketing has been starting earlier than ever. If you’re looking to sharpen your holiday marketing skills on Instagram, this post will give you everything you need to know to make the most of your efforts. No problem. From tips and tricks to help you expand your reach to making more sales this holiday season, here’s what we know…
7 Tips For Holiday Marketing On Instagram
Run a Seasonal Giveaway
Instagram accounts that do contests or giveaways grow 70% faster than those that don’t. Not only that, giveaways entice both current followers and potential new ones to engage. This increased engagement signals to Instagram’s algorithm that it should feature you more regularly in your audience’s feed.
What better way to engage your audience for the holidays than with a giveaway! Consider giving away things like:
- Limited edition merch
- Early download access to your new EP
- Signed vinyl
- A holiday care package (merch, vinyl, CD’s, a holiday card, candy, etc., all in one)
The holidays are about giving back and showing you care. Let your marketing reflect that, too.
Shoppable Instagram Posts
50% of US consumers do their holiday shopping at the last minute. Want to drive sales to your site? Make shopping for those last minute holiday gifts as easy as possible with Shoppable Instagram posts. This feature lets you to tag your products in your posts and link them to your website for your fans to purchase with ease.
(To be approved for Instagram Shopping, you’ll need to meet these requirements. Click here to learn how.)
Collaborate with Similar Artists
You’re not the only one looking to generate leads on Instagram during the holiday season. What better way to combine your efforts and get twice the reach by collaborating with another artist?
Just like brands partner with influencers to tap into their audiences, you can do the same.
Do you have connections with an artist who’s got a similar fanbase to yours? — Go on Instagram Live together or do your own respective posts within your feeds to promote each others merch, that limited edition vinyl that would make a perfect gift, a new single that just dropped, etc.. This extends both your views’ into both audiences.
Everybody wins! 🙏
Instagram Ads
Instagram ads are a secret weapon for gaining potential customers with ease. Instagram targets the exact audiences with the most potential for engagement, helping you gain exposure in all the right places.
Affiliate Marketing
The holidays are a great time for people to buy tickets to shows for their loved ones. A great way for you to use this to your advantage is to sign up for affiliate programs. With these, you can share their affiliate links in your Instagram posts or stories to promote tickets to you or your fellow musician friends’ shows. When your followers make a purchase through your link, you earn a commission.
For example, brands like StubHub, Vivid Seats and Ticketmaster all have pretty good affiliate programs. So whether your fans are buying tickets to your shows or other artists’, as long as they use your code, you get a cut. Doesn’t get much easier than that.
Run Exclusive Offers
I mean… who doesn’t like exclusive stuff? The holiday season means everyone is looking for the perfect, unique gift for that special music lover in their lives. What’s better than some limited edition merch from their favorite artist?
Consider offering limited time discounts on select products or drop a limited run of holiday themed merch. Get into the holiday spirit and offer something special to your audience that they just can’t pass up.
Engage with Holiday User Generated Content
You’re not the only one posting your holiday joy on Instagram. Tons of other artists (and fans) are doing their part and adding to the plethora of festive content coming out at this time of the year. Encourage your community to interact with one another by posting Instagram Stories asking about their favorite holiday songs, artists, snacks, activities, or whatever else comes to mind.
You can repost this content onto your own page and encourage a conversation. Don’t forget to get everyone to use a common hashtag so we can all get in on the action. This is community at it’s finest!
In Conclusion…
The holiday season brings in more sales than any other time of the year. With these tips and tricks, you’re on the right track to perfecting your marketing game on Instagram in no time.
Happy Holidays!
🎁✨
by Francesca | Nov 16, 2023 | Legal, Music Industry, Playlists
“Fake” artists are impersonators who steal music from real, hard-working artists like you and upload the tracks on streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music under false names through unsuspecting distributors. These fake artists also create fraudulent playlists with hundreds of fake songs, making them thousands of dollars in royalties stolen from their rightful owners. It’s important as a community that we fight against these practices, and the first step is learning how to recognize them. In this post, we’ll show you what to look for…
How To Detect Fake Spotify Playlists
A Blank Profile
One of the most obvious ways to tell if a playlist is fake is to check out the playlist curators’ profile. Typically, a real profile will have fully filled out bio, profile picture, links to socials, etc. Take a look at the followers, too. A playlist with tons of likes accompanied by a curator with no followers is definitely sus. Alternatively, if the followers they do have also have no profile pics, weird names or no additional info, those are most likely bots and another good sign to stay away.
Offering Paid Placements
Paying to be featured in a playlist is not only against Spotify’s policy, but also illegal. Oftentimes a fraudulent playlist curator will have a bio that claims you can be featured too, for a price. Typically, these playlists are using illegal third-party services, bots and click-farms to amass all those streams. If your own music gets caught on one of these playlists, you risk being removed from the entire platform yourself. Worth the risk? I don’t think so.
Many Different Genres
The whole point of a playlist is to serve you a certain vibe, set a mood, and offer a perfectly curated list of songs. That being said, if you spot a playlist with no specific vibe to it and tons of different genres sprinkled throughout, that’s a red flag. Let’s be real… going from Heavy Metal to Hyper-Pop to Country on a single playlist doesn’t make sense, no matter how diverse your taste is.
Random Related Artists
Click on some of the artists in the playlist and go to their “Fans also like” section. If these recommendations consist of artists who are completely different genres or have sketchy profiles, run the other way. This one may take you some time to vet, but it’s always better to take the time to be safe than to be sorry later. To be safe, I recommend checking 5 or 6 “artists”.
Inconsistent Followers
If a playlist is popping off with thousands of followers, shouldn’t the playlist curator themselves also have a similar number of followers on their personal profile? Typically, that’s how this music streaming thing works, right? You gain organic fans of your music and they follow you. (Duh!) That being said, if a playlist has a big discrepancy between the amount of followers and streams on the playlist versus the curator’s profile, this is a big, telltale sign that bots are running rampant.
You may be thinking… “How do these fake playlists even happen?”
Through independent distributors with limited oversight, these “fake” artists swindle their way through the process and upload infringing content right under the distributors’ nose. While these practices are strongly prohibited, these impersonators simply lie, using fake information along with other various tactics hoping nobody notices until it’s too late. This seems too easy to be true, but it works. In fact, it has been working so well that these impersonators have been making insane amounts of money off of music they have zero right to.
That’s why it’s so important to be wary of fake playlists and stolen music. It’s up to us as a community to report activity like this when we see it, do our best to protect each other from falling victim to these scams, and learn how to navigate situations like these when they do arise.
“What do I do if my music has been stolen?”
In the unfortunate case that your music has been stolen by one of these scammers, don’t freak out. There are a couple things you can do. From making sure your copyrights are in order to issuing takedown notices and taking legal action. Before any of these, however, the first thing you should do is report it to Spotify.
To do this, follow these steps:
- On the desktop app, right-click the playlist title or artist name.
- Select Report. A form will open in your browser.
- Complete the form and Submit.
The next thing you can do is make a legal claim on the content. Each report is investigated on a case-by-case basis, and any content that is deemed inappropriate will be removed. To make a legal claim, click here.
Good luck!
by Francesca | Nov 9, 2023 | Music Industry, Music Production
On top of monetizing your songs through media like TV, advertising, and film, publishers are masters of making sure copyrights, song registration, and general admin are taken care of. Within that general admin comes making sure every detail of each artists’ submitted work is in tip-top shape. While you’re writing your next banger, it helps to keep everything in order as you go to make sure you don’t lose anything along the way. Among those key details, there are 5 main ones to make sure you have saved and ready to go. Let’s dive in…
5 Things You Need To Document For Every Song You Write
Lyrics
These are important to have on deck, as an artist might need them to cut the song or a music supervisor may need them for a film/tv placement down the line. Making sure you have them documented ahead of time saves the stress of locating them later if needed.
Splits
Great songwriting is the basis for some of the biggest hits ever created, and collaboration is one of the best tools to get them there. When it comes to joint songwriting, it’s important to decipher who will get credit for what before the song ever comes out.
Typically, this is done through Split Sheets. A split sheet is an agreement that identifies who wrote what percentage of the song such as the producer(s) and songwriter(s). Each creator has to agree about how the percentages are defined. Some artists will divide it evenly based on who is in the room writing and producing the song. Some will base the percentages on the person’s specific contribution lyrics, hook, melody, and beats.
When it’s time to copyright your music, it’s always a good idea to double check who gets what and how much.
Writer / Publishing Info
Writer and pub information is important for admin purposes when the song is registered. (For example, information like your PRO, IPI#, publishing name, etc.) If this data is broken, the writers don’t get paid and nobody gets the proper credit they deserve.
DOC
This one’s self explanatory, but keeping track of the DOC (aka date of creation) is a popular detail that may come up down the line. Take note!
High-Quality MP3’s
It’s also important to have both an mp3 and a WAV version of your track on file. MP3’s are the most important, but if your song happens to get the opportunity to be placed in movies, TV, etc. (aka sync), a WAV will be required.
In Conclusion…
The takeaway here is to always be prepared for anything. The last thing you want is to be asked for a detail you don’t have and have no idea how to find it. With all these in order, you’re on the right track.
Good luck!
by Francesca | Nov 9, 2023 | Music Industry, Playlists
You’re an independent artist who’s trying to promote your new release. You updated all your social media accounts, threw a release party, and even updated your EPK. So, now what?
A great way to get your music heard is through the use of Spotify playlists!
To do this, you must catch the eye of a Spotify playlist curator, the people in charge of picking YOUR songs and adding it to the appropriate playlist.It also will expose new crowds to your music and have the potential to increase your followers and listeners on Spotify. This also has the potential of catching the eye of a curator as they see an increase in popularity. Numbers don’t lie!
If you’ve ever wondered how to create a Spotify playlist then keep reading!
Follow these tips to learn how to create a Spotify playlist:
1. Get creative – Choose a theme!
Playlists can be curated and customized to practically any mood or genre these days.
In fact, playlist themes can even be based off of specific holidays, events, or other monumental time periods symbolizing a specific music type. These can be as simple as “Party Music” or “Slow Songs”.
2. Get going – Pick your songs
Spotify playlists can contain up to 3,333 songs and still be playable in offline mode. However, most playlists are made up of way less songs and we suggest having a minimum of 20-30 songs for your own! The songs should be from a variety of different artists, not just your own stuff, but still hold true to the overall theme you chose in step one.
3. Publish it and share your playlist
Playlists always do better when shared through multiple platforms! By exposing your followers on other social media sites you are increasing the likelihood of your playlist being heard!
You can easily publicize your new Spotify playlist by adding the link in your next tweet or putting it in your Instagram bio.
4. Keep it fresh – Update it!
Continuously update your playlist with new bands and songs. Maybe do a weekly or monthly update that fans can consistently follow for music suggestions. This way you will not only be keeping fans excited about new content but you’ll also be able to grab the attention of new fans and curators while keeping your OG fans satisfied at the same time too.
When it comes to Spotify playlists, the possibilities are endless! The creativity and effort involved in the creation process is completely up to you.
Don’t be discouraged by low follower counts or streams, as Spotify curators are always on the lookout for hardworking artists with great new music.
