Are You Promoting Your Music Enough?

Promotion, possibly a musician's worse enemy? I say this because it's the part most people get wrong, intentionally or not. I've seen people take time to record the perfect CD, pay to have an excellent cover done, get it into shops worldwide, then just sit down and wait for their CD to sell. But it hardly does. Why? BECAUSE THEY HARDLY PROMOTED IT!! You can't just expect people to walk into a record shop and buy your music, you have to let people know it's there and give them a good reason to buy it!

Now I know you may not have yourself down as a sales person. And that's OK, most musicians don't. But I'll tell you now, without including some form of promotion in your campaigns, your music won't get very far.

So how much promotion do you need to do for a successful release? Well, that would depend on the size and type of the project. One thing's for sure though, you should be promoting your release between 2 and 4 week prior to the release date. You start out mentioning it without too many details, then as the date gets closer give more details and making a bigger deal out of it. Creating anticipation is a great way to pre sell your music, and if done correctly will mean that a nice portion of your sells should come within the first week.

Once you've released your CD, you should carry on promoting and spend all your time on it. Where possible you should be doing radio appearances, live shows, interviews, online promotion, flyering, and anything else you can fit in. Simply writing a one off post on a music forum won't get you the amount of sales you'll need to even cover the cost of making your music, so think bigger. Even a one off advert in a popular magazine often isn't enough, people react better to buying when they've seen your promotion in a few places and are more curious about your product. That means for the next month or more after your release you need to be EVERYWHERE your customers turn!

Please don't make the mistake of under promoting your music, if you're going to put the effort in to recording and releasing your music, the least you could do is let it reach it's full potential. To your success.