Rutger Ansley Rosenborg from Chartmetric shares valuable music marketing tips for emerging artists to use as they map out the plan for their upcoming releases.

1.) Put Your Music First

Successful music marketing starts with music you believe in.

When it comes to music marketing and music promotion in the digital era, it’s easy to put the cart before the horse — to get so caught up in music marketing strategies that you forget about what really matters: your music.

But if Fyre Festival taught us anything, it’s that marketing is only successful if you have something genuine to communicate with an audience, whether it’s a legitimate music festival lineup or, in this case, your meaningful new track.

Granted, you might not find success right out of the gate, but if you do have something organic to communicate with a receptive audience, your chances of long-term success are that much better.

In other words, hone your craft, commit to your craft, and then start thinking about how to get your music heard.

2.) Understand Your Market Place

Learn from other artists in your market.

While we can’t stress enough how important it is to put your music first, once you’re ready to get your music heard, developing market intelligence, or an understanding of your market — and your place in it — is absolutely essential.

So, how exactly do you do that? Fortunately, in today’s digital music industry, data analytics has opened up a world of market intelligence for everyone.

And that’s largely because music data analytics can help you see not only who and where your audiences might be but also how you stack up against similar sounding artists who might already be two steps ahead of you. Knowing these key points can help you think about how to model your music marketing strategies after your successful neighboring artists — not to mention what markets will and won’t be particularly important for your music.

3.) Recognize Your Strengths

Know where to take off and where to back off.

Once you have an idea of the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that tend to be most relevant to similar sounding artists, it’s time for some deeper self-reflection. Understanding your own strengths — and, by extension, your potential weaknesses — can show you both where to invest more of your music marketing energy and also where to put on the brakes.

It’s totally okay if you’re not everything to everyone. Because niches win in today’s music industry, you can be successful by just being something to some people. Maybe you’re heavily influenced by gaming culture and your music reflects that. When it comes to marketing your music on social media, you might consider doubling down on YouTube and Twitch instead of trying to split your resources across Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Just like artists, every social media platform has its strengths, so it’s best to start with the platforms that complement yours and grow from there.

By the same token, you can take a look at your historical demographic data. Are your followers and subscribers mostly in the 18-24 age range or the 35-44 age range? In what cities do you tend to generate most of your followers, streams, and views? Which of your posts tend to get the most engagement?

Consider how you might be able to use these strengths to reach the listeners who are most likely to connect with you and your music.

4.) Set Goals for Yourself

Make reasonable, concrete objectives that you can measure and ultimately reach.

So, you have your music, you understand your place in the market, and you have a pretty good idea of what individual strengths you can leverage…. What now?

If you don’t set some measurable benchmarks that take your music, market intelligence, and strengths into account, you won’t really know what you’re actually trying to achieve and whether or not you’re succeeding in getting there.

The odds of achieving Lil Nas X-like virality are astronomical, so the smarter strategy is to focus on hard won incremental gains. This month, that might mean growing your follower base by 5 percent and landing three new non-editorial playlists. Next month, that might translate to one editorial playlist and 20K more streams than the month before. Next year, that might mean selling out a 250-cap room in your hometown.

If you’re not hitting your objectives, then it’s back to the drawing board. Maybe you need to focus more on your strengths or consider how you might improve some of your weaknesses. It also couldn’t hurt to get some inspiration from other artists in your market who have managed to hit those objectives. Or, maybe some new music is the answer.

Don’t be afraid of iteration. If you commit to meeting incremental music marketing objectives like these and make the necessary adjustments along the way, you’ll likely increase your chances of sustainable success.

5.) Use Your Creativity

Make your marketing work for your music and not the other way around.

At the end of the day, the music industry is a creative industry, so harnessing that creativity is absolutely essential when you’re thinking about how to promote your music.

While data can help guide your decision making, resource allocation, and strategic execution, the essence of your marketing should ideally be an extension of the narrative you’re trying to communicate with your music. In other words, there is no one-size-fits-all formula to follow, and that’s because not every artist’s story is the same.

Think about what your music is trying to say and use your social media messaging, curator outreach, and press releases to reinforce that. It doesn’t have to be personal or political or any explicit “message” per se; it just has to be true to your music and your story as an artist.

And that individualism doesn’t mean, by the way, that you can’t learn from the creative ways in which other artists have told their own stories.

6.) Engage Your Audience

Connect with the people who love your music.

Generally speaking, the more you make your music marketing about organic communication and the less you make it about self-promotion, the better.

Sure, generating more streams matters, but stream counts aren’t everything. What’s really important is the ears behind those streams. And having millions of ears on you will only benefit you if the fingertips — and heart and minds — are there to follow.

In marketing, we call this engagement. The more engaged your audience is, the more enduring success you’ll find with your music. It’s one thing to be able to reach American audiences in music industry hubs like New York City and Los Angeles, but if listeners there aren’t taking the time to follow you or share your music, then that momentary success will ultimately fizzle.

However, if listeners in Mexico City or Jakarta are all about your music, then figure out what’s resonating with them. Open a dialogue and foster a relationship with your audience first, and then start thinking about how to find similar audiences in other places.