First Thing To Do As An Upcoming Artiste
First Thing To Do As An Upcoming Artiste.
In This Review
In my line of work as a digital marketer, specifically for artistes and record labels, I have come to realize that the biggest hurdle and question an upcoming artiste is confronted with is not really how to get a standard studio song; it is where to go from here, after recording a standard studio song. Many do not know how to manage themselves online, distribute or get their royalties. Most importantly, most do not know how to grow an audience both online and offline. This is a very wide subject, but I have tried to make it as concise as possible, while moving abstract content to other posts which I’ll try to link from this article to make your journey easier.
How do you establish yourself as an artiste?
- Social Media
- Online music platforms
- Expand your reach on the internet
- Do you need a website?
Social Media
The effect of Social media in your life as an artiste cannot be overemphasized. Being on as many social media platforms as possible has the potential of turning your artiste life around. We have up to five major social media platforms. These five platforms if handled perfectly can make a huge difference. Ofcus, social media is a world of its own and in most cases, to truly excel in your social media experience, you might need the help of a professional. For example; a social media accounts manager to handle technical areas such as running ads and setting up a brilliant demographics that works for your brand and genre of music. Collecting data and building presence for your social media accounts and so on. Social media is a very powerful tool as such you can absolutely become a star by knowing the right things to do from the comfort of your home. A couple of known stars took the advantage of social media to become internet sensations. There is no need for name calling, we already can tell by the invention of a specific name for a group of social media stars, “online influencers“. Yes, you can also become an influencer just by using this tool right; so how do you go about it? First, you set up your account. You do not really need money to be seen or heard on social media. Twitter for example has a concept called ‘Hashtag’, what most people do is jump on trending hashtags and gain traffic from that particular topic. Tiktok has a concept of using trending sounds to be seen by a lot of people. This might not be ideal for an artiste trying to promote his or her own work, but you can get creative with advertising your own music through participating in other music challenges. Tiktok is exciting too because it allows you duet with other creators, hence your own creativity can be discovered through this. Facebook has groups, there are groups on facebook for various reasons and you can communicate with the admins to let you post your music clips or links, this way you can reach more people even without having a lot of friends on your personal account. Every social media platforms has a way for you to reach more outside your immediate friends and connections. Although this can be limiting in the sense that you are not directly communicating with your own fans or people who will directly like your music, this is where ads come in. To learn about making targeted ads for your brand, I have made an article here.
Online Music Platforms
Making your song readily available should first of all not be about making money as an upcoming artiste, it should be about making your music available to your fans and people who are liable to like your genre and style. Today, there are a wide range of platforms where people prefer to stream songs, some prefer iTunes, some Spotify, some Audiomack and some on Boomplay etc. The question is, are the people in your country easily accessible to iTunes? You need to find out, from there you know where and where to make your song available. Most parts of Africa prefer audiomack and boomplay because they have a free and easy interface, so as an upcoming artiste in Africa, your songs will possibly do well being available on those platforms. How do you get your songs on these platforms? There are a lot of services online offering to distribute your songs to these platforms for a little fee, one of such is Distrokid, some will even do it for free. Although rumor has it that the free ones might not renumerate all your earnings but this is not the time to be bothered about your earnings, you can always take down your songs when you are established and redistribute with a better deal. For now, look for a distributing platform that can also get your songs on audiomack and boomplay.
Expand Your Reach on The Internet
Expanding your reach on the internet is one of the best bet of going viral. You can say most things about this one has been described under SocialMedia, but that’s just taking advantage of the free provisions. Expanding your reach goes beyond jumping on hashtags onTwitter or invading Facebook groups and dumping your music links on them, or jumping on Tiktok trends. You can expand your reach adequately by taking advantage of the sponsored ads features provided by all of these social media platforms. It has proven over the years to be a very strong feature to reach a wider audience. But if money is going to be an issue for you, then you have another option; that is the search engine optimization. This is a free way to reach a broader audience, and it takes a little bit of skill and hard work. It is the subtitle for paid advert. Search engine optimization is a broad subject but for social media platforms, we just might be able to shrink it down.
Kindly watch out for our next post and please share this to your friends if you found it helpful.
