Is One Platform Sufficient to Blow a Music Artist?

People think of blowing in music as when your music comes up constantly on very popular platforms. Cable Tv is one of the most influential domains where you can have such an impression. People like Kizz Daniel, Asake, Mavins Music, Wizkid, Skibii to mention but a few have all used the influence of multiple air rotations to stand out amongst the crowd. Although Music networks on tv are not the only place capable of making a hit out of your songs, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok have proven over the years that you can become a celebrity from these platforms. Soweto by Victony is a great example of music that got its reputation out of TikTok rotation.

When you follow this Tiktok link you would see that Soweto by Victony got used by over half a million people Tiktokers, most of which are influencers.

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♬ Soweto – Victony & Tempoe

Instagram and Twitter are not left out in their ability to uplift people into celebrity status as they also have their fair share of transformation stories. Lastly, radio airplay. People have become very successful by promoting heavily on radio stations. The demographics are surprisingly high on this side, and the number of people you can reach utilizing the powers of the radio stations is still astonishing even at these times of visual media upgrades and infiltration.

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Some of these promotions though were planned and many others were unplanned, your song might pop up once somewhere and someone might pick it up to make it go viral from there. Either from the radio station or tv or on the internet – the internet is the more likely place for a fortune such as this to fall on you and your craft since influencers are used to jumping on current trends. I am sure you are here because you do not want to leave your going viral to chance. Hence you have to plan your way up. The question remains if you’re on a budget, what platform should you focus on to blow your music up?

A combined promo is the real promo.

A team that is fully ready for a successful promotion must have a budget covering every platform extensively. Blowing up is not really by miracle, it’s through strategic promotion utilizing every platform available for this purpose. Tv, radio, internet, billboards, and print media.

But you have to be a very successful record label to competently afford a budget to cover the cost of promoting on every important platform available for music promotion. In Nigeria alone, record labels spend between N50m – N100m to promote a single to its full potential. If you think that is ridiculous, let us do a quick rundown.

• Heavy rotation on major radio stations across the country – N10m – N20m
• Twitter trend running for a week straight, Facebook and IG ads – N2m
• Youtube promotions, Snapchat promotions – N2m
• TikTok music trend by major accounts to trend a song – N5m – N10m
• Billboards promotion across specific states – N10m
• Cable networks promotion (Mtv, Hiptv, Soundcity, Trace, etc) – N10m – N20m
• Press releases – N1m

The intent of this post is to figure out if focusing on one out of these various outlets can actually do the job of transforming a song into a national hit. The answer is yes and no. Yes because like I have stated above, we have seen this type of situation play out before, where a particular song will blow out from a social media platform and it becomes a big song. Songs like Big Thug Boys by AV made it out after social media, Tiktok to be specific, held it down for them.

So yes, it is possible to channel your funds to a particular platform and break through from there. There just has to be a very good strategic plan in the way you utilize your funds to achieve good success.

No in the sense that it is still a risky way to promote, promotions like these depend on the wider audience to pick it up and make it start to go viral on other promotional platforms too.

What platform should you focus your music promotion on?

In a situation where you would rather channel your funds into one particular area of promotion for effectiveness, you might be met with the dilemma of selecting which of the platforms to focus the energy only; social media? and if yes, which of them? Facebook? Instagram? Tiktok or Twitter? If you take social media off the table, will you go for cable networks instead? Or radio. These are the only available options for anyone who is trying to focus on one platform due to the availability or unavailability of substantial funds.

Our professional advice would be social media. The platform you choose will be determined by your funds too. Some platforms are more expensive to promote than others. Take Tiktok for example, you do not go through the traditional way of promotion on TikTok. Funding and having your posts promoted by TikTok. Things go viral on TikTok by the number of active users involved in that particular sound. On Tiktok, you pay a whole lot of people to use your sound and you start to hope it gets picked up by the majority of internet users.

So, What is best for you?

Your money, sadly, determines what’s best for you. Sure on Facebook or Instagram, you can run an ad with N500k and reach say 300-800k people. A mini influencer on Tiktok will take N150-N200k, and you would need to employ at least a hundred of such and many other smaller ones before you can start to experience growth in your bid.  The question is, which is more powerful and effective? Let me put the question to you. Say you see an ad on Instagram today, and you come on tomorrow and see the same ad, the problem is it is from the same account (and even if it is not from the same account, the fact that it is a sponsored post puts a little strain on the campaign for some weird reasons), you log on the third day and you come across the same ad again, and probably for the next couple of days. The truth is you might get tired of the ad especially if the song doesn’t immediately become appealing to you. Now compare this scenario with coming on Tiktok and start swiping, but every other post has a particular song in the background, and by various users. It strikes more awareness and attention in you. This approach costs way more but it is clear that the result definitely sparks up something positive for the sake of the promotion.

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