Sooner or later, if you're serious about becoming a professional musician, you're going to need to do some proper marketing.
After all, being a professional means that, at least to a certain extent, you treat your brand like a business.
And, like any business, you'll need to be willing to pay for services that benefit your brand and will result in increased business (or in some cases, fandom).
Trying to find the right services you can pay to promote your music can be overwhelming – after all, there are a ton of services out there. And not all are terribly helpful.
In the world of music and other creative industries, promotion is often an overlooked ingredient required for a successful career as an artist.
To succeed as a musician, you must have a solid promotional strategy in place, which will involve getting your brand (and music) in front of people who can help tell your story and spread the word about your art.
But the world of music promotion is a vast one – there are countless promoters and services out there that claim to be effective means of promotion.
With so many options, it can be difficult to tell which options are legit versus those that are ineffective or scammy.
We've created this guide to help you understand the best companies that you can pay to promote your music.
All of the services in this article had to meet 3 main criteria to be considered for inclusion:
All the companies in this guide allow for a wide range of budgets.
This means that none of them require huge sums of money upfront – at most, about $100.
At the same time, for those of you with larger budgets available for promotion (i.e. $1,000 or more), each of the companies you'll find here will still offer value that will increase significantly and scale with these higher budgets.
Music promoters are notorious for making vague, empty promises that fall short of expectations.
This is partly due to the nature of the music industry itself, but also due in part to most music promotion services simply not being of high quality in the first place.
In order to be included in this list, a company has to have a stellar track record in regards to successful promotion and customer service.
At some point in your music career, you'll likely receive emails from spammy-looking music promotion services that make ridiculous claims like "get 1 million Spotify plays for just $10!"
There are a myriad of sketchy services out there that use bots to get you plays, followers, or views
While it can be cool to see your numbers instantly jump up for almost no money, the reality is that using these bot services actually does more harm than good.
If you use bot services to boost your stats, you may actually be penalized by whatever platform you're sending the bots to.
We've heard stories of artists trying ordering bot-generated YouTube plays, only to have their profile suspended on account of YouTube thinking the artist was attempting to defraud them of ad money.
The following list doesn't include any bot-based services – while these companies may use cutting-edge automation in their services, the end result is always real humans putting their eyes on your brand and their ears on your music.
Omari was started by a music producer who decided he'd had enough of paying ineffective promotional services hard-earned money, only to not see any results for their efforts.
Look past the minimal site design, as Omari has some very helpful services you can take advantage of.
You can pay Omari to promote your music online in a variety of ways:
Omari has been around for about a decade and has a loyal user base, so it's definitely worth checking out if you're thinking about paying to promote your music.
When it comes to YouTube video promotion services, Promolta is second to none.
Promolta gets eyes on your music videos by finding blogs that are interested in including your videos somewhere on their website.
Do this across enough blogs and, eventually, the views will start coming in.
They make it easy for you to get new people checking out your music videos, all for reasonable prices.
To be clear: Promolta isn't going to boost your views by the millions. Any service claiming to do that probably isn't legit.
But Promolta can help jumpstart your new releases and help them climb out of the sub-5k view count range quickly for a reasonable amount of money.
And since hitting the 10k view count can be an important signal in getting viewers to take your craft seriously,
We've heard it time and time again – music publicists (and PR firms in general) are too expensive and inefficient to warrant spending money on them.
With these problems of the PR industry in mind, we created Promo Panda – your personal publicist, all in a web app.
While your average PR firm is typically no less than $800 per month (with the price goes way up from there), Promo Panda can start getting your music reviewed in music blogs for as little as $99.
With Promo Panda, you can create, manage, and execute totally custom PR campaigns with just a few clicks.
Want to get interviewed by a music blog so you can discuss your upcoming tour? Promo Panda can do that.
Looking to get your new album reviewed by like-minded music writers in blogs all over the world? We can do that too.
Getting your story told through online publications is important to building your brand as a musician and creative.
After all, it's one thing to sing your own praises through social media. It's another to have independent writers at widely-read music blogs do the same.
When it comes to building and maintaining an online reputation, there's no easier or more cost-effective tool than Promo Panda.
Create a profile today and start getting noticed.
Pitch Playlist is a Spotify promotion service that can help find playlist curators who may be interested in including your tracks in some of their playlists.
It's straightforward, and although there aren't a ton of other services they offer, you may want to look into this company if you have an interest in boosting your Spotify numbers or (more importantly) reaching new potential fans.
Aside from both being alliterative, Pitch Playlist is to Spotify playlisters what Promo Panda is to music bloggers – both eliminate the need for you to waste time and effort trying to pitch yourself to tastemakers.
While Spotify numbers themselves aren't a big deal by themself, so long as they're indicative of real people listening to your music or putting their eyes on your brand, you'll be in good shape.
Something to note is that, at the time of writing this, Pitch Playlist doesn't put their prices on their website.
Instead, you have to reach out and inquire to get a customized quote.
While this doesn't necessarily mean that their prices are high, it's something that we want to mention ahead of time so you can know what to expect before learning more.
At the same time, getting placed in the right Spotify playlist can be a serious gamechanger when it comes to building up fans.
