If you're in the game for music promotion, there are a lot of options.
That is, there are a lot of options if you have a halfway-decent promotional budget.
The reality is there aren't a whole lot of completely free services that you can use to promote your music.
In fact, there is arguably no such thing as free promotion if you consider time to be worth some amount of money.
While there are free to use services you can use to get a buzz going, they may require significant input from you in order for them to start working well.
In this article, we'll go over the sites and methods you can use to start promoting your music on a shoestring budget.
Let's jump right into in.
Pretty much every single major social media platform you'd ever want to promote your music on is free to use.
Since Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok are all free to use, so long as you take the time to post content regularly, you can start building a buzz around your music.
Twitter can help you build a following, get attention for your music, and you may even get influencers to retweet you.
A Tiestö retweet was pretty much a sole reason for Martin Garrix's rocketship liftoff as a professional DJ and EDM producer.
With a Twitter marketing plan, you can promote your new music on Twitter.
Here is a list of ways you can promote your music on Instagram:
Instagram allows you to add hashtags to each of your posts. You can add as many hashtags as you wish, however, you need to use at least 25. The purpose of adding a hashtag is to make it easier for people to find your music in their feed.
When you want to share a song or song cover, you can either use a long, time-consuming video or short videos.
Some people choose to post photos of themselves listening to the song or of the music itself. Other people post photos of their families listening to the song or of friends dancing to it.
You can add more details to each photo, including the cover artwork, song name, album name, and release date.
You can also create a video to share on your Instagram account. You can also use music videos to promote your songs on Instagram.
TikTok is the best social media app to promote your music.
Here are some reasons why TikTok is so good for promoting music
I can’t overstate the fact that TikTok is easy to use and work on. You can edit a video right on the app without too many complications. Just a few clicks and you can share it with the world. It’s really easy to upload a video for your music.
People from all over the world have taken the TikTok app. It's very popular in America, South Africa, Canada, Philippines, and so on.
So if you’re an aspiring music artist, it’s a good idea to start promoting your work on TikTok. The app has a lot of global influence.
The problem with promoting your music on social media is that it takes A LOT of time to do it correctly!
The constant need for the creation of new content means that, if you choose to promote our music through social media, you'll always be needing to spend more and more time.
However, even the most successful musicians simply cannot always produce new content in a constant, timely fashion.
There are only so many hours in the day, and artists need to spend them on other things (such as actually making awesome music!)
Therefore, promoting your music through social media is not for everyone. It's a lot of work.
As we mentioned, if you don't consider your time worth anything, social media is a fine, non-capital intensive way of promoting your tunes.
This is a business decision, and one that only you can make.
Even if your time is only worth $20 or $30 per hour, if you're spending two to three hours promoting your stuff on social media daily, that's the equivalent of $60-$90 every day .
At some point, to speed up the pace at which you can promote your music and gain new fans, you'll need to spring for professional help eventually.
The difference between doing everything yourself vs. paying to get assistance can be night and day.
Plus, high-quality professional promotion doesn't need to cost a fortune.
With Promo Panda for example, our users can get their releases reviewed and written up in awesome music blogs for as little as $99.
And, for just a few hundred dollars more, Promo Panda can provide you with a full-fledged PR campaign (the type that would usually cost thousands if you used a traditional PR firm or publicist!).
We've created other articles that go over some of the best sites you can pay to get promotional help, and we highly recommend that you at least consider spending a little money to promote your music.
But if for now, all you can manage is to spend time, not money, go for it.
A little elbow grease can take you a long way!
