How to Promote Your Music Without Social Media

How to Promote Your Music Without Social Media

26 Comments

I just… can’t.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t! You really should. I mean, it would probably be better if you did. After all, social media is where the majority of music discovery occurs.

My advice is to record yourself lipsyncing your track the whole way through in 4-6 different locales, chop those into 60-ish 15-30 second clips, and share one every day on TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts. When one of them hits, share it again and put some ad money behind it.

Am I going to do that myself? No way. I simply can’t be bothered. For one, I don’t do video.

Instead, I tried doing social media my own way.

I put classic synthpop album anniversaries and artists’ birthdays in my calendar, along with my own release anniversaries, so I’d have something to post about. I also did a series of posts featuring classic synthpop albums asking “what’s the worst song on this album?”

They generated lots of likes, shares, and comments, to which I dutifully replied. Sometimes for weeks. It was a lot of work!

Did it expand my organic reach? Not that I can tell.

I’ve got several friends who are happy just being “Spotify artists.” They’ll announce new releases on socials, and that’s it.

Which is perfectly legit! They can grow their audience with ads and/or collabs, and if they release a truly great song, it might take off in the algorithm.

The odds of ever returning a profit are slim to none, and they’re fine with that.

I’m not willing to go that far (yet), so here’s what I’ve settled on:

I send out 1-2 emails a week to my 3000 subscribers. The following day, I share those emails as social media posts, minus any exclusive or overly personal bits.

A few days after that, I’ll promote the posts on Facebook and Instagram with my ongoing reach ad campaign. I’m spending $4 per day total, $2 to each platform.

Here’s an average day:

Placements are simple: Facebook News Feed for the FB ad set, and Instagram News Feed for the IG one.

My targeting for both ad sets looks like this:

I’m targeting my followers plus anyone who engaged with me on Facebook or Instagram.

Obviously you have to create custom audiences first, like so:

Whenever I have a new post, I just duplicate the ad, select the new post, save, and turn off the old ad.

I don’t want to get too deep into the mechanics of the campaign, as I’m sure there’s plenty of room for improvement.

In fact, looking at the IG 30D custom audience above, I can see that the audience is too large to effectively reach if I’m only hitting 400-ish people per day.

The point is that I’m able to compensate for my lack of organic reach through ads, so that my posts have enough engagement as to not be embarrassing.

That’s it for social media, but not for my engagement with fans.

I also share more personal updates with my supporters on Patreon, for their eyes only. And of course they also get exclusive tracks twice a month.

The net result is that I devote the most attention to my biggest supporters and the least to strangers. Isn’t that how it should be?

Of course, that’s not all I’m doing to promote my music!

I’ve also got:

Can you see why this blog is called Passive Promotion? These campaigns are continuously operating in the background 24/7 while I focus on making the best music I can, both for myself and for my production clients.

One marketing component that may be suspicious in its absence is playlist promotion.

I’m talking about paid playlisting campaigns, not SubmitHub. I just don’t think they’re worth it at this point in my career. That said, I do get playlist placements through Rise.

Speaking of which, for six months or so, I dropped Rise and all playlist promotion, just to see what would happen. The answer? Not much. It didn’t supercharge the algorithm the way I hoped it might.

But I did notice that my release engagement dropped dramatically, from around 8% down to 4%. That tells me that a decent chunk of the 11K automatic Rise saves I get with every release actually result in streams.

In case you’re not familiar, Rise runs Meta ads to their discovery site Tout, where users create a taste profile by sampling artists in their chosen genre (here’s me).

When a user “likes” an artist, they opt in to following them on Spotify and having new releases added to their library automatically. I’ve got a full review and discount code here.

I also run Spotify Marquee and/or Showcase campaigns when a track is particularly promising, though if you read the linked posts, you’ll see I’ve somewhat soured on both.

And that’s the full playbook!

I don’t have a lot of money, but I do have more money than time, which is better spent on things other than social media.

What’s your approach to social media? Share your thoughts and strategies in the comments!

26 Comments

  1. I HATE the vids and social media aspect of music. Why can’t music just be for music?! As always, you offer good advice and remain an inspiration!

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    1. Thanks Paula! I’m with you 100%. I was way late on the Instagram train because I felt I lacked quality images. Still haven’t boarded the TikTok train!

      Reply

    2. The sad truth is that WITHOUT vids and social media, it can be nearly impossible for folks to find out about your music, which is why we closely follow what Brian does–which almost always includes paid advertising–something that MANY artists frown on. However, our fan funnel is one of the ONLY ways that we’ve been able to grow our email list, our YouTube following, and our Facebook group membership.

      There’s so much music–and even alot of “good” music out here–but if we never get the chance to encounter it, how do we even know it exists? –For instance, an major artist that we liked in the 90s, we found out has been releasing albums (for 30 years!), but not on a major label. So, we had to Google him and get to his website to get all his latest. It taught us that just because the music is released–and the old music liked–doesn’t mean that fans will continually know when a new album is released unless the artist is aggressive about advertising/promotion and/or the fans are relentlessly trying to watch for it.

      Great comment, by the way. ‘Sparked a whole debate in our household….

      Reply

      1. As much as musicians like to rail against Spotify for low payouts, objectively speaking, they’re my #1 method of reaching new listeners. It’s only the 19th of the month and I’ve already got 11K Discovery Mode streams.

        For all I know, Rise might be generating just as many listeners, depending on how many it takes to hit their 225 follower monthly guarantee.

        So there’s two ways people can discover your music without vids and social media, and the first is free. Well, free-ish considering the reduced royalty rate.

        Not that I disagree with the central premise. My cover art videos may be lazy, but I do post them on social media and YouTube!

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    3. I had to leave social media and its demands for my sanity sake. After 15 years of posting which use to work until 2018, I have focused my efforts on real connection, privately and also on YouTube where my music can be found with its videos and Bandcamp, etc.
      I think social media was a good idea until it became locked down and only 1 people out of 100 see your posts. Very exhausting.

      Reply

      1. I used to see you on Facebook all the time! I agree that your mental health comes first. I check replies every night before email for 10-15 minutes tops.

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        1. Indeed, sorry for years later talking about it, I didn’t see your message until now from doing a self search online.

        3. Have you considered subvert.fm
          Join free, become a co-owner with the rest of us.
          Music platform that is the successor or aims to be to Bandcamp

  2. Tiktok has been good for me. It’s now my best platform. But totally unpredictable. Sometimes 1800 views. Other times no views. But it’s been fun, not tedious, to make the videos. I even enjoy arguing with the trolls.

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    2. Hi Brian. Can you believe I never heard of rise / tout before? I was researching deeply. Cheap is it not. I do t also see clearly whether they have room for classical or neo classical piano music, for instance. Anyway, since the recommendation comes from you, I will give them a further thought….
      Have a great weekend

      Reply

      1. I’m only surprised because you’ve followed me for so long! I opt for their cheapest conversions campaign, which I believe is $202.50 per month with the discount code. That gets me 255+ new followers per month plus some playlist placements, which aren’t guaranteed. But most importantly, all of my new releases automatically get 11K saves on release day from the Rise following I’ve built up.

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    3. I completely struggle to upload any music videos to TikTok. The music always gets removed while uploading (because it’s copyrighted). Then I should add my music later on in the process. But then most of the time it doesn’t find my music to add it, although it should be there.
      How do you work with TikTok?

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      2. I’m probably the last person you should be asking about TikTok, but when I upload my little cover art videos, I never have any problems. Then I add my song which it always finds since I switched back from a business to personal account, and set the balance to 100% my upload.

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        3. I make my videos with Screenflow on Mac, but I doubt that’s ideal. I just happen to own it and know how to use it.

          As for setting the balance to 100%, I don’t remember the specifics as I’ve done it maybe three times, but when you search for and select your sound in TikTok, you can set the audio balance between that sound and the sound in the video you uploaded.

  3. Great work Brian and thanks so much for your honest and transparent posts. An inspiration to us all!

    Reply

  4. It’s interesting you sent out this email at around the time I was thinking about this very question and came to the exact same solution. Just spending money instead of time.

    Making 1 solid video (maybe after some testing) and then promoting that with ads vs making daily videos hoping one goes viral, saves a lot of time. And going viral doesn’t necessarily mean conversions either, since social media platforms are optimized to retain customers.

    I think the next question, and maybe one that is valuable to your readers, is how do you setup ads to optimize for conversions to Bandcamp and your email list vs sending them to dead end platforms like Spotify? Feel free to point me to any of your articles where you’ve already covered this. I’ve read many but forget things easily lmao

    And by calling Spotify a “dead end” platform, I don’t mean it’s a bad platform. I mean that they try to capture listeners in their own ecosystem vs letting you use their platform to also get email signups or direct purchases, etc.

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    1. Great question Connor!

      Of course you can’t run a conversions campaign on Bandcamp because they don’t support the Meta pixel. You can certainly run an opt-in campaign for your email list though! I have, but I don’t think I’ve written about it, on the site at least. It may have been the topic of one of my monthly email newsletters.

      I’m currently offering five free songs as an email subscription bribe. I provide one a day and talk a bit about each, which leads into my larger welcome series of 20+ emails over six weeks or so.

      I’ve found it more valuable to get subscribers as a byproduct of my free + shipping/handling offer rather than to run a campaign specifically for opt-ins. But for most, it’s not too difficult to set up an opt-in page and pair it with a conversions campaign and get subscribers for less than $1.

      Reply

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