{"id":4684,"date":"2018-10-10T05:00:15","date_gmt":"2018-10-10T12:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/passivepromotion.com\/?p=4684"},"modified":"2023-01-01T19:26:25","modified_gmt":"2023-01-02T03:26:25","slug":"how-i-promoted-my-new-album","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/passivepromotion.com\/how-i-promoted-my-new-album\/","title":{"rendered":"How I Promoted My New Album"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
In a recent\u00a0How I\u2019m Promoting My Music This Month<\/strong> email newsletter (subscribe here<\/a>), I mentioned that I was working through a long to-do list to promote my new album<\/a>. Several subscribers emailed to ask for a copy of that list. It’s full of abbreviations, acronyms, and other indecipherables, so I figured I’d break it down here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The items are mostly specific to my situation, and as such, this isn’t intended as a how-to guide. Instead, think of it as a brainstorming session. You’re likely to find at least one or two new weapons to add to your arsenal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Keep in mind that I started album promotion about two weeks before release, with no aspirations of mainstream press coverage. This is more of a “get my shit together” list than a legit campaign.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Have your expectations been sufficiently lowered? Alright, let’s get started…<\/p>\n\n\n\n Optimize Bandcamp tags.<\/strong> I surveyed similar releases and put together a list of tags that accurately describe my music, that also match their genres in search. For example, “synth pop” is a subgenre of Pop, and “synthwave” is a subgenre of Electronic. Why there’s a space in one but not in the other is beyond me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Send teaser email with artwork. <\/strong>Sam Todhunter<\/a>, art director at NewRetroWave<\/a>, designed the cover art. He’s well known in the synthwave scene, and many of the outlets I promoted to are familiar with his work. As soon as I received the final artwork, I sent out individual emails to about 30 YouTube channels, blogs, and radio shows to show off Sam’s latest and to let them know the album was coming their way soon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ask about vinyl on Facebook.<\/strong> I’ve never pressed vinyl and I’d really like to, but I didn’t know where to start, so I joined the Synthwave Vinyl Collectors group on Facebook and asked for their advice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Submit to LANDR<\/a><\/strong>. You know them for their automated mastering service<\/a>, but they also do distribution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Create teaser video for Bandcamp Pro, YouTube, Patreon.<\/strong> I put together a video in iMovie with animations by Beeple<\/a>, uploaded it to YouTube, and set it as my intro video on Bandcamp<\/a> and Patreon<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Ads on teaser and single.<\/strong> I ran Google Ads to run on YouTube for the teaser video, and for the static cover art video<\/a> for the lead single, “The Future You is Forever”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Compose pre-order announcement.<\/strong> I enabled pre-orders on Bandcamp, and announced it in an email blast, a Patreon post, and on socials (which I pinned on Twitter and Facebook).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Send private streaming emails with Dropbox link.<\/strong> I planned to use Bandcamp’s private streaming feature to share the album ahead of launch, but the option wasn’t available. An email from Bandcamp support explained:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Private streaming currently isn’t available for pre-orders, but that’s something we may consider for the future. If you don’t want to deal with track\/album codes, you could instead create a duplicate private copy of that album and then send out private streaming links to that copy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n I went ahead and created download codes and emailed them individually to my pitch list of about 80 outlets, nearly all of them synthwave-specific.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Update Show.co for site embeds.<\/strong> There’s a Show.co<\/a> player in the sidebar of Passive Promotion<\/a>, in the middle of the homepage of colortheory.com<\/a>, and on the about page of my mastering site<\/a>. The advantage of using Show.co versus hosting the audio myself is that their player streams through SoundCloud<\/a>. I typically get around 3K plays per week between the three embeds, and I’d just as soon have that reflected in my play count on SoundCloud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Update bio on site.<\/strong> My old bio, while professionally written, was long and unfocused. I borrowed bits of various earlier bios and composed a few new sentences of my own to create the compact version that currently appears at colortheory.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Submit to NRW.<\/strong> NewRetroWave<\/a> is an influential network in the synthwave scene, that only accepts submissions during short windows of time, every few weeks or months. They featured a couple of my songs on their WeRuleNation<\/a> YouTube channel, but never the main NRW channel<\/a>, where 20K views is all but guaranteed. Still, they dutifully PayPal me $0.19 or so every month as a share of advertising revenue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Update YouTube song titles and direct to Bandcamp. <\/b>Most of the album tracks had already been released as singles, but I spent a solid 100 hours reworking them for the album, including recording all the vocals again from scratch. I went back to each of the YouTube videos I made for the singles, appended “Single Version” to the title, and linked to the Bandcamp pre-order in the description.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Approach Lipstick Crush.<\/strong> Remember how I asked about vinyl on that Facebook group? Several people referred me to Lipstick Crush, a new synthwave label that has so far reissued four classic albums on vinyl. I emailed, and Adam wrote back that they aren’t taking on any new artists at the moment. It’s okay, I can wait… 😜<\/p>\n\n\n\n Update avatars and banners.<\/strong> New album, new look. I hired Illumi Media to rework my social media presence around the album art. He created a new avatar and new banners at the optimal dimensions for each of my networks:<\/p>\n\n\n\n