Wondering where to get started? That’s the common dilemma facing musicians of all experience levels. With so many options available today, it’s hard to know what tools, strategies, and techniques work best for marketing your music. This post will give you a complete breakdown on the best online marketing tools for musicians. It also contains a number of actionable tips that I’ve learned from creating a thriving music business that generates a healthy side income – as well as a top 10 list of the best music marketing platforms that currently exist .
Beatchain
Beatchain is an app that offers independent artists tools to build their fanbase. Their free package allows artists to track the stats from their playlists and streams, and offers insights about your fan demographics, as well as providing you with a social post scheduler and limited monthly distribution.
Premium plans give you extra services such as unlimited distribution, branded smart links, and an instant website.
Soundcharts
Soundcharts gathers all the various data points to help you assess your marketing strategy and figure out what is (or isn’t) working. Soundcharts platform gives you a comprehensive view of an artist’s performance across the music industry, including:
- Social media performance
- Streaming consumption metrics and playlist exposure
- Thousands of digital charts, from TikTok and Instagram Stories to Shazam and YouTube
- Real-time radio airplay data from over 1,700 major stations in 69 countries
- Online media mentions
With Soundcharts, marketers have access to insights that help identify new opportunities, highlight high-potential markets, assess the results of your campaigns, and make strategic, data-inspired marketing decisions.
Access all music marketing metrics in a single, real-time dashboard and pave your own way to success. Try Soundcharts for free — no credit card required.
ReverbNation
One of the most well known sites in the music industry, ReverbNation provides a range of tools making them difficult to place in any one category below.
They offer advertising on relevant music sites, digital distribution, promo tools for you to get your message out through email and social media, widgets for fan sharing, and more.
ReverbNation is one of the largest online communities of music professionals in the world, and an excellent hub for music marketing tools across multiple channels, including (but not limited to):
- Email newsletters
- Targeted advertisements on social media and streaming platforms
- Crowd Reviews where users can rate your music
- Viral marketing widgets
- Electronic, trackable press-releases
Hubspot (CRM)
Hubspot is a full-suite Customer Relationship Management tool which music professionals can use to construct and carry out a cross-platform marketing strategy, then assess the success of this strategy and optimize moving forward. You can centralize all your marketing campaigns (emails, blogs, social media posts, advertisements) on HubSpot — and track exact metrics at the same time.
Show.co
Show.co provides a range of music marketing tools, including:
- Spotify pre-save: let listeners save your music on Spotify before it’s released to boost early streaming.
- YouTube Premiere: create unique debut webpages for your YouTube videos to drive view counts and enhance your branding.
- Spotify and iHeartRadio ads: create and launch ads on the largest streaming platforms.
- Banner ads on major music websites: place ads on sites like Rolling Stone and Billboard.
ToneDen
ToneDen is especially valuable to music professionals as a marketing platform for live events. With ToneDen, you can:
- Create marketing playbooks that cover each phase of the event lifecycle
- Design unique landing pages
- Launch social media and email marketing campaigns
Amplify
Your fans are scattered across dozens of platforms — so just giving them a Spotify link is probably not the best move. Content sharing is the crux of digital music marketing, and a link shortener like Amplify streamlines it in several ways:
- Customize your links with artwork, metadata, or videos
- Track how many people view your links
- Create landing pages and smart links
Buzzstream
Buzzstream is an outreach and PR tool that automates critical parts of link building and marketing. You can send out bulk pitches tailored to different audiences and create a link building database. Buzzstream is also an excellent way to find social media influencers in your genre.
Facebook Bots
Engaging with your audience in a personalized manner becomes more and more difficult as you gain traction. With social media bots, you can engage at scale and send customized direct messages to your listeners en masse. It’s great for viral marketing campaigns, like the recent campaign by the animated band Gorillaz which let fans chat with “imprisoned” band member Murdoc through direct messages on Facebook.
Label Engine
Label Engine’s marketing platform provides four main services: distribution, so your music goes to the main streaming services; accounting, including handling licensing agreements; promotion, involving things like email promo campaigns and follow gates; and demo management, which is a service for labels.
The whole platform is aimed more towards labels than it is independent artists.
Push
Push.fm is a music marketing platform for artists and labels. Push provides you with listening statistics and analytics so you can see how your fans like to listen to your music, and how they found you. Push also offers tools like fan links to help you capture new fans.
Spotify for Artists
If you’re not on Spotify it will be difficult to connect with your fans, as this is the most popular music streaming platform (after youtube.com). Spotify for Artists is where you can upload your music, view all your data on how your music is performing, update your profile and generally promote your tracks on Spotify.
Spotify for Artists gives you the tools to optimize and improve your performance on the platform. This starts with customizing your Spotify profile and accessing critical data on playlist additions, number of streams, and number of followers/listeners.
Playlist additions are the lifeblood of Spotify performance, and Spotify for Artists gives you a direct channel to pitch your music to Spotify’s editorial team, leveling out the playing field for independent artists out there.
Conclusion
Music industry is a place of constant innovation — and that’s why we love it. The marketing strategies that worked yesterday, might not work today, so to stay ahead of the curve music professionals need to stay agile and constantly innovate. As Darren Hemmings, MD of Motive Unknown put it in our recent interview: “smart marketing is where you swim upstream to where it’s quieter — to get space and be noticed.” Often, finding this quite place is a question of going out there and trying new things, and using data to see if that’s something worth exploring further.