Tips You Need to Know to Propel Your Music

Are you working towards a career in music? Let’s rephrase that. Are you wanting a career that allows you to express yourself creatively while inspiring and motivating others through your own music? Of course you do! Unfortunately, so do a lot of others, but luckily for you, almost no one is properly working towards it. The music industry is all about working smart, not necessarily working hard. Let’s look at analogies. Do your perform the best on a test when you’re tired? Nope. Do you lift the most weight when you’re tired? Nope. So why do you think pouring hours and hours a day into your music is any different? Often times by doing this, you become so close to your music, that you cannot see its obvious flaws.

Now please don’t think a career in music is easy. It definitely does take a lot of hard work to succeed, but that shouldn’t be a discouraging factor, that should be a motivator. All that means is the longer the journey, the more time you have to connect with others and share you story. BUT, when musicians here that they think they can just lay back, enjoy the ride, and wait for something to happen. That’s not working smart. Enjoy the journey, enjoy every minute of it, but always work towards your goal in smart, efficient way.

Here are a few key things you need to do to save time, and work smart.

1 - Smarter Distribution Strategies

Promoting your music is great and its necessary, BUT, there are smart ways of doing it and not so smart ways of doing it. For example, sending your new song (or post) to all your social media contacts is great, but it takes time and to be quite honest with you, you would have to not only do that an incredible amount of times, but also have a super high conversion rate in the people that you do send your music to, to make any real progress that would benefit you long-term.

Let’s look at it this way, if you send someone your music (assuming they listen to it), that’s one stream. One stream is great because it is one person you my have positively helped, but what if you used that time on more effective distribution strategies to reach and help more people, such as researching playlists (similar to the style of music you make) and devising a plan to get your song playlisted? If your song gets playlisted, you’re now getting a constant stream of streams week over week, month over month, without doing anything else. Doing this multiple times a week, month, etc. will sustainably increase your streams.

2 - Understand Not Everyone Likes Your Music

It's obviously tough to hear, but the sooner you realize it, the better. Why do people like some music and not others? Of course quality plays some part, but it’s mostly whether the music solves a problem the listener has. In music, the problem could be a variety of things, such as needing a hype song, needing a sad song to help connect through a breakup, needing to hear a happy song to help people get back on their feet, etc.

If you understand the problem, there is no ceiling to what you can accomplish. Spend the time, figuring out what music you want to make (if you haven’t already). When you know this, then position yourself within that niche of the music industry so you’re attracting individuals with a problem you’re solving. Here’s an example, let’s suppose you’re going through a tough breakup and you’re at the stage where you’re not ready to get over him/her. You are sad and you want to hear songs with lyrics that relate to what you’re going through, so you search for them. Then you come across an artist that has songs where the lyrics really hit home with you. You’re going to follow the artist to learn more, hear more and frankly because you now feel like you share a connection with them.

Music is subjective as you know. Not everyone likes all genres, styles, artists, etc, so if you’re mindlessly sending your music to blogs, playlists etc. that focus on a totally different style than what you create, you’re wasting your time and not working very smart. Take the time to pinpoint what type of music you’re making, who would listen to it (what problem you’re solving), and how to best reach that target group. You do this and every connection you make will be a life long follower of yours. They’ll be seeing you perform live, they’ll be buying your merchandise, they’ll be telling their friends about you, etc. because you’re solving their problem.

3 - The Power of Connections

In an industry that has never before been so crowded, connections are not only advisable, but practically mandatory for success. They are the main way you will 'get discovered’ and be given opportunities to succeed. For every connection you form, that contact has connections of their own, that you can now take advantage of. So how do you form connections though? Obviously Musician Guidance is one of the best ways to do that given you can directly video call professionals that quite literally have contacts to music’s biggest names, but also the power of social media can help.

The best way for you to form connections on social media is not by asking for anything, but by giving and NOT your music (unless it’s asked for). An example could be a message as simple as “hey I noticed you sang a cover of ____, you sang it so well. I would even recommend emphasizing the chorus because your voice is so powerful and can really hit those high notes.” Doesn’t seem like much right? A connection very rarely starts with “hey, I want to introduce you to Warner Music” (for example). It all starts with a “hi” and showing the person you’re invested in them by offering something, even just a compliment (not asking for one). You never know the connections someone has and so never turn down a connection or the opportunity to make one. To increase the chances of building solid connections, always give before asking. Work smart!

Now that you have the knowledge of these three tips, try and put them into use and let us know the benefit they have on your music career.