Promoting Your Music: Email vs Social Media Marketing

As an independent artist in the modern music industry, having a direct line of communication with your fans is absolutely paramount when promoting your music. With so much noise and competition vying for attention on social media platforms and streaming platforms, you need strategies for nurturing strong fan relationships and earning consistent income. Music platforms, like Apple Music, make it hard to earn money and the promotional tools found inside your Spotify for Artists account, help make Spotify money, but don't reciprocate financially to artists nor do they create true fans.

Email vs Social Media Marketing

Two of the most powerful channels at your disposal for marketing music are email marketing and social media marketing. Both are fantastic tools that allow you to connect directly with your audience, share updates, tour dates, promote new releases and sell products and tickets to live shows. So let’s discuss each:

Email Marketing

While the rise of social media has shifted a lot of fan focus and interaction to platforms like TikTok and YouTube music, email remains one of the most potent tools in an artist's arsenal - primarily because you own your mailing list completely. Social media algorithms will always be out of your control, but your mailing list allows you to directly communicate with fans.

Some key advantages of email marketing:

• Higher chance of making sales
• More personal, direct line of communication
• Ability to send multimedia content, like music videos, directly to fans en masse
• Circumventing social platform visibility issues
• No risk of losing access to your audience. Meaning, a random account freeze, decline of a service (i.e. myspace) or ban on a service (i.e. potentially TikTok - United States only)
• Additionally, research shows email remains an incredibly sticky tool - fans tend to change social media accounts and shift preferences across platforms much more frequently than abandoning established email accounts. This ensures you're getting into the inboxes of people that mean the most - your fans - not followers.

So what are the best ways for DIY musicians to maximize fan email lists? Always create attention-grabbing subject lines and make your messages personalized, so that your audience feels you’re directly speaking to them, as if they are one of your friends. Curate exclusive email-only content like behind-the-scenes videos, exclusive tracks, giveaways and VIP experiences to live performances to keep fans engaged. And every so often, send a super fan a private message from your personal email account – it makes them feel special.

Also if you want to transform casual followers into fans and fans into financial supporters, you don't do that on Apple Music or through your Spotify for Artists' account, nor do you do that via social posts or blog coverage, that's done in person and through email.

Social Media Marketing:

While email may outperform on sales and 1-to-1 communication, social media reigns supreme when it comes to attracting fans and reaching the masses, which makes it important to your music career.

The key strengths of social platforms like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube include:

• Reach beyond your existing fanbase to attract fans
• Shareability of content
• Having two-way fan conversations
• Real-time engagement

Developing engaged social audiences involves:

• Creating compelling content and an engaging social presence
• Consistent output across all channels
• Building fan communities
• Running organized marketing and promotional campaigns

Ultimately, you need to find the balance between using both types of marketing tools when promoting your music. Leaning too heavily on ONLY email marketing won’t grow your audience and ONLY focusing on your social channels, won’t build deeper relationships with fans and leaves you at the mercy of each platform’s algorithm.

In short, use your social channels and online presence as a funnel to feed your email list, so you can directly work on growing a strong connection with your fans that leads to consistent sales. This is what every unsigned artist must do if they what to have a successful music career.

Learn more by checking out the below video.

Click Here to Enroll in our Signature Sales Story (Brand Creation) program for FREE.

And finally, if you're serious about making music your profession, then I strongly encourage you to learn how to build a sustainable music career for yourself because it takes more than talent and great songs to be successful.

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