In the beginning, there was the record label. It had the power of the music world in the palm of its hands. It controlled distribution, production and had the budget to make most extremely talented artists bow to its demands, no matter how ridiculous.
Today the world is different, but for some reason many of us haven’t figured it out. Yes, we know that we can make our own music with a closet and a laptop. We’ve figured out how to load our music on websites, some we own, others owned by someone else. We know how to sell out the trunk, but we still haven’t figured out how to market and advertise ourselves, even though we have the greatest marketing tool ever known to man at our disposal.
Facebook, with its 500-600 million subscribers, gives us access to listeners around the world, with the ability to get to virtually any one of them, at any time. A lot of record labels haven’t even figured out how to do this, but that’s no reason for you to be just as stupid. Here are Steps 1&2 of 5 (five) Steps for you to find, connect with, and influence your audience.
Step 1: Find Your Sound
I find that this is the most difficult thing for new artists to do. Either they don’t know what their sound is or they don’t want to say that they sound like anyone else. If either is the case, let’s look at it like this: if there was a famous artist in the world (the whole world) that has a bunch of people either listening to them or buying their music, and you could say, “I would love to have his audience”, let’s assume that that’s who you sound like or that you have an image similar to theirs that could attract their audience.
Try your best to pick a few artists with the thought above in mind. For example, if you have dope lyrics with a slight or heavy conscious slant to them, you may find your audience through Jay Electronica, Nas, Common and Mos Def. If you’re speaking for the hood, maybe think of Bun B, UGK, TI, Young Jeezy etc. Whatever your sound, try and pick a few artists and write down their names for the next step.
Step 2: Find Your Listener
This next step is more technical and requires you to understand both Facebook Pages and Facebook Ads. If you have no experience here, we suggest you go to Facebook Marketing 101. It will teach you the basics of using Facebook pages and ads FOR FREE. If you find you need more help, please post to our comment thread below for additional assistance, or request help on our Facebook Page.
If you are comfortable with Facebook Pages and Ads, check out our Crash Course on Facebook Ads and see how we Create, Test, Select and Target our ads to artists like you. If after reviewing this video you still have question, please comment here or on our Facebook page and we will help you in more detail. If not, go for it and create a few ads and run them in the market for a week.
The next 3 steps will be uploaded in a week to give you time to do Steps 1 and 2. The following steps require you to have an audience and after you follow steps 1 and 2, keep testing the process and refining it. You can always get better at this and it is not a one-time thing. The more we test ads, the better we become and the more we learn about our customer, Independent Hip Hop Artists like you.
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