How I Promote My Music

A reader of my How I’m Promoting My Music This Month monthly email recently told me:

You always begin your letter by saying that your promotion is on autopilot but you never say what it is you do.

And so, for the next installment, I wrote a quick and dirty summary of my ongoing promotional efforts.

That went over well, so I thought I’d expand it into a full post. Then I realized something…

Using the term “autopilot” to describe my usual routine implies that, when time allows, I engage in bigger and bolder efforts.

But the reality is, I don’t. Not lately, anyway. Beyond testing out sites and services for review, what I’m about to describe is my full playbook.

The good news is, it’s working. My audience has been slowly but surely growing for the past couple of years.

I’m not saying that what I do will necessarily work for you. That is, unless you also happen to have a garage full of CDs, a Patreon page, and a relatively popular Spotify playlist that you curate on SubmitHub.

Not to mention money! Advertising ain’t cheap. I’m breaking even at best.

That said, I’m sure there are a few items on my list that you can put to good use, so let’s dig in!

Facebook & Instagram Ads

Meta ads are the bedrock of my promotional efforts, and where most of my advertising dollars go. Here’s my last 30 days:

Like I said, not cheap! From top to bottom:

C – The Curve is a conversions campaign (hence the “C”) promoting the track of the same name on my self-managed This Is Color Theory playlist at $30/day.

Here’s what that $896.75 got me over the last 28 days, on Spotify:

And on Apple Music, though I have no way to isolate the results of the campaign:

C – Modern Synthpop is to promote our co-op Spotify playlist at $40/day. The ad budget comes from the other members of the group. I contribute by managing the playlist and ad campaign.

R – GLW is a reach campaign to show my Facebook and Instagram posts to my followers, at $2 per post per platform, $0-8 per day. It’s roughly equivalent to boosting posts.

P – FSH is a purchases (conversions) campaign for my free plus shipping/handling offer, which I’ll describe below.

C – VSR is to promote my Vocal Synthwave Retrowave playlist at $15/day. All of the money I make from curating the playlist on SubmitHub goes back into this campaign, and then some.

Google Ads on YouTube

I’m running three YouTube ads campaigns in Google Ads. With mostly cover art videos, I’ve managed to grow my channel to over 22K subscribers.

Here’s my last 30 days:

Google Ads (click to enlarge)

Subscribers Pop-Up ($3/day) directs viewers to subscribe when they click on the ad, which is my entire last album as a single video. I describe the campaign in detail here.Discovery Retarget ($2/day) retargets previous viewers with thumbnails on the side of the video they’re watching and in search. Fluff ($1/day) is a broad, cheap (five views for penny) campaign purely for social proof, though it’s also generating likes, subscribers, and earned views.

Rise

I spend $191.25 per month (discounted from $225) for 256+ new Spotify followers, which Rise solicits by directing Meta ads to this page.

Like Google Ads, I’ve been using Rise for many years now. They’re responsible for half of my 29K Spotify followers.

I dropped the campaign for a few months and noticed my Release Engagement (followers who stream a new release in the first 28 days) dropped noticeably.

Which makes sense, as Rise automatically saves new releases to followers’ libraries:

That’s not to say that Rise followers are my most engaged listeners. They’re not, but I’ve built up enough of them to have a measurable impact.

You can read all about Rise and grab a discount code here.

Spotify Marquee

I’ve written about Marquee and Showcase several times, most recently here.

Back when it first launched, I said I like to see a 25% intent rate and 2.5 streams per listener. I’m not getting anywhere near that with my recent single releases, but I have been able to target warm audiences in the US.

Here are the results of my latest $381 campaign::

Spotify Marquee Results (click to enlarge)

Pricy for sure, but I split it with my collaborator, so it wasn’t so bad. Meta ads generate more streams per dollar, but Marquee allows me to reach previous listeners directly on the platform, so I do both!

SubmitHub

I spend about 6 hours per week curating submissions for my Vocal Synthwave Retrowave playlist. The money I earn goes right back into the ad campaign, but isn’t enough to cover the full $15/day.

You may not consider curating a playlist to be promotion, but the playlist itself certainly is, and it needs to be updated regularly.If I didn’t accept submissions on SubmitHub, I’d be fielding them from every corner of the internet. And if I didn’t take submissions at all, I’d have to constantly explain why, and keep up with new releases on my own, beyond just Release Radar.It really is a lot of work, and if I have to drop something else (like I did with my podcast a few years back), the playlist would be next. Hopefully it doesn’t come to that!

Of course I also use SubmitHub as an artist, spending about $50 to pitch every new release. My last couple have done quite well (for me, anyway):

I’ve also got a spreadsheet of contacts that I pitch manually as part of my release checklist, which warrants its own post.

Free CD Offer

I’ve released 13 albums on CD. Two of them got second pressings. My garage was not pleased.

So in 2020, I launched a free + shipping/handling campaign which you can read all about here.

The basic mechanics are: I offer a CD for free. The buyer just has to pay for shipping, $5 in the US. When the payment is completed, they’re presented with two or three additional offers aka upsells. Ideally, the upsells cover the cost of the ad campaign.

Originally I gave away my 7th album, The Thought Chapter. When those ran out, I pivoted to my 8th, The Sound. Then I experimented with a slight variation on the theme (read about that here) with my 5th album, Color Theory presents Depeche Mode. It worked until it didn’t, and then I shut it down.

In October of 2023, I started back up with my 10th album, The Majesty of Our Broken Past. When I nearly ran out of CDs, I pivoted to my 12th, Mages. Those nearly ran out last month, so I turned off the ads prior to the holidays and just restarted them with my 11th album, Lucky Ago.

Here are my top “sellers” since the October 2023 reboot:

I’ve only got a handful of copies left of Mages, and 20 left of my debut album, then I’ll be down to 3 CDs left in print!

If all goes according to plan, I’ll have one more pivot to make when Lucky Ago gets down to about 150 units remaining. After that, I’ll either run out of CDs or the campaign will become unsustainable.

Either way, I’m ready to be done with e-commerce. International shipping is prohibitively expensive and the time, effort, and expense required to maintain my WooCommerce site isn’t worth the reward when I can just sell the remaining CDs on Bandcamp.

Until then, my free + s/h campaign is a great way to promote my music with $30-$50 per day of ads while mostly breaking even.

Email & Social Media

When someone orders a CD, downloads a track from Bandcamp, or subscribes on my homepage, I add them to my mailing list. That launches my 30-email welcome series, spread out over the course of 2-3 months. They’ll learn more about me, download some free tracks, and get a discount code or two.

In addition, they also get updates 1-2x per week, like new release announcements and nurturing content and my thoughts on whatever happens to be going on at the time.

I repurpose most of those emails for social media and amplify the posts through the GLW campaign mentioned earlier.

I’ve got 3000 email subscribers, which got too pricy on my previous email platform, Drip. Fortunately FunnelKit handles my email campaigns along with my sales funnels for $33/month. Email delivery falls to Amazon SES, which only costs me a few bucks.

Patreon

Last but far from least, I deliver two new exclusive tracks to Patreon members every month. I’ve also been doing something special with Andy Last of Beyond Synth: a podcast series dissecting every Depeche Mode album.

I’ve currently got 145 paid members to the tune of $700 per month.

Members of my top tier get two additional benefits: exclusive CDs mailed to them twice a year, plus special thanks on my website, on every new release on Bandcamp, and in the email announcing every new release.

It’s been nearly eight years since I launched my Patreon page, and I’ve never been more prolific. It’s a ton of work, but it forces me to create on a regular schedule, no matter what life throws at me. Without my patrons, I might not have anything to promote!

And that’s everything I do to promote my music.

I mean, pretty much. More or less. There’s Digital DJ Pool which I just wrote about, and other little stuff on my release checklist, but these are all the big ticket items.

Thoughts? Questions? Anything I should add? Anything I forgot? Let me know in the comments!