So you have a show coming up this weekend. Are you prepared? Sure, you've practiced. You emailed your list to come out. But when was the last time you thought out ideas for the merch table?

Do you even have a merch display? I've seen it all from the fancy, free-standing, lighted display to a performer using a little box with her CD prices scrawled on it! Your best bet is to stand out. Most bands I meet don't really give it much thought and pretty much wing it at their shows. I would take the time to come up with something unique. Since most venues are dark, something with lights could be very cool. I've seen rope lights used very effectively. Get creative and have fun with it. Get a friend or your biggest fan to help sell your CDs while you are performing. Most people want to buy your CD either while you are playing or right afterwards. As soon as your set is over, you need to get to the merch table as quickly as possible. People want to meet you! They want you to sign their CD! It's good PR and a way to earn fans for life.

Be sure to have plenty of CDs to sell at your shows. It's really easy to not bring enough and then run out. That would suck! The best money maker at your show is merchandise, especially your CD. Also make sure you have it available for purchase online through your web site and other outlets such as iTunes, CDBaby.com and Amazon.com.

Also have a mailing list available. So many times I see bands scramble at the last minute to find a piece of paper and pen to put out. Instead, get a cheap clipboard and attach a pen to it.

I hope these useful tips help!

Rock on,
Madalyn Sklar
IndieMusicCoach.com
~providing one-on-one indie music consulting & coaching~
http://www.indiemusiccoach.com/

Music Marketing Tips

© Brandon Marcel Cherry

Jun 22, 2007

Marketing is one of the toughest areas for most musicians to tackle. It requires a lot of focus, hard works and determination even when it seems you are not getting any positive results. On top of these facts you can easily go broke by over paying for advertisements and other marketing services. However, if you are like most musicians, you probably don’t have a marketing budget to blow in the first place. Here are four music marketing tips for those musicians that are on a tight budget.

1. Business Cards- Business cards are the old standby of any business marketing plan. They are generally cheap, well received and easy for those you are targeting to quickly tuck away for a better look later on. You should always carry your business cards with you and look for opportunities to disperse them to your target markets. For example, music conferences, seminars, trade shows for things your fan demographic is known to love, even other bands live shows with similar sounds to yours, etc. Also when you are sending out press kits you should include a business card in the cd case and one with your folders or binder incase they ever get separated from one another. Vistaprint.com offers 250 business cards for free (plus $5.99 shipping) if you allow them to print a tiny logo of theirs on the back side of the card.

2. EP/Demo Cdrs- Eps are shortened CDs (5-7 tracks) also sometimes known as demo CDs. Here you take your best songs and compile them all onto cdrs and disperse them to your fans at shows and other forums for free as samplers of your music. This works well in creating buzz about your band and you paid nearly nothing to do this because the songs used should be previously recorded tracks or low budget recordings at most. Labels call this white labeling, it commonly is used to create an early street buzz about an artist or group they are just starting to break.

You have the choice to sell these CDs at venues too, you should earn a fairly nice return on your investment here. You will also have a demo disc ready for press kits and any song contests you may decide to enter in the future.

3. Build an Email List-Though this can be a timely process it is one that is well worth it. There are numerous free group and newsletter services out there for you to choose from that will host and help you manage your email lists. From Yahoo! Groups, Myspace Groups, Google Groups and many other smaller communities. One of the best ways to quickly go about growing a list on the big three above is to use other groups’ members lists and invite their members to yours. The groups you do this with of course need to be similar to your sound or genre or else you are probably risking getting marked as a spammer by numerous people. Be cautious as to how many times you attempt to get members from the same groups as well. Though many will let you slip by once or twice with an invitation, invite number three may be one too many and result in you also being marked as a spammer.

4. Myspace Pages-Many artists are already using Myspace as a great way to market themselves, however not as efficiently as they could be. While they create band pages, add tracks to their music players and invite many friends, they fail to target their friend adds (only targeting those members that are actually in your demographics) and fail to use all Myspace tools to the best of their abilities. Many artist don’t blog, use videos, post bulletins, podcasts, or create groups for their fanclubs. Myspace has over184 million individuals in its community and to not be actively using all it has to offer (for free by the way) is a total waste. Think of all of the word of mouth you could be getting about your band if you gave people a reason to come back to your pages on a regular basis by using these tools listed above.

With these four tips you should have the basis for your marketing plans ready to go. Best of all, you can use all of these tips together for no more than $25 combined (easily). Put these four tactics into use and watch your low budget music marketing campaigns take off.