2024: The year your music takes off
Plan your 2024 music releases with a clear cadence and back them with a strong content strategy. Combine multiple marketing channels like social media, ads, and collaborations to grow your fanbase effectively.
By Andrew Southworth
Happy new year!
Today we’re going to talk about how you can make 2024 the best year ever for your music!
This newsletter is also available as a podcast, listen on your favorite podcast platform here.
Have a release plan
Ideally you should some idea of how your releases are going to go throughout the year. This doesn’t mean you need release dates for every song throughout the year, just a general cadence for how things are going to go.
For example, knowing you’re going to be releasing new singles every 6 weeks. Or knowing the release dates for the first 3 singles with general spacing for the singles that come after it.
Things will change throughout the year, and you might pivot based on the results you’re getting. But you still need to create the plan and write it down!
Create a content strategy
A LOT of artists hate the word content, and they don’t enjoy social media.
However making content around your music is incredibly important not only for organic social media growth, but also for audience engagement and for ad creatives.
The content you make supports every marketing activity you pursue. If it doesn’t exist or it is low quality everything else will be much harder.
You need to find content you can make in volume, you enjoy making and that people want to watch. For example, if you love playing live, making performance videos should be enjoyable and easy for you.
Choose marketing channels
There are a ton of ways to promote your music effectively and generally all of them work when done right. For example:
Social media content
Collaborating with other artists
Playing live
PR
From all the artists i’ve talked to that ‘made it’ and are professional music artists making a living with their music - it’s almost never just 1 of these things that results in success.
Very often people are doing multiple things at a time, and one thing leads to another until eventually something happens. It’s different for everyone. Anyone promising that you can ‘just do this one easy thing’ to be successful is likely trying to scam you. It’s almost never one thing, and it’s almost never easy.
If you want 10+ hours of music marketing content from over 15 experts covering different topics and approaches, consider registering for our free music marketing summit.
Many content creators in the music marketing space overlap in many ways, but we all have our strengths. So while you don’t want to be scattered and try a million things at a time, it’s good to get fresh perspectives and see which strategies align best to your goals and personality.
General Recommendation
It’s hard to give a broad recommendation that applies to everyone, but if I had to give one it would be this:
Make great music
Release singles every 4-8 weeks
Create 30-50 pieces of social media content for every release
Launch a Facebook / Meta ad campaign for each song
Focus 90% of your marketing efforts after the song is released
Interact with your audience as much as possible
Marketing your music always requires either time or money, and most likely some of both. If you have no budget, you’ll really need to double down on social media. If you have a lot of budget you can relax a bit on socials, but make sure you don’t abandon it.
I hope you have a great 2024!
New Content
Are albums dead? How many singles should you release for an album? In this video I compare albums vs singles, and give my recommendation.
In this video I go over a case study taking an artist from zero to 2,500 monthly listeners on Spotify from one song using Facebook ads, getting the song to 32,000 streams and counting.
Did you know you can listen to my music industry interviews on podcast platforms? Click here to listen to the Modern Music Marketing podcast.
News
Here are some music industry news highlights from the past week.
Koji was acquired by LinkTree and is shutting down on January 31st
Billboard will now be counting physical sales differently in 2024 in a way that may underreport sales from indie music stores
France has plans to introduce a music streaming tax, Spotify and Deezer are not happy
Microsoft’s AI chatbot Copilot can now compose songs from text prompts using Suno
Whenever you’re ready, there are 4 ways I can help you:
My courses. Spotify Growth Machine teaches you how to use Facebook ads to promote your music on Spotify. YouTube Growth Machine teaches you how to grow a YouTube channel organically and how to use YouTube ads. Fan Growth Machine teaches you how to build a website, online store and grow your email list.
My ad agency. Forbid Media specializes in running Facebook conversion ads to promote your music on Spotify.
Website / Store / Funnels. MusicFunnels is the best all-in-one platform for music artists to make a website, online store, sales funnels and build their mailing list.
1-on-1 consulting. You can book 1-hour calls with myself or Alex Bochel here.
My Links:
🌍 MusicFunnels - Best website / store / funnels for music artists (get your 14-day FREE trial!)
💿 Partnered Projects - the best Spotify playlist service
🧑💻 Consultations
🎬 Get 15% off Melodist music distribution with code ANDREW15 here
Discount / Affiliate Links:
►► FeatureFM - use code ASOUTH30 for 30% off for any annual plan!
If you’d rather just purchase the e-book, or physical book or audiobook you can do so here.
I hope you enjoyed this edition of Music Marketing Monday! Please give your feedback using the poll below.
In case you’re curious what platform i’m using to run this newsletter, it’s called beehiiv.
Turn Meta ads into real streaming growth
Learn the campaign structure Andrew uses to promote songs without guessing at every step.