Music Marketing Mistakes To Avoid for 2026

In this video, we're going to be talking about music marketing mistakes to avoid for 2026. And the first one I have for you is one that I've actually seen several people recommending the opposite. So, my take on this is you shouldn't be posting most of your content around the song on social media until after the song is out. It's so hard to get people's attention on the internet. In my opinion, once you have their attention, you should have somewhere to send them. Now, I'm not saying don't post anything before songs release. I'm saying post 90% of your content for after the song's out. Go online, you will see people complaining about how much they hate it when they find a song they love and it's not out. They feel like the whole moment's just been ruined. So, in my opinion, don't blast a bunch of stuff about your music before it's out. Make sure 90% of it's after it's out. And again, if you're writing and you're showing behind the scenes content, that's different. I'm just saying if you have a bunch of videos you've done, save them for when the song's actually out. The next big mistake to avoid for 2026 is has been a big one for 2025 and 2024 actually. That's just avoiding ad mistakes. So, and when I say ad mistakes, I'm specifically talking about meta ads, but really just any ad platform, particularly in meta ads, there are a million mistakes you can make that will completely ruin your campaign and basically result in you wasting money. For example, if you're trying to run a like Spotify streaming focused conversion campaign, which I've shown a bunch on this channel, I'll link to to a video I've done on showing you how to do that. Basically, it's a campaign to promote your music on streaming services. Uh there's a lot of things that can ruin your campaign. For example, let's say you're duplicating a campaign like I'm going here and Meta's like, "Hey, you should turn on these recommendations like advantage plus creative, advantage plus audience, advantage plus placements, and they're even bragging about how much lower of a cost per result you're going to get." All I was going to say all three of these things, but really audience advantage plus audience and advantage plus placements can both completely ruin your campaign. literally completely wrong. Not like not even just make it worse. Make it so that all the money you're spending it to it, you might as well just light on fire. Now, this isn't the case with every campaign in Meta, but for these kind of streaming campaigns, these three things will ruin you. So, you need to make sure that you duplicate original and not with recommendations. Don't take Meta's recommendations. They're constantly giving you these things to do. But going off the back of that, there's a few more instances I want to call out. For example, if I go into the ads set and then I go down to the the audience here, don't use 65 plus ages, right? So, don't make don't include 65 plus. Um, and then, of course, I mentioned don't use automatic placements. And in fact, if I were to clone an adset right now, let's say I'm just going to let them turn on the recommendation so I can show you what it looks like when they're on. So, this is what not to do. You don't want to be using this advantage plus audience thing. And how do you know it's Advantage Plus? If you have a button that says further limit the reach of your ads or it says switch to original audience options, click it. Right? So here I'm going to further limit the reach of my ads. Further limit the reach of your ads. Continue. And now we have advantage plus audiences off. Now there are a whole bunch of other mistakes you can make when it comes to metads. For example, using the wrong conversion event in a landing page. For example, if you're using a feature FM page, use the feature FM click event. If you're using a hyped page, use the hyped smart link click event. Submit hub links, use view content. So, make sure you have your pixel installed in your pages and make sure you're using the correct event that corresponds with the landing page sharers you're using. I see it all the time in my consultation calls, which again you could book in the description if you want to hop in a call with me to help you you get these ads set up for you. But people very very very often use the wrong event from the wrong landing page service or they don't put the pixel in the right way. So, um, these are just a bunch of mistakes you can that there's way more things that can go wrong, but but those are the biggest ones that I see most often. The next big music marketing mistake to avoid for 2026 is running too many social ads to off-platform ads. And what I mean by that is typically most or all of the ads I'm running, I'm driving people off platform. These are all the ads that I have running right now in this ad account. And every single one of them is either taking someone off platform or it's growing my band's email list. Okay? Not a single one of these ads is being used to grow numbers on social media. Meaning, we're not running ads to promote posts. We're not running ads to get followers on social media. We're not running ads to get more views on our reels or get likes on our post. We're not doing any of that. I'm not saying doing that is inherently wrong. In fact, there can be plenty of great reasons to do that. What I'm saying is keep that to under 10% of your budget really. Now, this next one I might get a little bit of flack for, but it's it's don't blow your budget on expensive tactics that don't actually move the needle on the things you care about. And specifically, I'm talking about PR, radio promotion, and influencer marketing. These are three things that I get asked about all the time. You know, PR, which is like trying to get magazines, blogs, interviews, features, stuff like that. uh radio campaigns, trying to get your music played on the radio either on like college stations or like big actual terrestrial radio stations for like regions of the country or world. And then you have influencer marketing, hiring influencers to use your music in their videos or make specific videos per your request and post them to their audiences. I have seen people do a $9,000 PR campaign and have it result in essentially like less than a,000 streams and no noticeable email growth or social media growth. I have seen people drop $10,000 on an influencer campaign and have it do essentially nothing or have it do less than what our couple thousand ad budget did. And I've seen people do a radio campaign, have it do nothing. There are very good times to use all three of these tools, by the way. For example, I know someone where they have a huge budget. Like we're talking like $30,000 around a song. Uh and and obviously this is this is the company, right? This is not just some random individual. And they're they're piecing together all these strategies, right? They're like, "We're going to need to run this like 10k meta campaign. We're going to run this influencer thing. We're going to do this contest thing." You can kind of piece together these strategies in a way that can make a lot of sense. But even for them, the influencer campaign was very much a roll of the dice. And I can't get into the specifics, but essentially they knew going into it that it was like there's a chance that if you do this, you're going to get this great result, but there's also this really good chance that even though you're spending like 5 to 10 grand, it's going to do minimal compared to what the other things. It's a very high-risisk, highreward marketing method. Now, this last topic I want to cover is kind of complicated to explain, but it's I described it as not being present to fans. And you might have heard there's this AI music thing and AI video and AI images where people can make these social media accounts and these music profiles with millions of followers and millions of fans or at least passive fans um with just AI and faceless content. And so my take is that going into the new year um and going for the future years, it's going to become more and more important that artists like have their face in their content like they're interacting with their fans. They're showing the behind the scenes of their process. They're they're opening up and they're making more content about their process. And I know for a lot of you this makes you want to throw up because you hate that part of it. Like you just want to make music and not do the content thing. But I think over time like the thing that separates human artists from AI artists or creators um is that human connection is that behind-the-scenes thing, right? the AI people are not going to be able to create this intimate human connection, this behind-the-scenes content, this like communicating communication thing that like an artist can do and and talk about their work. So, some of you are going to love this and some of you are going to hate this, but I think no matter what, like going forward, if you really don't want to just be thrown in with the the horde of AI creators that are rising, you have to do some of this stuff. Otherwise, people are going to see you and they're going to be like, I can't tell by listening to it if it's a human or not, and I don't like AI stuff, so I'm just going to ignore it. So, if you don't want to be lumped in with the AI stuff, then you have to be more. Now, if you don't care, that's a different story, right? This is for the those of you that do care or maybe want to stand out from the crowd. Um, that being said, if you want to learn more about how you can run ads to promote your music on streaming platforms, check out this video right here. Or if you're looking for someone to help you out with your music marketing because you'd rather not do a lot of these things yourself, like running ads or other things that we can help you with, uh, check out my agency, Southworth Media, down below in the description. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next video. Bye.