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We need to talk about self-promotion

mediumaevum said:
I have a youtube channel. This very same username. I've had it for over 10 years.

This is my latest video:


I also make CGI reconstructions and animations of castles, churches, abbeys and other medieval-stuff. I've worked together with a museum for historical accuracy etc. But at the moment, my channel is still below 1000 subscribers.
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An example of shameless self promotion there… 😉
 
mediumaevum said:
So, -HOW- am I expected to promote my works of art/music? HOW am I expected to make people notice my works? If I can't post it anywhere and say "Hi, I exists!", how am I ever going to make other people recommend me or my works?

If you're forced to be invisible on social media, how are you supposed to promote your art?
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I hate to be blunt, but you need to be excellent. When you create something excellent, you don't need to promote yourself, people WILL find you. I haven't read the whole thread but the other thing that came to mind is that if you're into creating music for the sake of having fans, you're doing it for the wrong reasons. Fix your why, and everything will fall into place.
 
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thesteelydane said:
When you create something excellent, you don't need to promote yourself, people WILL find you.
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You should tell that to the big movie studios, they are wasting tenths of millions on marketing on each of their films! But then again, maybe their content isn’t excellent enough for people to find it..

Seriously, we’d all love to believe it’s enough to be excellent to make a great career but unfortunately it’s not enough, at least not in the entertainment business and especially not in music. If your experience is different and you put out an excellent music composition on YouTube or somewhere and made a career from it without any marketing then you are one of the very lucky few. For most of us this will not work.
 
Excellent may be in the eye of the individual mind. But may it be excellent I also guess this could vanish through those tons of music everywhere easily. And will mostly.
Therefore many who mentioned the importance of self-marketing have a point.
Though it could mean to have 50% of the powers going into this half.
 
ChrisSiuMusic said:
I totally agree that the music is first and foremost what we're trying to market.
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The problem with that is that it rarely works. At least not on a large enough scale to make a decent living.

Sell the brand, not the music.


thesteelydane said:
When you create something excellent, you don't need to promote yourself
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That's clearly not true as evidenced by two basic facts:

1. There are people whom I judge to be as "excellent" as others who have a huge following but have only a tiny following or no following at all.

2. There is no consensus defintion of "excellent" in music.

rgames
 
Some of my experience with YouTube/Soundcloud:

1. Decide VERY EARLY what you want the channel to be about. If it's a gear porn channel, then understand that it'll be really tough to use the same channel/brand to promote your music. The audience for gear porn and the audience for music are very different. It's WAY easier to grow a gear porn channel than a music channel so if your goal is to promote your music then avoid the easy win with gear porn.

2. I get 100x - 1000x more plays on YouTube than on Soundcloud. So I pretty much quit using Soundcloud. I think its value is extremely genre-dependent.

3. You can use AdWords to promote your music on YT and it can be very effective for relatively little money ($50/month). However, an ad-driven fan base will grow much more slowly than one driven by links from other music-related websites/channels/blogs/etc. so try to get links there. You'll also get a lot more thumbs-down and negative comments when people are driven to your videos with ads because, well, ads are annoying. But you'll also pick up subs and find people who actually like what you're doing. So it's still worthwhile.

rgames
 
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rgames said:
1. Decide VERY EARLY what you want the channel to be about. If it's a gear porn channel, then understand that it'll be really tough to use the same channel/brand to promote your music. The audience for gear porn and the audience for music are very different. It's WAY easier to grow a gear porn channel than a music channel so if your goal is to promote your music then avoid the easy win with gear porn.


rgames
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This right here is more what I'm trying to get across:

Not that you don't need good marketing or self-promotion, but that supplemental offerings on a 'music' channel can actually make your own music take a backseat to the teaching, analysis, reviews, or whatever you have on offer.

So like you say, clear direction is necessary with what you are aiming to achieve on said channel or platform. Specialization is quite clearly the proper path forward.

Just don't be surprised if you start spending less time on your craft (doing what you truly love) if you specialize too heavily in the 'music adjacent' activities (as another user called it) on your channel.

It's just so damned easy to get side-tracked and bogged down in all this shit - truly, to the point where you drown in it, and from where I'm sitting it's an epidemic among creative folks particularly online or in some solo or independent operation.

It's just another good ol' fashioned causality paradox:

Are we forced to focus more on 'music-adjacent' activites because people care less about music, or do people care less about music because we're more focused on 'music-adjacent' activities?

Perhaps there's no concrete answer. Sometimes just thinking about the question is more important.

Cheers
 
I used to think it was all about promoting your work. I still think there is a path there, but it's a path that requires an extreme amount of luck. I've come to believe it's far more reliable to, rather than promote your work, work on the self. By that I mean that people who will work with you work with the person, not the music. And that person is expressed outside of the music.
Places like this are places where fellow composers go. The fans don't see what you promote here. Nor do non-composer employers. But if a fellow composer likes the way you conduct yourself (excuse the pun), they might develop a friendship, which also opens doors. Maybe they like the way you think, or the way you do public discourse, but it likely won't be your music they respond to, if they even listen to it.
Seen through that lense, you're ALWAYS doing self-promotion. But we need to take the term a bit more literally.
 
Tice said:
I used to think it was all about promoting your work. I still think there is a path there, but it's a path that requires an extreme amount of luck. I've come to believe it's far more reliable to, rather than promote your work, work on the self. By that I mean that people who will work with you work with the person, not the music. And that person is expressed outside of the music.
Places like this are places where fellow composers go. The fans don't see what you promote here. Nor do non-composer employers. But if a fellow composer likes the way you conduct yourself (excuse the pun), they might develop a friendship, which also opens doors. Maybe they like the way you think, or the way you do public discourse, but it likely won't be your music they respond to, if they even listen to it.
Seen through that lense, you're ALWAYS doing self-promotion. But we need to take the term a bit more literally.
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This is such a good take honestly.

Working on forming healthy relationships with people who can help you go places is almost always a good thing
 
I like stumbling on artists unintentionally, which usually involves me searching for a particular song I heard on the radio, from a movie or TV series, or in a video game; or, searching for a particular genre on YouTube or Spotify, liking a song I hear, and researching who the artist is. I haven't ever found someone through their self-promotion, and I think others are the same. You discover artists from songs you like, and find other similar artists, and one thing leads to another and it naturally grows from there. There's no pressure in that process, whereas there's a sense of pressure when someone promotes their material to you and suddenly you feel obliged to listen to it, which ironically can have the opposite effect of putting people off. There's no harm in sharing tracks you have made on websites like these as long as they're in the right forum. Make sure you also have a body of work you can show off to potential clients so they know what you're about and what to expect.
 
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antames said:
I like stumbling on artists unintentionally, which usually involves me searching for a particular song I heard on the radio, from a movie or TV series, or in a video game; or, searching for a particular genre on YouTube or Spotify, liking a song I hear, and researching who the artist is. I haven't ever found someone through their self-promotion, and I think others are the same. You discover artists from songs you like, and find other similar artists, and one thing leads to another and it naturally grows from there. There's no pressure in that process, whereas there's a sense of pressure when someone promotes their material to you and suddenly you feel obliged to listen to it, which ironically can have the opposite effect of putting people off. There's no harm in sharing tracks you have made on websites like these as long as they're in the right forum. Make sure you also have a body of work you can show off to potential clients so they know what you're about and what to expect.
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Exactly, which is why doing a proper cover or a variation on a popular tune is a GREAT way to generate attention!

It doesn't have to be top 40 💩 either, film OST tracks and video game music is also highly sought after by many a youtuber.

There's even a big market still for song parodies these days, incidentally.

I think Weird Al would have still 'made it' with a YT channel today if he were coming up now and had decent production quality.

For newcomers who really are committed, and serious about getting exposure for original work on their channel/s this really can't be stressed enough, try it out :thumbsup:
 
Peter Williams said:
The internet is the neo-Tower of Babel. We are living in a time of highly specialized skills and interests. It is very difficult to generate interest in art-music in whatever form, especially if it breaks with convention. I've tried to create a kind of poly-stylistic music that embraces the past, the present as well as current technology. Some like it, but others not so much, which I understand. Specialized persons often have very specialized interests in music, so my stuff can probably seem heretical and flippant to some. I am grateful for this forum, as I learn things that I would otherwise have very little exposure to. I'm not too interested in doing film or game music, but I very much respect the skill and effort involved with that craft and I do learn useful things from others' experiences with it. I'm 73 years old, been playing music since I was seven, and I'm now mostly content to save my work on decent quality cds and other media. I do use Soundcrowd and Farcebook, but to very little effect. You can't even find me on Soundcrowd unless you include my middle initial (B.), as Peter Williams is a common name.

P.S. I thought that the music business changed radically when music videos became popular in the '80s, because the musical artistry became compromised by the visual artistry, although occasionally the sum was greater than the parts. In general though, what you looked like became more important than what you sounded like.
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"Video Killed the Radio Star" was appropriately the first music video aired on MTV.
 
Stephen Limbaugh said:
Not sure if this is the exception or the rule, but I have a career as a film composer because a director's fiancée discovered these two videos while surfing around social media.



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Excellent, Stephen.

You pretty much did what I'm arguing for, which is putting yourself 'out there' on the basis of your musicianship (and/or writing), rather than getting sidetracked with the 'extra-curricular' stuff.

Being such an excellent pianist your playing speaks for itself, but I think most of us can benefit from this same approach.

Cheers!

P.S. Also HOLY SHIT that coffee house crowd was rough, not even one person applauds after you SLAYED that Rachmaninoff?! 🤦‍♂️
 
Stephen Limbaugh said:
Not sure if this is the exception or the rule, but I have a career as a film composer because a director's fiancée discovered these two videos while surfing around social media.



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The exception and it’s kind of ironical because none of these videos are actually original compositions by you. Kind of proves the randomness of it all, but you do have good looking friends! (And you killed it with the fox part!)
 
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rgames said:
The problem with that is that it rarely works. At least not on a large enough scale to make a decent living.

Sell the brand, not the music.



That's clearly not true as evidenced by two basic facts:

1. There are people whom I judge to be as "excellent" as others who have a huge following but have only a tiny following or no following at all.

2. There is no consensus defintion of "excellent" in music.

rgames
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Fair points. I guess it depends on what your end goal is - sell records to the public, get TV placements or get hired as a film composer. I come from a performing background, where “all” I had to do to get the job was to play better than the other guys and be nice to work with, so I’m still stuck in that mentality as a composer.
 
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