To promote your own style of indie music you need to find out where your style is being played on radio stations online. and get your songs played on those where the audience is going to be YOUR audience. You need to work out which are the best web sites to get reviewed on and how visible such a review might be. You don't want to submit a country song to a hip hop site or vice versa, it defeats the objective.
You'll also want to start shopping around for a label or an indie distribution site that will make it possible to upload your tracks and allow them to handle the creation of the CD, the collection of payment and postage costs, packaging the CDs and distribution of them.
A very good reference to these types of websites, that is being constantly updated - as it needs to be online - is the Indie Bible. If you live in the United States or anywhere else in the World and you don't own a copy of the Indie Bible you are missing out on a resource that can be the difference between success and failure online.
Music Distribution Sites Reach a Global Audience.
While everyone is aware of MySpace and Facebook - both of which are important sites to use to promote Indie music, far fewer people are aware of the thousands of other web sites that have other services that they can perform for you.
You can promote indie music on music review sites by uploading a demo or free single and asking it to be reviewed. If you get a rave review this can immediately impact on your profile and perhaps your sales. You can promote indie music by actually selling a download or CD through a variety of music distribution sites. Many of these are community sites and the community of listeners is an audience well worth playing to. These sites are great for promotion but they also allow you to earn some money from your songs.
Many of these music distribution sites allow you to list your product on Amazon or iTunes. If nothing else, doing this makes it possible to have a place to refer fans to, when they ask if you have recordings available. Some of these music distribution sites also make it possible to earn money in different ways as well. If you visit the site in my signature, you'll discover more information about this there.
When you have a CD released, there are press release sites where you can submit a press release about the recording and also let people know if you are touring somewhere. If this is of interest to local papers, they may print it in their paper. A press release that they don't have to pay for is always welcomed. A story about your band could be of interest in a local paper and can have a very positive effect towards your promotional campaign.
Even if it's not picked up independently, it won't hurt to put in a short call to your local paper and bring it to their attention and this is a good strategy, well worth following through on. Having the article already created, where an editor can immediately read it, formatted and already online, makes their job easier. I have found it has a better result than cold calling an editor and asking them if they'll run an article they have not seen.
If you are a classical musician or you have ever felt you'd like to write soundtracks for TV or film, there are several music sites where you can submit samples for assessment. Service sites that can help you write for these industries can prove very lucrative in the long run. These are just a few ways to promote indie music.
If you are looking for ways to promote indie music, then look online.
Opportunities don't come round knocking on doors but they are in abundance online if you just know where to look. Get the Indie Bible for advice, there's a stack of articles that will give you invaluable information. Don't get stuck or freeze in confusion when you see so many sites. If necessary pick a site at random and start there. But make a start today with MySpace and Facebook.
Hyper link each site together on your profiles so that people can hook up easily with you on all your sites or profiles. If you don't know how, learn how, you don't need to do any programming anymore, nearly all the sites make it really easy to upload a picture, upload an audio and paste in some text. Start simple and go back and add more as you gain experience.
You'll quickly get the hang of it. Learning how to promote indie music is not as hard as you think. It does take time to have effect but if you spend a little time each day on it, you'll be surprised how fast you get results, so long as you keep adding to it. The most important thing you can do is ask any friends you have to link to you wherever they may have a site or blog and to use your name or band name in the link as often and wherever you can.
When you have a little more experience, read the articles on this site about marketing and promotion with articles. These is so much free information available it would be a shame not to benefit from it.
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