On day 4, I began looking at a way to present my free music to my blog and create a strategy so I can track if it is helping my unique visitors increase and helping my track sales go up. How are you actively promoting your music? Are you describing it or just throwing it at your fans saying “check out my music”. The test will be challenging the question: Does giving out free music help get me more visits as a musician?

Over the next two weeks I will be releasing some free hip hop music with my band posts. I want to make this into a regular thing for promoting our projects. When I visit artist’s sites that I like, I enjoy hearing their music, especially FREE music.

Experiment 1

I’m writing about 3-4 blog posts a week, pacing myself with my schedule. I will add one song per post of some of our music. I found some of our unreleased tracks and gathered about 6 songs I had on my hard drive. These songs can be full tracks, instrumentals, or even ringtones. The key here is to be creative.

The next step would include writing a description of whatever song is used in your article. The track info will be good for search engines and gives you more opportunity to rank for various keywords. Describe your track mood, setting of song, story line or even inspiration. This will also be valuable for future music licensing submission. Generally, many music licensing companies will ask for this kind of description before submitting your track. Good to have some practice describing your tunes or even referring to it when you do your actual submissions.

Reasons For Giving Out Free Music

1. Increase RSS subscribers: more repeat visitors wanting to hear your music
2. Expose your variety: let readers get to know you better
3. Build Your Mailing List
4. Easily share your music: each article represents one song. 6 songs can be 6 future article topics, giving you more chances for fans to find your projects online. Social bookmarking each article provides a powerful tool for one project

The ultimate goal here is testing out what are the best ways to connect with fans. Do they want to read about us or hear us? Can’t hurt to provide both. You can use the same setup with pictures and videos.

Keep your music blog fresh and active, visitors will appreciate it.

While in the midst of marketing as a musician, you must always remember the central focus is your music. I came across an interesting podcast on www.musicmarketing.com that stressed an important point. Always focus on what you are good at. If you are a lyricist, then write everyday. If you are a producer, then create music everyday. The point is simple but very critical.

While you are hustling everyday to get your music out, you must remember that you need good, current music in your arsenal. If you are working so hard on networking, who is creating your music? This is just a preparation test for all indie musicians who have to run their marketing, production, and promotion teams all as one person. When your networking pays off and you get multiple offers, you will have the right mixture of marketing and quality music, keeping your talent polished.

After hearing the podcast I organized our instrumentals and songs and looked for ways to improve our inventory. Here is a free hip hop instrumental called “Get Set” that is the melodic reminder of our music marketing expedition.

Get Set produced by Lost Thought and Shifty J