Marketing, Content Creation, Getting Fans, and Going Viral

We’ve learned how to create music. Now we need to get your music heard. Branding, promotion, and marketing are important tools to launch a career in music. In this chapter, we’ll learn about developing your brand, marketing/promoting yourself, and tips to create online content.

In this chapter, we will discuss the following topics:

• Marketing essentials
• Creating a brand
• Making the most of your live performances
• Collaborating with others to promote yourself
• YouTube and TikTok for musicians
• Creating album artwork using AI art generators (Stable Diffusion)
• Creating music visuals with ZGameEditor Visualizer

Marketing essentials

How much you’re able to earn is directly connected to how well you’re able to market yourself. To market yourself, at a minimum, you’ll want to have the following:

• A brand identity.
• A musician website featuring you and your products.
• A YouTube channel.
• A Google email account for business-related inquiries. Give it a professional name.
• Optional but potentially useful: SoundCloud, Patreon, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and/or Twitch accounts for your brand.

Building a brand isn’t something that happens overnight. It takes months or years for you to develop a fan base. So, if you don’t have the previously listed items yet, get started creating them.

Creating a brand

Time for the fun part… choosing your identity. What do you want to be known as? How would you like to be recognized? Think about the visuals, logos, genres, and so on. If you don’t know what kind of artist you want to be yet, start thinking now.

If you want to get recognized, it helps if you have something to be recognized for. It may sound a little counterintuitive, but the more specific you get with your brand image, the easier it becomes to generate content. By narrowing your options and choosing some rules to work within, it becomes easier to create. This applies to any creative artistic expression. Once you know what direction you’d like to go in, you’ll start discovering lots of opportunities to get there.

Making decisions to advance your career can be intimidating and overwhelming when you first start as there are countless paths you could take. Creating a brand makes decision-making easier. Think about how you want to look...

Making the most of your live performances

If you’re a live-performing musician, that means you’re an entertainer. That means you should be thinking about how to entertain. The music, although important, is only one piece of the act.

If you want to perform live, you need to have something to show. That means you need to put together an act that can be repeated in multiple performances. If someone is watching your show, you need to find ways to keep them engaged. Why should they watch you? Give them a reason.

Think about visuals you can create to captivate your audience. Although you may not be able to control the venue itself, since it changes with each performance, there are many parts of your act that you can control, even when you’re first starting out with little to no budget. Here are some suggestions:

• Find a visual costume that is pleasing to look at. You might consider incorporating costume changes throughout your show.
• If you’...

Collaborating with others to promote yourself

Whatever social media you pick, if you want to grow an audience base, it’s a lot faster if you collaborate with other content creators.

For example, in many music videos, you’ll see videos featuring other singers. Why feature another singer? Why not just do everything solo? By featuring a collaborator, you gain the opportunity to introduce your fans to your collaborator and your collaborator’s fans to you. It’s a win-win situation, and both of your fan bases increase.

Collaboration is extremely important in building a career in the music and film industries. It presents some golden opportunities, but you need to have the right mindset to see them. Let’s take a moment to see how to get the most out of collaborating.

Lots of singers and instrumentalists are talented. There’s an endless supply of talent out there. You see countless musicians do very well in TV show competitions, but you...

Creating music visuals with ZGameEditor Visualizer

When you’re playing a song, you always need a visual. In the long term, you’ll need to invest time and effort into learning about video creation or collaborate with someone who does.

In the short term, when you’re just getting started, there’s a free tool in FL Studio that can easily generate decent animations called ZGameEditor Visualizer. It allows you to sync your music to video and text and add visual effects.

Let’s learn how to create animations with ZGameEditor Visualizer:

1. Create a new project and import your finished song into the playlist. You’ll want a new FL Studio project as ZGameEditor Visualizer can be quite CPU-intensive.
2. On the master bus mixer channel, load up the ZGameEditor Visualizer effect plugin:

   Figure 13.3 – ZGameEditor Visualizer

   ZGameEditor Visualizer allows you to load videos, images, and effects in layers. Although you...

Summary

In this chapter, we learned about branding, promotion, and marketing. The more effective you are at using these tools, the more publicity and interest you will generate for your music and business.

We discussed choosing an artist identity and an artist name. We discussed preparation for live show performances and booking gigs. We looked at tips to create content on social media platforms and use collaboration as a means of promoting yourself.

We looked at creating album artwork with Stable Diffusion. If you want to go further in learning to create art with artificial intelligence using Stable Diffusion, I offer a full course on the subject at https://www.chestersky.com/stable-diffusion-masterclass/. Finally, we learned about creating music video visuals using FL Studio’s ZGameEditor Visualizer.

In the next chapter, we’ll look at monetizing, selling, and registering your music.