How to Promote Your Music and Your Band

If you're a musician and you've decided to self record your music or use your own private record label, you are probably in need of some ideas on marketing your music or marketing your band. Marketing your band online can be a great way to increase your sales and your exposure as a musician.

Here are some great ways to promote your music and improve your earnings as a recording artist:

1. Create a Website
You must have a website to succeed. A MySpace page alone does not count as a website. You will want your website to have samples of the music for your audience to listen to, the ability to purchase the music either directly from your site or through a partner such as iTunes, regularly updated content such as tour dates, a blog written by one of the band members, an email mailing list and more. You can either choose to do all of this yourself, but if you're a serious musician or not very familiar with building websites and marketing them, it is highly suggested you either hire someone as a member of your band who share the profits with you to do this work or hire an independent webmaster on an hourly or project fee basis.

2. Merchandise Yourself
People love t-shirts, stickers, buttons and more displaying their favorite music groups and artists. You can join a site like Spreadshirt.com or CafePress.com that will allow you to open up your own store selling things with your band logo, song lyrics, or album art. You may want to see about finding a local printer who will make a large quantity of stickers inexpensively so you can give these away for free at concerts or to someone registering on your mailing list online. Once you have the ability for people to buy merchandise that promotes your band, you have the ability to earn more from the sales of merchandise and it will also help promote your band to others unaware you exist.

3. Start Networking
The key to making money as an artist is to develop a fan base that will listen to your songs and want to buy them. A great way to do this is promote your page on social networking sites. You cannot belong to too many social networking sites, so try to get on as many as you can and participate actively in all of them by adding friends and sending messages. You will also want to network with people offline - the people who visit your shows, the club owners, other bands you could potentially perform with and more. The more people you know in the industry, the more tips you will learn and the farther you will go. You may want to keep a database or contact list for people for mailing lists, new releases, and more.

4. Submit Your Music Online
Submit your band information and your music to every page you can find your musicians. MySpace, PureVolume, OurStage, and many others allow musicians to create a free page and upload songs. Some will even let you put them up for sale. This will also help attract more visitors to your website.

5. Send Complimentary Tickets
Sending free tickets to your next performance to writers for local websites, magazines, and newspapers can not only be beneficial for more attendees to your show, it can also be a chance for some free publicity on a blog, newspaper, or local magazine article. If they come and the like your sound, they will write about you and promote your band for free just because they are in need of material to talk about.

Following these five steps will help you promote your music and your band. You will notice more fans, more website traffic, and definitely more revenue. The more people learn about you they will be more likely to purchase downloads or your merchandise. Prmoting your band takes a lot of hard work and perseverence, but it can be done by independent musicians and artists. Good luck in promoting your band!