Indie Artist’s Ultimate Guide to Music Marketing

Music marketing is no longer about chasing trends or posting nonstop. This guide to music marketing reveals how independent artists can build lasting fan relationships using a clear strategy, authentic content, and the right tools.

Indie Artist’s Ultimate Guide to Music Marketing

by RYAN DILELLO from CD Baby’s DIY Musician

Why Marketing Matters More Than Ever

In today’s saturated market, independent musicians need a strong music marketing strategy to stand out from the crowd. But that requires more than clever promo tactics. Successful music marketing is about building a story around your artistry, developing deep relationships with your fans, and setting goals to focus your effort and track your progress. 

At its best, your marketing serves as an extension of your music, providing more ways for fans to access your artwork through storytelling and creative content. It’s why, according to the 2025 IFPI report, record labels invested a total of $8.1 billion in A&R and marketing in the global music industry – nearly a third of their revenue in 2023.

But ultimately, marketing is about relationships, not reach. It’s about telling the right story, to the right people, at the right time. And that resonance is incredibly rewarding when you’ve found ways to turn first-time listeners into die-hard fans. 

In this guide, we’ll provide you with an introduction to music marketing in 2025. We’ll explore the approaches, considerations, strategies and tactics you’ll need to give your music the spotlight it deserves

PART 1: FOUNDATION

What Music Marketing Is — and Isn’t

The American Marketing Association defines marketing as “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.” 

Putting that into musical terms, that’s creating music, communicating its message, providing digital and physical playback options, and exchanging music for revenue. 

Good music marketing provides a system to execute all of those functions, from songwriting to monetization. 

That requires writing great music, telling a story with clarity and consistency, finding the right audience, and creating a journey to create and retain fans. Success on all those fronts comes from careful planning and consistent execution. 

Marketing is a systematic and long-term process. It is not: 

• Posting without strategy just to “stay active”
• One-off stunts with no follow-up
• Relying entirely on the algorithm

Music marketing is:

• Telling your story with clarity and consistency across formats
• Reaching the right people at the right time, not just more people at any time
• Creating a journey for fans to follow, from first-time listeners to die-hard fans

Build a Music Brand That Sticks

When a new fan discovers your music, they’ll want to learn more about you and contextualize your music within their world – to form a deeper understanding of your artistry. They’ll do so through your brand. 

Your brand is a cumulative impression left by your music and aesthetic, social media presence, merch and asset design – and your story as an artist.

Your brand can arise from conscious planning or you can come to know it by reflecting on your creative processes, identity, and output and leaning into the patterns. Reflecting on your artwork, past marketing efforts, and aesthetic, you might be surprised to find patterns that constitute a kind of brand. It’s important to build and maintain a brand identity to anchor your music marketing and give it identifiable cohesion

Define Clear, Measurable Goals for your Artist Career

Before you market anything, start with a specific, measurable goal. A vague goal like “grow my audience” is too broad and lacks metrics to define success. Goals are essential for your marketing strategy. They provide your marketing with a purpose, help you prioritize your time and energy, and enable you to measure success and adjust accordingly.

When you’re making goals, use the SMART goal framework to ensure you’re creating useful goals.

• Specific: What exactly do you want to achieve?
• Measurable: How will you track it?
• Achievable: Is it realistic based on your resources?
• Relevant: Does it support your music career?
• Time-bound: What’s your deadline?

Follow the SMART framework to ensure you have a tangible and rewarding goal to work toward.

Some examples include:

• “Gain 500 TikTok followers in 60 days”
• “Get added to 15 user-generated Spotify playlists”
• “Sell 100 shirts from my Bandcamp in 30 days”

Know Your Fans

Many artists who are early in their career try to market to everyone. Even if they understand their music won’t be for everyone, they haven’t channeled that into their marketing approach. Instead, these artists are consistently trying to win over the algorithm, execute sporadic, mass promotional efforts, and take general, non-targeted approaches, blasting out to fans and non-fans alike. This work is exhausting and with relatively minimal consistent payoff, it can become discouraging.

Build a Fan Persona:

There’s a good chance your perception of your fans revolves around your superfans; these are the supporters you see at every show, they like and comment on all your posts, and share your music with friends. These are your most valuable fans, but they’re not the easiest to cultivate. That’s why you should focus on new and casual fans. Fan engagement expert, Dan Goldberg wrote in a recent Music Business Worldwide column, “I believe that the opportunity is to stop treating superfans as the end-all be-all, and instead to construct pathways that acquire casual fans and communities that convert them into diehards.  This means placing more investment in the middle.  Acquisition leads to identity, which, if done right, becomes conversion.”

Think of your ideal fan — not just age and location, but:

• What online platforms are they most active on?
• How might they discover and stay engaged with you?
• What kind of content resonates most with them?
• What other artists do they listen to?

Connecting the dots between your casual fans and superfans, you’ll begin to understand your funnel from discovery to loyalty, more on that later. But a crucial first step is taking stock of the opportunities you currently offer for discovery, ways for fans to stay engaged, and the offers you can provide to convert casual listeners into loyal fans: artist merch, a newsletter, a fan club, etc. Identify gaps and areas to expand your funnel. The goal is to acquire more casual listeners, which you can ultimately convert into superfans.

Key Takeaways from Part 1

• Marketing is about building fulfilling and trusting relationships
• Give your fans something to latch onto with a cohesive brand
• Clear goals focus your effort and track progress
• Understanding your audience is the key to relevance

PART 2: STRATEGY

Plan, Don’t Just Post: Marketing Campaigns That Build

It’s essential to plan out your marketing at an effective yet sustainable pace. Planning out a month to a year’s worth of content can feel daunting, but take it in chunks and plan around anticipated timeframes for studio sessions, releases, live shows, tours, merch drops and more — promote what excites you! Piecing apart your content marketing by milestones can also ensure you’re marketing for a cause and thinking in more digestible ways. 

Create a Fan Journey That Converts

Once you have a content plan, it’s important to optimize it for converting your audience. That requires understanding your fan journey and having the right tools in place to convert a first-time listener into a lifelong fan. 

First, consider the key stages of your fan’s journey:

• Discovery: How are fans learning about your music?
• Interest: What drives your fans’ interest in your music?
• Loyalty: What keeps fans engaged in your music? 

Don’t do this abstractly – envision the journey of a real or imagined fan. For example, imagine a concert attendee who discovered your music when you opened for their favorite band. What steps will you take to develop a relationship with this potential fan? If they come by the merch table after the show, do you have an email list or social media handles to stay in touch? From there, what content are you putting out that might keep this new fan coming back for more?

What metrics should I track?

Ahead of planning, take stock of your profile performance metrics and follower activity. Get a social media management app or look within an app’s native metric reporting. Some key metrics that can help inform your content planning are:

• Follower count and activity over time (knowing most active hours/days can optimize your post schedule)
• Top/bottom performing posts (find out what content is resonating and what’s falling flat)
• Follower demographics and mutual follows (paint a picture of your online community and identify communities you want to expand into)

Map out content types according to what resonates most with your followers and what you’re able to execute consistently. Then look at your calendar of upcoming activity – shows, studio time, releases, etc. 

You can simplify planning your marketing by taking it in chunks. First get multi-week plans for milestone events such as an upcoming release or tour. Once your calendar is filled there, you can begin to plan templates for standard non-milestone weeks. It’s helpful then to come up with a standard, repeatable content framework for a week to use when you’re in between major promotable events.

Taking a data-informed approach to your marketing can save time and guesswork. Here are some other key metrics you should consider tracking on email, socials, and streaming and how to leverage them.

Email

• Email list growth over time: Understanding the growth of your email audience can help you identify what events drive signups
• Open and click rates: Identify whether your content is resonating at the subject line and copy levels
• Unsubscribes: how many fans have unsubscribed from your emails? Are certain sends diminishing interest?

Streaming

• Monthly listeners: how many fans listen to your music on a monthly basis?
• Streams by song: what are your most and least popular songs?
• Playlist placements: what songs are being playlisted and where?

Align content creation with your career, not the other way around

When content creation starts to feel like a slog, it’s often because it’s not aligning with your activities as an artist. Fortunately, there are ways you can organically promote yourself and execute a marketing strategy without straying too far from your typical to-dos as an artist. Consider some of the ideas below.

• Document studio time: Great pictures and short-form content can come from idle time in the studio. Film your bandmate tracking a part, interview your singer, capture b-roll, and more.
• Network with press: Stay up to date on music news and find some voices in the press who resonate with you. If an article clicks, reach out to the journalist and build a relationship. It will come in handy when you have a release ready.
• Send song sketches, demos, and alternative versions to fans: Workshopping a tune or landed on a new demo? Your fans might love hearing a song in the works or an alternative version of a previously released track.
• Play live: There’s no replacement for performing live. Concerts win you fans and keep your music top of mind. Bonus points for capturing soundboard audio and filming sets.

Center your marketing efforts around channels that make you feel like yourself while connecting with fans. Are you a great performer? Play more shows and market your live performance. Are you captivating in front of a camera? Create more short-form videos. Are you a writer? Send out a fan newsletter. And so on.

Artists are pushed to so many content channels to promote themselves. That’s why it’s important to remember that there are just as many ways to reach and retain fans. Do yourself the favor and focus most on the channels where you feel fulfilled. That’s not to say you shouldn’t challenge yourself and try new tactics, but if it’s feeling daunting or forced, go back to a familiar place.

PART 3: CHANNELS & TACTICS

The sheer variety of marketing channels and tools available for artists today means you can balance what makes you feel authentic with what resonates with fans when it comes to choosing platforms for your marketing strategy. As mentioned before, find what marketing channels suit your strengths. If you’re a writer, email, Facebook, a blog, and micro-blog sites might suit you best. Or, if you’re great on camera, experiment with TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube shorts. You can gain new skills by stepping outside your comfort zone, but focus on what’s sustainable and fulfilling if you’re looking to grow your audience. In the end, staying consistent with channels that make you feel empowered will lead to better results.

Email and Websites: Own Your Audience

Social media is excellent for fan acquisition and engagement, but to truly own your fanbase and reach them directly, you need to build an email list. The main advantage of email is bypassing the algorithm. Only a fraction of your followers on social media platforms will see, let alone engage, with your posts. Email, however, enables you to reach fans on your own schedule. It’s also accommodating of multimedia, making each send more efficient. Where social media platforms can be restrictive, a single email can include images, videos, and outbound links you want fans to engage with. 

Choose an email management tool and begin building your list. You can build your email list by offering signups at key fan touch points such as your merch table at a show, your link in social media bios, and promotional materials.

Social Media Without the Burnout

Social media can quickly become a burden if you’re not taking the right steps to align it with your interests, strengths, and goals as an artist. 

First, choose the right platforms for you. Between the short-form videos of TikTok, photography of Instagram, or quips of X (formerly Twitter) and BlueSky, you can find an outlet that aligns with your natural way of connecting with people. 

Second, create content that connects with your audience. After choosing a platform or two to focus on, take note of the content that drives follower engagement and lean into it. 

Third, take all the steps you can to repurpose and batch content. If you have a studio session coming up or a concert, recruit a videographer and photographer to document the moment. Then repurpose that content into press photos, short-form behind the scenes videos, music video footage, and social media image posts. 

Creating social media content organically—like documenting your shows, studio time, and other creative processes—can make it feel fulfilling and more directly beneficial to your artistic process.

Short-Form Video: Breaking the Algorithm

Since the initial boom of TikTok, short-form video has become the predominant social media tool for driving engagement. According to Vidico, short-form video will take up nearly 90% of internet traffic in 2025. With that, if you’re on a video-supportive platform, you should make short-form video an essential part of your marketing strategy. 

Creating quick content with strong hooks and a call to action is the best path to cutting through the noise online.

For more information on how to leverage short-form video, check out our musician’s guide to video.

PR and Media Outreach: Pitch With Purpose

Even as AI poses a threat to independent media organizations, PR and media relations are still crucial for gaining exposure. In fact, AI Search Engines and LLMs are drawing tons of information from reputable news sources and having your artist name within reviews, interviews, and features can improve your visibility. Beyond your direct marketing channels, buzz in the press can help you win new fans, expand your network, and build your resume. 

You’ll want to develop a strong press list to tap for coverage on upcoming releases, tours, and other career news. If you’re early in your career and don’t have experience with pitching press, a great first step is following journalists online who are covering music similar to yours. Keep tabs on their pages, engage with their content, then reach out when you have news to share and mention how you discovered them. A warm outreach is always better than hundreds of cold pitches sent en masse.

PART 4: PUTTING IT TOGETHER

Marketing for Each Stage of a Release

If you’re planning to promote an upcoming release, structure your content in stages. We’ve provided the three stages below with goals and 5 tactics you can use to achieve them.

• Pre-release: Hype & anticipation
  • Create a pre-save campaign and pitch Spotify Editorials
  • Send press release to your network
  • Record and cut up behind the scenes videos
  • Create a music video teaser
  • Plan a release show, party, and/or tour
• Release week: Conversion & engagement
  • Run conversion ads on social media
  • Repost and share press coverage
  • Run paid campaigns on streaming platforms like Spotify for Artists
  • Make announcement posts and encourage reposts
  • Run Meta conversion ads linking to your music
• Post-release: Momentum & relationship-building
• • Play local shows and/or tour and keep a tour diary
  • Pitch curator playlists
  • Drop a remix, b-side, or alternative arrangement of a recent release
  • Promote merch and physical copies of your release
  • Poll fans on favorite tracks

Marketing When You’re Not Releasing Music

No matter how busy you are, you’ll encounter rest periods. For a lot of artists, marketing during this time can feel perplexing. But it’s crucial to maintain momentum and nurture your fanbase so that they’re already engaged when it comes time to market your next “big thing.” Here are a few approaches you can take.

Diaristic: Post about things in your day-to-day that fans might relate to! Create content around a new skill you’re learning, a musical idea you’re exploring, a recent trip you took, or a question you’re struggling to answer. These kinds of day-to-day posts may seem mundane, but if you’ve focused your media around marketing and music, these kinds of posts can be a refreshing change and enable fans to get to know you. This approach also works in a newsletter format.

Creative: Think of ways to repackage and enhance your latest release. That could mean dropping remixes or alternative versions, but it could also be grounds for a totally new spinoff. Record an album-long music video or documentary, curate a special show, or drop a complementary form of media like a lyric book or painting that adds to your latest release.

Community: You can stay active by supporting other artists and building community online. That can take various forms but a few quick ways to engage are sharing and reposting content from artists you love, commenting on other profiles, and creating playlists and mixtapes assimilating your music with others.

Final Tips: Think Long Game

As you’re putting these marketing tips into practice, it’s important to keep a focus on the longer term goals you want to achieve. What does success as an artist look like for you? Set goals that genuinely motivate and inspire you – with so many tools, channels, and content types today, it’s easy to overwhelm yourself by following general industry advice and end up spreading yourself thin by treating marketing as an obligation. Reflect on what aspects of your artistry bring you fulfillment and align your marketing accordingly to grow your career in those directions.

Secondly, as you’re planning out marketing strategies and content, focus on how you can set yourself up for consistent rather than perfect content output. Consistent posting builds trust with your audience, establishes you as an active artist online, and plays well to algorithms.

Lastly, keep a log of key performance marketing metrics across all your channels. Long-term marketing success comes from data-driven decisions and after several months of output, you’ll be positioned to learn from your data. Track how an entire release campaign performs and you can leverage your insights to make your next release campaign even more successful.  Leveraging metrics can optimize your marketing and save you time, allowing you to focus on the art itself.

We hope this guide helped you hit the ground running with marketing in 2025. At CD Baby, we’re committed to supporting you beyond your releases, to propel your career. Learn more here.