Avoid the Void: 10 Tips for Releasing Digital Music

Does releasing music feel like throwing all your hard work into an endless void? You’re not alone. Here are 10 ways to find the fans you know are out there.

10 Ways to Avoid the Void and Find Your Fans

By CD Baby for DIY Musician Blog

If you’ve felt like you’re releasing music into a void, it’s not an illusion. 

Over 100,000 tracks are uploaded to streaming services every day, making it difficult for new releases to stand out. But the good news is there are thousands more music listeners waiting to discover their next favorite artist. And with the right mix of promotion, networking, and community-building, you can be well on your way to building a fanbase this year.

In this blog, you’ll learn 10 ways to start finding your fans online and in your community. These aren’t comprehensive strategies, but key approaches and considerations to start making a splash in everything you do.

1. Make a strong release plan with plenty of lead time

Most artists wait too long to start building hype around their release. We recommend beginning promotion 4-8 weeks from your release — that’s in addition to a 2-3 month lead-time for your release itself. Plan a release strategy with a mix of social posts, studio clips, pre-save links, press release sends, and other auxiliary assets that create a story and build anticipation. 

You can refine your promotion by assessing your current audience, identifying your goals, and taking stock of content creation opportunities and prompts. Spotify for Artists has analytics that provide insights into your audience. Make a list of ways to reach your audience (channels, topics that resonate, and content comfort areas), then create a content plan for your release.

2. Define your ideal fan

No matter where you are in your career, start to take note of who resonates with your music. Whether you’re on an international tour or just playing your first show, marketing your music to “everyone” is incredibly difficult and sets many musicians up to fail. By targeting your promotion to your ideal audience, you’re more likely to find open ears. 

Defining your fans can be a different process depending on your career stage. An established artist might have access to a wealth of analytics and a team to help leverage them. For a newer artist, this process might entail looking inward. Target your marketing around your genre, aesthetic, comparable artists, and your scene/community (local or global). Getting smarter with your marketing can save you valuable time and ensure your efforts pay off.

3. Meet your fans where they are

Organize and attend shows in your scene and network with local musicians, show attendees, and venue staff. Being active will open up opportunities to grow your target audience and organically develop a fanbase. Meanwhile, keep tabs on where you’re seeing engagement with your music online and double down on successful platforms. See where your audience is willing to meet you. 

Two golden rules to consider. First, presence matters more than perfection. Providing potential fans with the opportunity to experience your music and meet you will always be valuable to your career – don’t get lost in the pursuit of perfection. Second, you must engage an audience before promoting to them. Prime your audience ahead of blasting them with promotional content by documenting your time in the studio, capturing live shows, and building up a story around your release.

4. Seek out co-promotion opportunities

Some of the most powerful promotional techniques are collaborative. Adjacent artists in your scene can help by sharing your songs to their audience via social media or artist playlists. Tastemakers can help by putting your songs on their most popular playlists (but DO NOT pay for placements). Other creative ideas include co-hosting Instagram live Q+As, doing remix swaps, or collaborating with a local businesses on a limited edition version of their product with your branding!

5. Make social media serve your music

If posting to social media begins to feel tedious or aimless, consider how content is serving your music. At a high level, social media should help you find and build relationships with fans. If you’re posting promotional content to a void, it might mean you need stronger organic connections. 

First, focus on the platforms where you feel like your authentic self. Second, identify what content concepts resonate with your fans. Third, make posts that invite fan engagement and showcase your work in a candid way: behind the scenes cuts, interviews, live show footage, day-in-the-life content. Make an intro clip, essay, or carousel introducing yourself and descriving your music! The bottom line: draw in a fanbase through shared moments and exciting messages, rather than a flood of calls-to-action.

6. Build a home base you can control (more than socials)

Your social media is a platform for fan acquisition and engagement, but you need a home base for your audience—a space you control. Whether that’s a website, landing page, or email list, build a tool that allows direct access to your fans, on your own schedule.

If you feel that’s ahead of your current stage, your home base can be physical as well. Do you have a residency at a local bar, run a house venue, or routinely meet up with friends in your scene at “the spot?” Lean on those places to help get the word out. In addition to flyering there and spreading the word, consider hosting a release party or artist mixer night to build community around your release.

7. Experiment with targeted ads to test and scale

If you’re sitting on some funds from gigs or merch sales and you’re looking to invest more in your marketing, paid ads are a great place to start. Begin with testing $20-50 on Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube and leverage the available targeting filters. Ad content can range but some great starter ideas include snippets of upcoming songs, music videos, or footage from a live show. Think through your call to action – you can drive viewers to your social media pages, a ticket landing page, a song pre-save link, and more!

Get your first paid-ads campaign started with Show.co, a suite of music marketing tools for multi-channel campaigns.

8. Harness the power of short-form video

Short-form video has become the predominant form of sharable, bite-sized content in today’s social media landscape. Platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts can distribute attention-grabbing, authentic content, making them ideal for sharing everything from lyric videos to song breakdowns and live performances.

Creating this content is easier than ever, too. You don’t need expensive equipment or fancy editing tools. With a smartphone or camera and the native video editing tools on many platforms, you can instantly create content that offers a glimpse into your artistic or candid world. Getting started can be difficult, but don’t aim for perfection. Begin threading video in as a variant to posts you’re already making—merch drops, show promotion, song teaser clips, and interviews.

9. Consider your fan’s journey

How did you discover your favorite bands and how has your relationship with them evolved over time? Perhaps you caught them opening for another band you love or your favorite streaming platform made an astute recommendation and you were instantly hooked. From there, how did you engage further with the band? Maybe you checked for upcoming tour dates, caught their next local show and bought merch, then signed up for their email list to stay up to date on the band’s latest. And now you’re in the loop and attending every show, pre-ordering every album, and so on.

That’s an example of an ideal fan journey, which you might consider as part of a fan funnel. Now assess whether you have the touch points available for fans to navigate a similar pathway with your work. Orient your online footprint through the lens of a journey – from a fan catching a snippet of your song on their daily scroll or the fan that stops by the merch table after a show, consider how you’re going to retain them.

10. Engage fans between releases

Make the most of your time between releases. In the lead up to your release, capture content to post for the future. Record moments on tour, journal about the process of writing a standout song, and make a habit of following up with journalists in the wake of a release for delayed coverage. Taking an artistic approach in the storytelling and presentation of even your most mundane songwriting aspects can serve as entry points for new fans. A few ideas on how to engage fans between releases:

• Update your artist playlists on Spotify
• Hold an AMA on your social media or with a relevant Reddit community!
• Collaborate with other publications or artists to produce a mixtape or host a conversation about your creative process
• Drop a b-side or remixed version of a previously released track
• Record a previously released song in a different arrangement

In conclusion

Consider these tips as focal points for improvement throughout your career. Not only will you gain more experience to approach each of these aspects, your fans will change, as will ways of reaching them.

Found this blog helpful? Register for a CD Baby account to get more marketing advice right to your inbox. We’ll keep you up to date on industry trends, challenges, and innovations, and answer your biggest questions.

And once you’re ready to distribute your music, we’ll be there with you from submission to release day and beyond. Take the first step by creating a free CD Baby account here.