If you desire to do music full-time, then you have to approach music as a business. If you want to be successful in today’s industry, you must employ proven marketing and promotion strategies, use modern technology, and always treat music as a business. 

Taking music as a business will make you always wary of competition because it is easy to substitute in business. Read on to learn other strategies you can employ in your music business.

Make great music

Making great music results in a shift in the music career as it gives it a positive direction. With good music, music starts being profitable, you garner a large loyal fan base and realize recognition from various chats. In music, you compete for people’s attention and recognition. You should go beyond your comfort zone to ensure you write good music.

Strategic moves

Avoid making weak moves. If fans start to lament on your level of creativity, outsource lyrics from songwriters. This strategy ensures that fan satisfaction comes first, and they are set to be entertained with each release. 

Fans have long memories, so always make sure your songs are up to standard before releasing them. Always work hard and employ unmatched strategies, including the options to convert m4a to mp3 to ensure you stay at the top and relevant. Converting files is easy and it ensures that you have the right format to play whenever you need.

Target businesses

After taking music as a business, focus on building good relationships with other businesses rather than reaching out to fans. These other businesses include radio presenters, event organizers, TV stations, DJs, established musicians, and websites covering the same genre that you have specialized in. Making your music reach out to the target audience is more important than making fans one by one.

Gigging

Gigging helps raise awareness of musicians’ brand, generates money, and builds strong relationships with the audience. Gigs contain two types of audience that should be on your wishlist, die-hards of other musicians and general fans. 

The easiest of the bunch to sway is the general genre fans but the other group of fans requires solid reasons so that they can switch their allegiance. This can be achieved by providing consistent quality music. Gigging also improves artists as performers and leads to relevant exposure.

Regular posts

New content is generated and posted every day. It is hard to stay on top if you do not post enough content for the ever-wanting consumers out there. Regular posts are aimed at keeping existing fans entertained and getting new fans in the process. 

In online video sharing platforms like YouTube, frequent content updates are rewarding. Having much content there and a loyal fan base results in huge payouts in the form of royalties. 

Having a personal website

Other than posting your songs on social media and online video-sharing platforms, having your website ensures that your fans have an all-in-one place where they can find your content. Keeping fans updated is of great essence. This is easily achieved by having a website that keeps fans informed of your next gigs, new development, what to expect next, and when there is new content available.

Mailing list

Newsletters are the most convenient way to communicate with fans. On your website, prompt fans to leave their email address. These email addresses will be used to share appropriate messages with fans, act as reminders, and share any other development in your career. 

Publicist

Having a publicist that works in conjunction with you is very beneficial. Most successful artists work with a publicist. The publicist is responsible for media engagement, special event organizing, and creating stories about your music that news-mongers will be eager to hear. 

A competent publicist should help you get attention from the media, resulting in interviews and even better, getting featured in magazines and shows.

Tour of your content creation 

Record behind-the-scenes clips and share them with interested parties via your website, social media, and online video-sharing platforms. Fans are always curious about how their favorite music came into existence. Behind-the-scenes include clips of you while writing your song’s lyrics, live recordings, and even scenes from the official video.

Role definition

For those in bands, define roles for each member. These roles may include content creation, marketing, social media handle management, and posting updates. To avoid being overwhelmed, solo artists should secure a team who will deal with other roles, in turn, leaving him/her with humble time to be creative and deliver great content.

When artists decide to venture into music as a business, it doesn’t end with good music production alone. Good music is accompanied by marketing and promotions. Good marketing strategies and proven promotion methods result in more revenue, expanded recognition, and may even result in endorsements from companies.

Promoting music today is a totally different ball game from what it was in the past. Previously, it was practically unthinkable for your music to be heard and become a hit if you did not have the backing of a major record label.

This was mainly because you required massive financial backing to enable you to get radio time, television slots, headline at concerts of already popular artists, go on road tours and more. This was something that was not possible for most artists back then.

Interestingly, the music industry was among the first to be hit by the changes brought on by the internet even before other industries began to experience massive disruptions. We can see this in this article here. The status quo had already been disrupted in the entertainment industry, resulting in a proliferation of what we now know as indie labels and independent artists.

One of the major tools that has made it possible for these indie artists to achieve fame and fortune even without the backing of any major record label is music streaming platforms. These platforms allow independent artists to build their fan base on the internet, sharing their songs and receiving likes, followership, shares and collaborations which all result in increased visibility.

With increased visibility comes increased demand for their songs which results in increased song sales, concert ticket sales, merchandise sales and other opportunities. In fact, a lot of them even get pickup by one of the major labels because they’ve shown that they have what it takes to make it in the entertainment world.

There are currently a number of these kinds of platforms, but we will be focusing on one and that is SoundCloud.

What is SoundCloud?

This is an online music sharing, streaming and distribution platform. Here, musicians and podcasters alike can upload their content, making it available for access by a huge audience. These uploads can be listened to, downloaded, shared, commented on, liked and reposted.

This platform offers independent musicians a great opportunity to bring their sound and music to the world without spending an arm and a leg. Everyone on the platform has equal access to the many platform users, so this levels the playing field for all.

Why Should I Choose SoundCloud?

There are a number of benefits that this platform offers. These benefits can be broken into two parts. There is the issue of convenience of use and the second issue which has to do with statistics. You can read about the convenience that the platform offers here: https://www.houstonpress.com/music/necrofier-at-the-secret-group-11332021. We will however focus on the stats in this article.

Entertainment has always been about numbers. How many ears will hear it? How many eyeballs will view it? etc.So, in this regard, what does this platform offers? Let’s quickly enumerate a few of them right here.

User Base

A lot of different people use this platform. Some simply come to listen to music that have been uploaded while some others upload their music and also listen to music uploaded by others. SoundCloud currently has over 76 million users who come to the site for one reason or another each month.

The site also has about 20 million musicians who are registered on this site. Having such a huge community of artists, covering practically every known music genre means that collaboration is very easy.

Reach

Every month, content from the site reaches over 175 million people from around 190 countries of the world. These are 175 million folks that your music can potentially reach it you know how to go about it. That’s really huge.

Music Uploads

This year, SoundCloud announced that it had hit its 200^th music upload. This makes it the streaming platform with the most uploads. You can read about it in this blog post. This should tell you that there is something about the platform that has warranted such a huge following.

How Do I Get SoundCloud to Work for Me?

All of the stats we have listed above will not profit you much if you do not know how to make the most of the platform. We will therefore dedicate the remaining part of this article to explaining a few ways in which you can get the most from this platform

Your Profile

It all begins with your profile. This is not something you treat carelessly. Put some thought into what you write here, understanding that it should be something that will pull people in to listen to your work.

Your Images

This is another very important thing to note. Your profile image as well as your album arts should be very attractive. People will see this before clicking to listen to your song. If the image is not attractive, the chances of getting them to listen to your song will be lower.

Quality of Music

No matter how wonderful your profile and images are, if a person listens to your music and it is horrible, what you will achieve will be negative publicity. It is therefore important to understand that you must ensure you do a good job before trying to promote it.

Proper Tagging

Tagging is very important when it comes to campaigns online. This is not just something you do for fun. It has to be strategic. You may want to read about it in this article. Properly tagging your work makes it easy for the right people to find it.

If you are a pop artist, tagging your song as pop and also using other related tags will ensure that pop lovers and other pop artists can find you easily. This is very important.

Offer Previews or Free Downloads

This is especially important for very new artists. You should consider offering free downloads so people can really feel your music. As you get more popular, you can begin to offer short previews of your new tracks. These will act as teasers that will get people interested in listening to the whole thing.

Be Active

It is important that you do not just upload your music and then fold your hands. You need to be active on the platform. Listen to music by other similar artists. Make comments on their work, reposts some, reach out and try to establish some relationships. Doing this will organically attract more people to come check out your page and what you have to offer.

Collaborate with Other Artists

Following from the point above, collaborating with fellow artists on the platform can help build your brand. When two artists come together to do a track, they could easily be bringing their respective fan bases together to support both of them. This becomes more for each person.

Pay for Promotion

While you do all of the above, something else you should really consider is paying to have your music promoted. SoundCloud promotion offers could come in different forms. You could decide to buy SoundCloud reposts, followers, likes, comments etc.

There are companies that offer these services. If for example you pay for 1000 reposts, these will be delivered to you over a specific period. Same goes for likes, comments and followers. This is most certainly a good strategy to adopt if you really want to speed things up nicely.

Conclusion

There is a lot that SoundCloud has to offer you. Carefully take advantage of its many features and with a little help, you may find yourself the next big sensation to have come out of the social media space.

It is really tugging at heartstrings when you see this ballet academy, which is located in Nairobi slums.

At the same time, these photos make your mood better when you see how these children are happy.

In this ballet Academy every underprivileged child from Kibera can try to take lessons. It is worth mentioning that Kibera is supposed to be the largest urban slum in Africa.

As reported at Tuko this dance school is under the guidance of Mike Wamaya — a former dancer who acts within the collaboration from the studio, which is located in one of the affluent districts in the city.

Those who take courses at this Academy have also the possibility to be active participants in different local performances and plays at The National Theatre in Nairobi.

It should be pointed out that British Charity Company, under the name Anno’s Africa, has been supporting this amazing ballet project in Kenya. www.onefineday.org once helped to set this unique program. Be the way, the British company is putting up money for this thankfully to the parents of one young poet, who has a dream to help people without great opportunities in their lives.

Those who attend this ballet academy, except receiving happiness and joy during the lessons, have a possibility to get rid of slums with a near-term perspective to move to a college if they reached a certain age.

One more fact is that children practice their classes barefoot as they can’t afford themselves to buy these expensive slippers. So, they are very friendly and share available pair among each other so that to make their best.