5 Indispensable Tools for Music Marketers [Updated]
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As a music marketer, there are countless tools out there that help you manage distribution, find the right audience, and build relationships with fans. We list 5 tools we think every music marketer should use.
Which online music marketing tools really separate the wheat from the chaff? Which ones are indispensable, and which can the modern music marketer live without? The list below isn’t conclusive, of course, but read on and let us know if you agree with our selection.
1. Distribution - Distrokid
Whether you’re an independent artist or work for a record label, the fact of the matter is that you will need to distribute this music across streaming platforms and online music stores. DistroKid is a tool that centralizes and streamlines this process.
The service works for solo musicians, bands, DJs, performers, but it will service record labels just the same. The basic plan is $20 a year, which lets you upload an unlimited amount of music. The most expensive - record label - plan is $80 a year, which allows you to create 100 artist profiles, and has more advanced data analysis features.
In general, DistroKid is the go-to solution for online music distribution. With a simple and straightforward dashboard, an easy way to split earnings with others, and optional additional services like Youtube monetization and integration with Shazam & Siri, DistroKid packs quite a music distribution punch.
It even offers a Leave the Legacy service which will keep your music in stores after - God forbid - you pass away! The only thing missing from this music career boosting tool is a feature that would allow you to build a DistroKid landing page.
2. Website - Bandzoogle
Let’s face it: every artist needs a website. You can hire someone to build you one, or use self-service tools like Wordpress or Squarespace to build one yourself.
We like Bandzoogle, a website building tool that focuses on catering to people in the music industry. Their goal?
“To empower musicians to build effective websites for their music.”
How do they accomplish this? Bandzoogle offers e-commerce integrations that allow musicians to sell music, merch, downloads and tickets, commission-free. There are a lot of customizable templates to choose from, and the platform is incredibly easy to use, so you’ll be able to build a website in minutes. Literally.
Further features include a built-in tour calendar, so people can stay up to date with where you’ll be playing next, fan data reporting tools, to get an idea where your fans are from, and, most importantly: integrated search engine optimization, designed to help people find your website and your music more easily.
Bandzoogle pricing starts at $9.95 a month, for bands who are just starting out - this ‘Lite’ plan doesn’t allow you to sell your merch, though. For that, you would need at least the ‘Standard’ plan, which starts at $14.95 a month. Go check it out!
3. Email - Mailchimp
An email list is a powerful music marketing tool, and in the world of email marketing automation, Mailchimp is king. This powerful marketing tool does more than just email marketing - it has a built-in CRM, lots of templates, and you can use it for Facebook/Instagram Ads, social posting, and to build landing pages.
It’s a great tool to manage and grow your fanbase, especially seeing as you can try it out for free. The free plan includes, 7 marketing channels, 1-click automations, and access to basic templates and the marketing CRM (for up to 2000 contacts).
Make full use of this tool to share links to your latest music video or one of your live performances. You’ll really flourish in the music business!
Of course, email marketing is great, but we advise you to consider using POP in conjunction with Mailchimp. Messenger marketing simply has much higher open rates than traditional email marketing. Not to say that email marketing isn’t effective. Try supplementing it with direct message marketing: you’ll be pleasantly surprised!
4. Social media - Buffer
Want to build your brand on social media? Manage all of your social media activity through Buffer. At its core, this social media management tool enables you to plan, collaborate, and publish (scheduled) posts for your social media accounts.
Buffer offers three products: Publish, Reply, and Analyze. The basic Publish plan allows you to queue up 100 social posts per social accounts - up to 8 - which should be more than fine to get you started, at a price of $15 a month.
The Reply and Analyze products offer supplementary services: a shared inbox so you can easily deal with comments, and an advanced reporting tool, respectively.
Additional pricing tiers let you add extra features to your Buffer account, depending on your needs. Very powerful stuff if you really want to ace your social media game!
5. Pre-save campaigns - Presave.io
Pre-save campaigns should be part of every modern music marketers toolset - as a matter of fact, at POP, we are working on building a tool that runs pre-saves directly on Messenger!
If you’re going to release music on online music streaming platforms like Spotify or Apple Music, and you want releases to do well, you will need to make sure there’s a spike in engagement on release day.
Just like pre-sales on Amazon and iTunes, Spotify presave campaigns allow your fans base to tune in to your new music the day it’s released. It’s one of the most powerful tools in music promotion!
This means you will need to start planning the release well in advance, to make sure that people pre-save the song. The earlier fans add your release to their playlists, queues, or start streaming it, the more likely the digital streaming platform’s algorithms will be triggered to consider it a successful piece of music.
This means you increase the chances of it being added to Spotify’s official playlists, for instance. That’s the kind of success you need for the release to go viral.
Presave.io is a tool that allows you to set up such a pre-save campaign. The steps are simple: you create a presave page, where people are prompted to presave the release to their DSP, leave their email address, and follow the artist or a playlist.
Next, you’re going to want to share this presave page through your trusted distribution channels, such as blog posts and social media - don’t forget to include your Messenger channel here.
That’s it! On release day, this’ll optimize engagement with your music, and guarantee that it performs to the best of its potential.
The most basic option is the ‘Upcoming artist’ plan for €9 a month which includes presaves to Spotify, Apple & Deezer, 1 presave page simultaneously, up to 1000 saves per campaign, and the option to include an artist follow CTA on the page.
You can check it out here!
P.s. If you sell merch on Shopify, try POP's All-in-One Chat Marketing integration for your store to boost sales with abandoned cart messages and much more.
Or why don't you connect to I AM POP directly through Messenger at https://m.me/bypophq