Music Marketing Idea Scavenger Hunt
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Where do your best music promotion ideas come from?
If you consider only what other artists and bands are doing, you’re cheating yourself. The seeds of great marketing ideas are everywhere — literally!
In fact, I just challenged myself to go on a Music Marketing Idea Scavenger Hunt. I’ll reveal some of my findings below … then challenge you to do the same and report back what you come up with.
Here’s what I did:
Last week I went to the public library and told myself I would not leave until I had found five good music marketing ideas. Well, I ended up with about 12.
Instead of using the entire library, I limited myself to the magazine section only. AND I purposely did NOT use any music-specific magazines as a reference.
The whole idea was to generate fresh concepts using non-music related news as my starting point — and then seeing where each original idea led me.
Here’s some of what I came up with using only a single issue of one magazine …
Source: “Publishers Weekly” – March 6, 2006
Original Idea: Some smaller niche book publishers put out a magazine on their core topic, in addition to a line of books. Example: Entrepreneur Media produces “Entrepreneur” magazine and SmallBizBooks.com.
Music Marketing Spin: In addition to a web site dedicated exclusively to your music and CDs, consider publishing an ezine or web site for fans of your overall genre. And be sure it covers a wide variety of well-known and lesser-known artists.
Examples: David Nevue’s SoloPianoRadio.com and Marc Gunn’s CelticMP3s.com.
Here are a couple more brainstorms from “Publishers Weekly” …
Original Idea: An ad for a book titled “Yoga for Regular Guys.”
Music Marketing Spin: How about making your CD very targeted with a built-in marketing hook in the title? Consider “Classical Music for Regular Joes” or “Punk Rock for Sassy Chicks” or “Folk Music for Vegetarians.” The possibilities are endless.
Original Idea: An ad for a book titled “What Color Is Your Jock Strap?” — a spoof of the perennial career book “What Color Is Your Parachute?”
Music Marketing Spin: Give your CD a parody-type title, such as:
- “Dark Side of the Spoon”
- “Appetite for Obstruction”
- “The Stravinsky Code”
- “Heavy Metal for Dummies”
Check back for more of my Scavenger Hunt brainstorms. In the meantime, I want you to go on your own idea-generation safari. Go to your local library or bookstore or whatever … and challenge yourself to come up with five cool promotion ideas.
Then come back here and post a comment detailing what you came up with. Let’s share our best ideas with each other and prove that good marketing concepts can indeed be found anywhere.
Oh, I gotta run. I just spotted another idea I need to capture!
To your success!
-Bob
Or just enter your first name and email address below:
Bob! Bob! You’ve been spammed by an encyclopedia!!
Back to the subject at hand. My favorite as-yet-untried idea is to adopt the speed dating idea to blogging. Bloggers with topical blogs sign up and visit each other’s blogs with their 50 words-or-less “what me and my products are all about” all within a designated time-frame.
I love the ideas you put together in your books and newsletters. I always look forward to getting them, mostly because they shoot me into new directions for my artists. Often, new ideas emerge as a result. The web is a great tool to see where links take you.
In the spirit of a scavenger Hunt theme, I hereby propose the following; (Although it is not in the same format as Bob’s)
Choose a day of the week to commit to searching.
First begin by searching for your artist name and album title (if it applies), repeat this in a few of the “majors”. What you may find is odd little links that feature your music, it’s like getting reviews without the work of begging and pleading, ever so politely of course. What I have also found is that this weekly process will begin to drive you. You will begin to pursue other avenues as a means of improving the listings in your search.
For example; radio station playlists, podcast sites, e-zines, bloggers, reviewers, guestbooks.
Then the true change happens, you begin to feel confident. Almost computer savy! This leads to the discovery of other signifigant search engines, where you submit your site (on the free sites, let’s not go broke here). My point is, you could begin to care about your ranking, where you are associated. You target audiences, which will then lead to so much more.
The overall point of this exercise SHOULD lead to higher site hits, your news section should become top position in the page-views. Your on-line presence will begin to emerge. The important part is that you commit initially to a “search” day.