I think the best part in music making is the point where you finish your song, play it to your friends and start to get a feedback; whether it’s good or bad it’s very exciting. Internet provides a HUGE audience for your music plus it’s a channel full off other possibilites as well. You may even get a record deal if your song has a potential and it’s heard by a right person. This actually happened to me few years ago. I produced a track called “Turnpoint” and uploaded it to a discussion forum called trance.nu. People liked it quite a lot and they started to post postive comments and it sort of created a “buzz” in that forum and in no time record label contacted me and we made a deal! Also, I’ve got a couple of other deals as well and even a music placement in a award winning documentary film and all thanks goes solely to internet and the promotion possibilities it can offer for an independent artist.

With that said, I’m going to give a couple of music promotion techniques I’ve found to be very effective in my own music career. So without further ado, let’s begin!

Use discussion forums for music promotion

First you need to find a forum that is related to your music genre and register there as a user. For dance / trance / house music minded people, I recommend trance.nu. They have an artist promotion section in their discussion forum where people can post their musical work for feedback and comments. You can also try to find forums that are dedicated to electronic music genre in whole or other music related forums that have a section for artist promotion. But remember: DO NOT SPAM! If you register in those forums rember to participate and be active. Comment other peoples songs as well.

You also need a place to upload your songs in MP3 format. If you have a own website, you can upload it there. I really recommend you to have your own website because this will benefit you in a long run. Some of the forums allows you to upload your own music straight to their servers. But if not, you can find a lot of free file hosting services by Googling. Mediafire is a quite good.

I produce electronic music and here’s a list of some of the forums I’m using for artist promotion and am active on:

KVR Audio
Imageline Forums
The Flipside Forum
TAXI Forums
Musicradar
Young Composers
Future Producers

Also, you can find a loads of more by googling. Just type for example: trance +forum.

Use Youtube for music promotion

Yeap, Youtube is HUGE for music promotion. If you haven’t registered an account, do not hesitate. I recommend you to create an Musician account there. Next you may think you need to have a music-video to showcase your music there, but you’re wrong. All you need is a still image, your song and a windows movie maker

Here’s an example of how I did a video from a still image and my music in background:

As you can see it’s a simple still image containing the song info and my music plays in the background. Perfect way to showcase your music for a potentially millions of people! It only takes a few minutes to put this kind of “video” together with the Movie Maker. You just need to create a text like that and save it as .jpeg image. I created a video tutorial for you how to do it.

Build your own website (or blog) to promote your music

I really recommend you to have your own website to showcase your music to the world. It doesn’t have to be pretty, basic clean and simple look will do fine. When you set up a site and start to update it, you will eventually start to get visitors there through Google. That’s kind of handsfree promotion for your music: people will come visit to your site automatically

What I really recommend is to buy a domain name (your own name or artist name), webhosting space and install a Wordpress blog platform. Wordpress is a free and popular content managment system which is easy to maintain and update and there’s TONS of free themes, extensions and plugins available for it. My site, for example, runs on a wordpress platform and I have installed various free and easy to use plugins on it: music player for people to listen my music, guestbook for visitors to write a coemments, contact form for a contacting me straight. For more information about wordpress, check out wordpress.org.

Of course, there are free places too to set up your own blogs like blogger.com, but it looks a bit more professional to have an own domain name related to your band or artist name and website around it.

If you need any assistance for setting up your own website or blog, I can help you. Contact me through the Contact Me section.

Use Facebook, Myspace, Reverbnation and other social networking sites to promote your music

Create an artist profile on both of these sites, gather some friends and showcase your music. Lot of artists do not have their own website. Instead, they use only Facebook and Myspace artist pages as their ‘homepage’. Of course, these places are crowded by other artists too promoting their music, but don’t worry: there’s still room for more These kind of social networking sites are very powerful for music promotion. I for example, got a placement for my music to an award winning documentary film thanks to Myspace. I really recommend taking advantage of these sites.

Then there’s Twitter and loads and loads of other similar social places to go for promotion. Use Google for such words as: social networking +music etc You will find lots of places. Just remember: do not spam.

‘Offline’ music promotion

You have friends, relatives, co-workers, schoolmates etc. Tell them about your music. In situations like these, your own website or Myspace/Facebook style profile pages come in handy. Just write down your homepage address and give it to them.

That’s it for now. Hopefully this short guide will help you to get going on your music promotion!