How to Build An Engaged Community In The Music Industry
Community in the music industry is a multi-dimensional strategy. Community development in the music industry is like the politics of music jobs. It requires the artist to become a wholesome, approachable, sociable character and most importantly inspires confidence in their music.
To build a well-balanced and coherent music community, you need a variety of different qualities that will ultimately attract other members of the music industry. Like the producer, who might offer you a new recording community, booking agents who will get you your gigs, and labels, who albeit taking a chunk out of song royalties will be able to give you a very wide platform to optimize your reach.
The DIY marketing checklist for building a community in the music industry
1. Your vision and mission should be accessible and clear
Being Insta-famous does not come overnight, nor does it take a bot army. In fact, the most simple thing to start with is identifying your goals as an artist, and your medium to long-term objectives as a brand. Do you want to get into fashion eventually? Do you want to be the founder of your own NGO? Getting a music industry job for the love of music is half the battle, it needs to be coupled with an overarching theme or cause that the music/brand fights for. This vision is the cornerstone of your entire community.
2. Target a specific market, don’t just post content randomly
The music industry is a deep jungle of trends, tracks, and templates. To jump in and hope for the best will only result in wasted time and energy that could have taken you down the right path. Identify and target your market so your content gets to the people who will actually enjoy it and connect to it. Start with analyzing your music as if you were a producer cataloging music, and find which sides will resonate with your fans, and which potential fans it can resonate with.
3. Inspire yourself from the competition
Without understanding your competition you will be swept away by the business of music. Social media gives you a complete map of someone’s career, as well as their fans, their sponsors, and the methods they used to propagate the message. Emulate the ones that matter, disregard the ones that look fake, and omit completely the ones that don’t resonate with your image or sound. All other ideas after this study, are guaranteed to be unique, authentic, and originally yours!
4. The music industry requires a marathon, not a sprint
Give yourself measurable and realistic objectives, a week per week month per month, quarter to quarter. You will not be able to do everything at once, realistic goal setting means it is something you can complete yourself or with your team, and that takes into account the scaling of your community. The first 1000 will be harder than the next. Always monitor and manage your progress and adjust it when things are not working out. Give each attempt a logical time to grow but don’t wait too long for the weeds to grow.
5. Always work on your brand
Your brand is a totality of all the sides of your music your social media banners need to be consistent to keep the community on a straight track toward your vision. Your first impressions do matter, but if your mission is clear, and the community is on board then work on what matters, and pluck out the sides that are limiting your growth. This doesn’t mean changing your colors every week, it means letting your first choice be a powerful win and working on it until it begins to dwindle.
6. Post great content for the community IN the music
Content is the name of the game when it comes to community communication. Your content is a space that allows them to talk about what you’re doing. Make each one unique, make it relevant, make it engaging, and ask from them what you expect from anyone listening to your music, attention! High-quality graphics and video or nothing. Study the posting schedule and algorithm so you don’t miss an opportunity or prepare something for nothing.
7. Overselling is just as bad as underperforming
Your fans are not cattle. You are not there to feed them a fantasy for them to buy your album. You’re there to create an emotional bond using your art. Anything less and you’re just not an artist. A healthy amount of giving and taking be it via fan 2 fan engagement or giveaways creates a relationship founded on trust.
8. Create a keyword and hashtag strategy
This might seem confusing for many musicians, but there are lots of free tools that help you define your community via hashtags on social media and keywords in your articles. After all, beyond the live show, you are working on different kinds of platforms that each have their own rules and algorithms. A proper excel sheet with hashtags you want to focus on will go a long way in organizing your strategic output on your channels, as well as save you time when posting content.
9. You catch more bees with honey
Enthusiasm and community building go hand in hand. Unless there is an announcement from gloomy, controversial news, the enthusiasm you bring to the table is going to be how your community is glued together. If you’re anti-social and drenched in pessimism, your message is going to get lost and your community will not be able to hold the vision together. So stay positive, stay engaged, and stay humble.
10. Build a killer team, volunteer or not, community in music is key
Nothing can be done alone. Even if you are the most prolific artist out there, your time is best spent in the studio, and finding the group of people, volunteer or not, that will help you on your journey is a necessity. You can hire professionals, but often a little bit of collaboration can go a long way.
11. Save when possible, spend money on professionals
Every dollar you can invest into a legitimate professional service for promo and marketing will give you 10x the amount of reach than doing it yourself. It is better to save your money and deploy 1 powerful campaign than to spend aimless amounts on momentary advertising.
With MPT Agency you can build a meaningful funnel and continually release products for your community in the music industry
At MPT Agency, we understand that having multiple avenues to release your music is important for your overall volume of possible interactions. Spotify may provide the same type of streaming as others, but your fans can listen to your music anywhere, so you need to be ready. Our team of techies, DJs, and creative ninjas have 15 years in the industry Your community will be driven from one to the other so they can interact with different sides of your project.
Our blog about creating enhanced music videos for your community outreach has key information about content creation. Never neglect this element and follow the best way to do it. We regularly post novel content for both established and independent artists on our social media. Don’t forget to follow us on Instagram for more music marketing-related updates.
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