Basic Marketing For Musicians

What is Marketing really?

Marketing is a term that seems to scare musicians off a bit. Far too often it’s a term that’s related to “doing the hard sell” or “over-hyping” and it’s sometimes seen to be in conflict with a “creative” field like music. Those descriptions are far too narrow however, and the thing is that marketing is a very creative field itself if properly understood.

Whatever you think it may be, the simple facts are that it can’t be avoided if you want to have even the smallest success with your music.

If you get paid money by a customer (your paying punter) for either goods or services (gigs or cd’s), then you are marketing. Seeing we can’t avoid it, let’s work at understanding it and doing it just a bit better.

So let’s kick this chapter off with a few definitions. We are going to be talking about concepts that sound very “business like”.
Concepts such as: “Marketing”, “Customers”, “Products” and such.
Let’s start with the word “Marketing”.

For a start marketing may contain any or all of the following activities:

• Selling
• Market research
• Product research
• Customer relationship management
• Promotion
• Customer segmentation – demographics
• Branding
• Positioning
• Advertising
• and much more.

Marketing guru Peter Drucker said it like this:

“Marketing is not only much broader than selling, it is not a specialized activity at all. It encompasses the entire business. It is the whole business seen from the point of view of the final result, that is, from the customer’s point of view.”

There’s that word “Customer”. Musicians can have a variety of customers on a number of levels.
You can think of any or all of the following people as your customer:

• Your booking agent
• The venues where you play
• The paying punter who comes to a gig.
• The person who buys your recorded music
• The person who buys your merchandise. T-shirts, posters etc
• The person who buys your music for a movie or ad

Last but not least is the word “Product”. Again, musicians can have any number of products for sale.
They include:

• Live gigs
• Recordings such as CD’s or digital downloads.
• Merchandise such as posters, t-shirts, caps etc
• Songs that you write for other musicians
• Work as a freelance or session musician.
• or pretty much anything that you exchange for money or value.

Before we go too much further I just want to reiterate to you that we aren’t trying to be marketing guru’s here. Marketing is a skill you could study for years and still only scratch the surface. What we WILL do though is to learn some fairly basic skills that will have some pretty dramatic results if applied properly.

Don’t be frightened to do some further reading and research beyond what you will learn here.
I’ll leave a list of suggested resources at the end of this chapter.

"I've just finished an album of world music/electronica and am now trying to market it. Your site has some good advice and has provided some ideas on how to go about doing it. Thanks."
Best regards, Anthony Barker

Full list of sections in this chapter:

• Who Is My Customer?
  

  The most important piece of marketing that any business can undertake is to define who their typical customer is, or even better their actual customer, and then work out what that customer wants to buy.
  That may seem a bit back to front for the average musician. You probably think that you already know what your [...]

• The Stages of Customer Relationship
  

  Click on the icon below to open the presentation.

• Websites – Marketing and Promotion
  

  Seth Godin
  Seth Godin writes a number of marketing related websites and is the author of many best selling books. He has written quite a bit recently in relation to the future directions of the music industry.
  From his biography:
  “SETH GODIN is a bestselling author, entrepreneur and agent of change.
  Godin is author of ten books that have [...]