Marketing 101 Ep. 5: “Music blogs: worth it?”

Here’s some questions to ask to discover if submitting your work to music blogs is worth your time!

Services like SubmitHub allow anyone to blast a release notice out to large numbers of music blogs at once. Is this a good idea? Depends! Probably of limited use if it’s the only marketing you’re doing, but this could absolutely be part of a larger and varied marketing strategy. SubmitHub can be a great way to break out of the friend bubble with your marketing.

Is your ideal audience composed of music blog followers? If you’re an indie darling, the answer might be yes. If you’re a Hollywood soundtrack artist, maybe not. Or maybe.

Either way, blogs are most useful if your ideal potential fans are there, actively looking for new music. I recommend going for as focused an audience as possible-try to find a small blog that does great, interesting work focused on your specific genre. You’re looking for a small niche, but a very expert focus.

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If you’re using SubmitHub to send your release out to music blogs, it’s worth putting in the time carefully tuning exactly who you’re sending out to. These services are much more effective if you take a highly targeted approach, especially as a smaller artist.

There’s lots of good resources online that will help you figure out how to do this well. Here’s a SubmitHub sanctioned video with some specific recommendations. SubmitHub also has a detailed section for artists with lots of quality information. And, our friends over at Bandhive also have quality content on this topic!

Red flags for mediocre music reporting

1) Click-bait. If the publication’s “album reviews” consist of two random sentences and an embedded SoundCloud player, move on.

2) Quantity over quality. Longer band/album features that are well written and thoughtful done once a month will speak much louder than 3 generic fluff social media posts each week-->

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Music press is a tough biz. There’s tons of competition, tons of free content to compete with, and it’s hard to charge for your work. So, most publications are forced to blast out as much cheap content as possible constantly, looking for advertising dollars.

For indie musicians, you might try going real indie with your press and promotion work. Try finding some paper zines, hyper-local independent magazines, small genre-focused mags, and independent bookshops and record stores. These are all likely to be successful because real, passionate fans are in these places looking for new stuff. You may get less total eyeballs, but likely a higher percentage of people actually paying attention.

Variety in marketing strategies

Variety in your strategy is also important, because you will need to try many different marketing ideas before you find what works for you. It’s also always wise to have some small selections of your work available on a mass market platform, at least until you see how it’s working out for you there.

I would not suggest putting 100% of your work out there for free, always, though. It’s absolutely ok to give out some special stuff as a reward to the dedicated fans that care enough to support you with their wallets.