Promotion is very important as a musicians, this is because without promotion you will most likely not make a living out of music because nobody will know your music exists. Promotion is when a musician publicly tells people about their work so that they can listen to it if they wish, this is why I am going to work very hard on promotion for my music. One mistake I have already made with my promotion is beginning the process late. Starting late means that I now have to push my promotion hard on people as most of my followers do not even know I am currently composing music, this is my fault for not talking or posting about on my social platforms. This mistake now means I have to push my promotion very hard in order to attract an audience for my music, to do this I will implement marketing strategies in my promotion to ensure I attract the biggest audience I possibly can.
Art Work
For my promotion this year I have had art work hand drawn by my brother and sister who fortunately happen to be very talented artists. In the second week of my project I asked my brother to hand draw DOOM Guy for me, who is the main protagonist of the DOOM franchise. I asked for this art so that I may use it as a thumb nail for my music once I distribute it on sound cloud. I will also upload this image to social media as a form of promotion to let my followers know what my music will be about and what theme it will revolve around. I will give credit to the artists through an @ on my social media page.
Social Media Account
When making my Instagram profile I believed it would be important to tell people who I am and what I do in as few words as possible. This is because when it comes to social media people tend to have a shorter attention span when it comes to investigating profiles, meaning if you have a paragraph of words in your biography most people of my generation will leave the profile and keep on scrolling down there phone. This is why I tried to summarise what people will see in on my page in less that 10 words, which is that I am a pianist and music producer from the United Kingdom. This gives my audience a clear idea of what they will see on my Instagram page and a tiny bit of context to who I am. The words ‘GB’ at side the text is a malfunction on my computers behalf, the letters ‘GB’ are meant to be emoji images of the union jack but my computer cannot process it. Once our college showcase airs on the 28th of May I will post all the official links to my music on all of my social media biographies, this will let people find my music faster and more effectively with a click of a button.
This is a post I uploaded to my Instagram account as a form of promotion for my project. This image shows a screenshot of a completed Logic Project, this shows my followers that I have almost finished developing my music. I put the caption ‘coming soon’ as a caption because I didn’t want to give too much away about my project so that it may cause intrigue and give the college showcase more attention. My Instagram account does not have a huge influential following this meant that I would have to use hashtags to my advantage. If you are not familiar with a hashtag, they look like this ‘#’. A hashtag is a way to put your post into public categories where people with an interest in that hashtag category may see your post. As a musician this is a very helpful tool as it can help you branch out to your target audience very easily. The more hashtags you use in a post the bigger an audience your post will attract, this is because your post will not be in one, but numerous different hashtag categories increasing your chances of being viewed by a wider variety of the public. The hashtags I used in this post link to all the elements I would associate my music with, which includes: composition, metal, video game music and more. Using hashtags I have gained 7 likes from stangers I have not met before, while the other 11 people are people I personally know.
From this post I learnt that hashtags are very useful and have the potential to attract like to your post, but as a musician it is important to gain a following more than having a good dislike to like ratio on your posts. To gain more followers I hope to publicly release my music on YouTube and promote it through my Instagram. I will use Instagram to promote my post by posting one section of my music to my Instagram page, hopefully this will attract an audience to listen to my music. I don’t want to post too much of my music because then too much will be revealed and there will be no element of surprise in my music. If they like the music they hear hopefully I can gain an increase in my following. Once I have my music posted on YouTube I will share a link in my Instagram bio so people can find my music without having to search for it. Posting it in my bio would be a good idea to grab listeners as this is the first thing you see when first opening some body’s profile account. My next on my social media page will show the audience a small section of my music, hopefully with some form of moving image in the background to make the post more visually pleasing.
To make this Instagram post better and more informative to my audience I could have zoomed out to show my full Logic template, this would give my audience a better understanding of the length of my composition and maybe a brief insight into my instrumentation. But most importantly zooming out would show a 1 frame of the game trailer I made, seeing this trailer would give DOOM fans that confidently recognise the game’s scenes a better understanding into what my music is about. Unfortunately for people that have not played DOOM they would not get any useful information from screenshot of the game as they have no experience with it.
Instagram Stories
An Instagram story is practically a temporary post on social media that is usually around 5 to 20 seconds long in length, stories are automatically wiped from Instagram every 24 hours meaning people can miss them if they are too late. This is why for the past week I have been uploading this same story above to promote our college showcase, this post shows people only what they need to know about the showcase which is the date and time of the event. It is very important that every who wants to attend the showcase knows this information other wise we will be missing members of our audience. Posts are usually shared to stories from other Instagram accounts, this was the case for me. The post I uploaded to my story came from the Instagram account ‘Bradfordcollegeplus’ which is an official account run by my college.
After distributing my music through instagram reels I decided to promote the music on my main account, this is because I have a larger following on my main account in comparison to the fewer followers on my music account. This is why I uploaded my post on my music account to my main accounts story, this means most of my followers will see my music along with a link to my music account. This promotion is a good idea because it gives my music and my music account more exposure than it does currently. This story also shows my full composition meaning my followers can just watch my full composition just by viewing my story which may attract more listeners from my following.
Distribution
Here I am going to talk about how I distributed the final product of my project and the techniques I used when publishing them. I will also talk about why I posted them on certain social platforms and how well I managed to distribute my music in a professional manor.
This is the final product of my project that I have uploaded to YouTube, this if the trailer with the music I have composed over it. I plan to upload an audio only version on my project to YouTube as well as the one I have already uploaded, this for people that do not wish to see the video and only want to hear the music. I cannot upload an audio only video to YouTube just yet, this is because I would need some form of a visual image to put my music over. This is because YouTube does not accept audio only formats when uploading. I will most likely not be able to upload an audio only post to YouTube before the deadline, this is because my visual artwork for this idea is still in development from an artist who is helping me. The presentation of the video I uploaded does not look professional, this because of 3 main causes. The first reason is that I don’t have a thumbnail for my final product, this looks less visually pleasing and may make audience members ignore my video due to it’s unprofessional look in the thumbnail. The 2nd reason the presentation is not as good as I would have liked it to be is because the YouTube channel I got the clips from ‘Ikiga’ has a channel marking in the trailer footage. This makes my trailer look very tacky and unprofessional as I cannot provide my own footage for my trailer. The final reason my presentation is not as good as I would like it to be is because I have no profile picture, this makes me look very anonymous and hidden to the public which is not what I want as a music artist, To fix this I will upload a picture of myself or some of my art work to my YouTube channel this will make my channel look more professional in the eyes of the public.
This is the upload of my music that I uploaded to Soundcloud, this does not have much exposure to the public because I have not promoted it as much as I should be to the public. To give my SoundCloud post more of an audience I will promote it through my social media and put a link to my SoundCloud in the description of my YouTube video. I do not expect this form of my music to get more attention as automatically more people will be drawn to the moving image trailer version, this is because moving image is generally speaking more interesting to people. Just like my YouTube video, on SoundCloud I do not have my own official artwork used as a cover photo for my music, instead I burrowed an image from the official Bethesda website. The quality of this image is very low and must be changed to a more professional photo that will be designed by an artist outside of college. This artwork will be the same as the thumbnail I will use for my YouTube video, but the artwork will most likely not reach me in time for the deadline. As soon as this artwork arrives I will assign it as the thumbnail for my YouTube video as well as the cover photo for my SoundCloud, this will make the cover of my music more visually appealing to people as it looks nicer, it will also make me look more professional if I have my own art work designed for my music.
As well as posting my music on YouTube and SoundCloud I also decided to post it on Instagram, this is because I thought it would be important to release my music on as many platforms as I possibly could to get as much public exposure on my music. I uploaded my music to Instagram TV, this means anyone in the world outside of your following can see your post, which is why I uploaded it there to attract a wider audiencer. The presentation on this post looks more professional than the other posts I made on YouTube and SoundCloud. This is because the thumbnail of the post is of a much higher quality and almost fits the IGTV (Instagram TV) frame perfectly. This content of this post has both my music and the trailer video inside of it, meaning people have full access to my music from their phones on social media. I gave my post on Instagram an official name instead of DOOM Eternal Trailer, this is because I believed the title ‘Wingless Angel’ was more interesting to an audience and would attract a higher number of views on my music. Having an official title for your music also looks more professional than a random project title such as ‘DOOM Trailer’.
Summary
My promotion was successful in the time that it was active as it attracted an audience of up to 70 people, which was a lot more than I was expecting. This means the promotion strategies that I have been using have been very successful in attracting an audience to my finished product, however it is disappointing that I started my promotion so late. This is because I amassed a total of 70 views in the time span of 3 days, this number would have been much bigger if I was promoting my project from the start which is disappointing. However from this mistake I have learnt that the promotion methods I have used are highly effective and I will use them in the future, however in projects to come I will promote my music in the early stages of development to attract an even bigger audience than the one I have currently on my YouTube video.