If you’ve always wanted to pursue a music career, you might find this article helpful. This article will explore how to get started, as well as the different paths that are available for aspiring musicians.

Let's dive in!

Promoting Yourself & Your Music Online

The music business has changed considerably in the last decade due to the rise of technology. Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have created great opportunities. Artists can use these to promote themselves and their music to a larger audience. Those looking to pursue a music career should invest time into these platforms to get the most out of them.

It can be very helpful to know what you should be doing and sharing on social media. Especially if you want to kick start your music career & get the most out of all the platforms out there.

However, It can be a minefield out there! So rather than attempt the impossible...diving straight in and promote your music through every single channel available…

First take a moment to simply pick one social media platform where you can begin your process.

How do you get new ideas of ways to promote your music online?

Take Facebook, for example. If you start copying what you see others do, there’s the potential to do more damage than good.

Basically, you don't want to be doing anything online that could be harmful to your music career.

Imagine being an artist spamming your song onto people. It’s just not a good look and it will make people switch off to you.

U2 are not people to emulate!

What you want to be doing is creating fans! not customers…

And you certainly don’t get them by forcing your music onto them.

As you probably know, Facebook (Meta) is by far the biggest social network of them all. Because of this, it is often seen as the standard for where you should be online. Begin by creating yourself a profile.

The best type of profile is a complete one, so you need to complete all the fields available.

Study the landscape

It's always good to do research. You’ll need to use this to start engaging with new people. Follow accounts and pages that are positively motivating, educating and enabling you in your craft, for example:

• Apple Music
• Spotify
• Soundcloud
• Vevo
• Billboard
• Warner Bros. Records
• Interscope
• SonyMusic Global 

Next - Focus your time and energy connecting with your peers

Engage with peers and ask if they are open to sharing what has been working for them.

Although this can seem a bit scary the first step is the hardest. You’ll find talking to people that have a similar passion and drive can be exponentially rewarding.

The people that you surround yourself with are going to impact your music career. If you’re surrounded by people that love music, understand networking and aren’t afraid to put themselves out there. Success as the ultimate end goal is a lot more likely.

Time management is crucial to your music career

Time is obviously a big factor in your music career. So don’t spend too much of it focusing on the people that aren’t getting back to you!

Share the knowledge you have

As you have been making progress you will inevitably learn some useful information.

If people are asking for help/advice and you know the answer, jump into the comments! But remember only if you genuinely know the answer. You definitely don't point anyone in the wrong direction!

Build Relationships

Opportunities and relationships that are built on a mutual benefit also tend to last longer.

Coast2Coast, for example, is one for any hip hop musicians out there. They run events all around the world where you can meet artist/producers/Djs and fans. You can even apply to perform.

Big Sean made sure that he reached out to Kanye West. This led to his big break on Kanye West’s mixtape ‘Can’t Tell Me Nothing’.

Now you might be saying, well hang on! That happened face-to-face!

In fact, talking face-to-face is probably the best way to connect with people and build relationships.

Video content is king!

In recent years, video content has seen tremendous growth. 

It’s not just YouTube, Facebook has also grown to become a video platform with their redesigned 'Watch' tab. Also new platforms like TikTok.

However, as Facebook’s algorithm has evolved over the years, it’s become increasingly difficult to get content seen by fans organically.

Put yourself out there!

Go and find those people…don't just pluck names from thin air.

Choose people who are in the field you’re interested in or maybe those who are already making music in the same genre, search a hashtag that’s relevant or find a music group page.

For example, if you’re an R'nB Singer you'd want to connect with other R'n'B Artists, music producers, and bloggers.

Also, try to stick with people who work with artists at a similar career level to you or just above.

One last thing, don’t just copy and paste the same message over and over again to different people, because it will be obvious and rather embarrassing if say those two people ended up knowing each other and ever had that conversation about you!

Reach out and talk/type to the person as if you were having an actual conversation with them sat in front of you!

Maybe look through their profile first and start a discussion on something that they shared recently or say something about a recent post of theirs, or some content they’ve made that you appreciate, you could even reply to one of their stories!

These are good ice-breakers but make sure you don’t forget to be upfront and direct about why you’re actually getting touch, you could leave that for the second interaction but don’t fear being up-front with people.

Honesty is the best policy!

Everyone has got to start somewhere so don’t be afraid to start that conversation and see where it gets you!

Additionally in the meantime don’t forget to keep creating awesome music and sharing it with the world!