© 2009 Vinny Ribas
There are 2 ways to market anything – ‘push’ and ‘pull’ marketing. Push marketing means that the company is flooding the market with ads of their product in the hopes that enough people will be bold enough to try it to maker it worth while. Major record labels have been especially good at this. They have basically owned the airwaves for years, so they force fed their artists to the public. If the public wanted music, they had no choice but to take what the labels were giving them.[private_freebie]
2 things have changed all that in the past 5 –10 years. First, the introduction of high-quality, low price home recording studios has made it possible for literally millions of artists to produce acceptable-quality music. Next, thanks to the Internet, the public has thousands more places to hear music than just the radio, and they are flocking to them. This has created the opportunity for artists and record labels to switch from ‘push marketing’ to ‘pull’ marketing. That means that the way to sell music now is to create a buzz where your fans are telling their friends and pulling them to you. You need to create a demand for your act and your music. Social networks enable this to happen at an amazingly fast rate. Some songs and videos that are posted online attract tens of thousands of fans in almost no time at all, without any marketing efforts behind them. The pull comes from word of mouth!
What are you doing to pull fans towards you? Are you on every social website that your fans are on? Do you make it easy for your fans to tell their friends about you? You can do this by making it obvious how they can forward the link to your site, post your songs on their sites, forward your newsletter etc. Let your fans do the work for you! They love to be the one who ‘discovered you’![/private_freebie]
