I finished a new song. I got it mixed and mastered, and created artwork for it. Then I submitted it through a distributor, setup a pre-save and pre-order link gate and the track comes out to effectively no fanfare besides posting on Instagram about it. Maybe you’re getting ready to release your first track and you want to avoid the exact scenario I described. Have you e-mailed the track to some DJs only for your e-mail to be ignored and your track not downloaded? In this post, I’ve broken down common promotion strategies that a lot of content creators push artists to use and my thoughts on how effective they are at promoting your new dance music release.
Facebook & Instagram Advertising
This was one of the first dance music promotion strategies that I used to try to promote my music. A common strategy that most creator led courses tell you to use for dance music involves targeting countries outside of your target markets to train the advertising algorithm into learning what people will click your ads. This also coincides with the use of terms such as big DJ’s, “Carl Cox” or “Martin Garrix” and topics similar to your music. This advice is bad because if you limit the ad to just “People who like Carl Cox”, even with the region/country limits will get your ads in front of people who like that page or topic, but they aren’t going to be the most likely to convert through your ad. By really niching the audience for each advertisement, you can really focus in on specific people to target with your ads.
I spent probably several hundred dollars with Facebook and Instagram advertising, and I tried different strategies of limiting where ads were placed and different copy. Basically, advertising is hard and unless you already have brand recognition and awareness, this is NOT a great way to build that awareness. If Facebook and Instagram advertising are not an effective dance music promotion strategy what else could work? What about a hub for 3rd party playlist pitching to help build brand awareness and recognition?
SubmitHub & 3rd Party Playlists
SubmitHub is a service that allows artists or labels to pitch their music directly for additions to 3rd party curated Spotify playlists, YouTube channels, and blogs. This service has a free tier however that free tier doesn’t seem to do much at all, and you’ll need to shell out some money for credits to use premium pitches. Premium pitches require the curator to leave feedback, and if they don’t respond in 48 hours then you get the credit back. A credit is about $1, and most playlists charge between 1-3 credits per pitch. SubmitHub does do a decent job of acquiring data to help show engagement, and whether playlists are generating streams or not for artists. This data is fed back to SubmitHub periodically when SubmitHub asks artists to download their playlist reports from Spotify for Artists and upload it into Submithub.
The Problem?
My main problem with this as an effective promotion strategy is that it does not cater to original music very well. That is to say, if you are making unique music that doesn’t sound like everything else on a curator’s playlists, even if they absolutely love the production, mix and master, you still won’t get added to it. It’s all down to personal taste at the end of the day. If you are making commercialized dance music, SubmitHub is probably going to be the most effective dance music promotion strategy for you.
In addition to SubmitHub, you can easily search an e-mail address like “@gmail.com” in Spotify and find other 3rd party playlists that you can submit to. I recently e-mailed a handful, and of those that replied every single one wanted anywhere from $5-25 per submission. If this isn’t the most “Pay to Play” thing I’ve ever come across I’m not sure what is. The other thing with these playlists is, most of these you don’t know if they’re bot streams or not until after the fact.
If you have a large enough budget and are making commercialized dance music, then SubmitHub would be an effective dance music promotion strategy for you to grow your stream numbers and brand awareness.
Hire a PR Service
If you are just starting out as an artist, it can be hard to track down email addresses, and really just get your music in front of other DJs to start playing out. Inflyte is a platform that’s taken over the dance music space for promotional downloads / early releases for DJ’s globally. Artists or labels can create their own mailing list through the platform and curate a list of DJs to offer downloads to but if you don’t have a big list of emails and want to ensure your tracks get in front of A List DJs, then hiring a PR service for an Inflyte mail out might be the most effective dance music promotional strategy.
Which PR Service?
There are big firms that charge $500 that are used by the big dance music labels but there are other more niched firms with essentially the same A List DJ’s on it that are way more cost effective for an independent artist. I ran a campaign with It’s A Promo Thing and was amazed at the results. I write unique house music, and did not expect to get over 100 downloads of both tracks. 1001Tracklists.com also maintains an Inflyte list that you can submit your music to for consideration here.
For where I’m at with my music, and the uniqueness of it, I found that hiring a PR service proved to be the most effective dance music promotion strategy for me with. a limited budget.
The Most Effective Dance Music Promotion Strategy
The most effective strategy is going to be a combination of the strategies above. Get your tunes in the hands of other DJs, get them on some playlists, and in front of dance music fans. Of course this requires having budgets, so if you can’t implement all three strategies at the same time try and see which works best for you and which gets the maximum results you’d like to see with your music. Success is determined by YOU and what you deem a success.