I encourage questions via the Noob Underground form to help expand on this article. If you think there’s something I should cover that’s not already here or to be more specific about a portion of a platform then get in touch.
This article should give you some idea of where to promote your music, the best times of the day to do so and how to best present your content according to the platform.
It’s a lot of work but so is writing and recording an album, a lot of bands slack it when it comes to the final part of the process: promotion. I also recommend hiring PR because a hands on PR firm will do a lot of this stuff for you or increase the effectiveness of your self promotion by giving boosts to your posts via sharing them as well as acting as an aggregate of all the coverage you get.
Anyway, here’s what I can tell you to improve your game either way.
General Tips
General tips:
GOOGLE SHIT. For real, most of anything you want to do can be found with the right google terms. Maybe not broad strokes but if you google how to use specific parts of an app you’ll surely find info, if you google best times for posting per app you’ll find that too. Think specific and increase your resources instantly.
Timing is everything no matter where you are posting to. Figure out where you want to target, some days you’ll want to post locally and others you might feel the want to penetrate the American or European market. Find out the local times of the areas you want to target and compare them to the most popular posting times for each platform. Typically on a weekday the prime posting times are 5am – 9am and 6pm – 10pm. I mostly target Australia and America depending on the content. You can google the most popular time for each platform to get an idea and then shape it around the local time of the area you want.
Promote your whole local scene. Don’t just use your social media to promote your own work, use it to also promote your peers and create a supportive space where you are likely to share a fanbase and thus obtain mutual likes from each others following. This works best with other local bands and bands you’re gigging with. Besides, if your peers strike it big from your hometown and you’re friends with them, there’s a connection right there that may be beneficial to achieving your goals.
Create your own content that will engage your following according to their interests whether it be writing based (Facebook) or more image based like collages (Instagram, Twitter). Since they are interested in you, they would likely also be interested in music similar your band, a good tactic is to write about your influences and post your opinions on current releases within the genre. This will give your following a reason to stick around and engage, if you’re only promoting your own wares then there doesn’t feel like there’s a connection. This is important, create content that is outside of your own work but connects to it.
Get good artwork. This is key in the digital age, it’s always going to be the first impression and on average music with good art has a higher quality. Show that you care about every aspect of your product. People share pretty or badass images, it’s most of Instagram and Twitter these days. If you’re ever in need of artwork Noob Heavy has a growing resource here of commissioning artists on IG but you can also reach out to the social media accounts for Noob Heavy for additional artists info or according to your needs. I often do this for PR clients and I am involved quite heavily in promoting the art side of metal and thus have a following of such artists.
Be on all the socials. As a band your core goal is to channel people into your bandcamp or spotify links. Be on all three major platforms, it doesn’t matter if some aren’t going that well because anything is better than nothing and you will increase your odds of being shared by being available anywhere. Once one starts building or the music platform algorithm gives you exposure, they will naturally come to support you on their preferred platforms. Blogs and fans of your music will tag you if you’re there and their friends will probably follow you but you have to be there. People aren’t going to leave their preferred platform to join yours. Be flexible.
Have the same username across all platforms. I cannot stress this enough because many people may desire to share you on all platforms and this makes it easier for you to be found.
Continue to Music Platforms
The music platforms:
Bandcamp: this is the best one by far for a new or underground band. This is where a huge section of the underground finds new music from fans to blogs. It’s also the most impactful platform for funding your band since it’s super merch friendly. I get most of my cassettes and shirts through bandcamp and if you keep the stock in and the promotion up, it can really help build your band through affording things like equipment, better merch and PR. Bandcamp also gives you tools like generating codes to give away free copies of your album which is a good way to get the ball rolling, it puts supporters on your page and make you visible in fanpage collections so their friends can see it. I run bandcamp code contests if you want a good targeted giveaway outside of your own following who would potentially buy it.
Include all of your social links on the bandcamp page so that when Bandcamp makes your page more visible for various reasons then those people can find their preferred way to follow you. Bandcamp has a lot of algorithms that you can be included in if you set you page up right such as New Arrivals, Bandcamp Daily, under the various metal related tags (For example I search by metal with cassette merch) and being included in collections can often sell an album. I get an email sent to me when someone buys music from my collection page – it happens more often than you’d think.
Include as much information about the release as you can such as music credits, who recorded and mixed it and the album cover artist. This is all information that reviewers will look at when writing coverage so it helps take away the guesswork and research load if it’s all in one place. This is another way Bandcamp shits all over Spotify, by being informative.
The link value of bandcamp is pretty solid. It presents nicely and people know what they’re getting into before they click.
Spotify: This one is good for reach but reach ain’t gonna do a whole lot until you build through the underground first. You’ll just be sitting on spotify with <1000 next your songs. You kind of have to already have a dedicated following for Spotify to work in your favor. The amount of work it takes for it to be successful is pretty ludacris for the return. The main benefit of Spotify are it’s analytics and availability. If you spend a few years really building up every other platform and your promotional work ethic then Spotify will work better, I don’t recommend it as a starting place. Chasing the dream of getting enough streams to generate income will take too long and distract from more meaningful promotion that will build you up to that point anyway. It’s basically the Avon of music platforms.
High link value since it’s a popular platform, most people have it and it shows album art.
YouTube: It can be hard to get your own YouTube channel going as a band. I see a lot of bands with a very small following on there and putting a lot of work into making content. This works better down the line when you have a dedicated following and what you really want to focus on is having a couple of reusable videos like a music video, a lyric video or just a plain album art/audio track download. Have all three and share them accordingly to mix it up.
For starting out my tip would be not to make your own channel but find popular promotional channels that may upload your album according to genre. There’s heaps of good ones out there, check the stats on their videos and get a feel for them. Doom metal for example has 666MrDoom and Stoned Meadow of Doom, if you can get your content on their channels then the videos will immediately do much better right off the bat without you promoting it as they have a dedicated following that likes the same genre you are. Add your social promotion of the video on top of it and you’re gonna get results. People may even be more responsive on the socials if the video is from a reputable source.
You can certainly have your own channel as well but be prepared to work hard and look up a lot of tutorials to get things working in your favor.
Best link value since everyone can access it and knows what it is. It has a bigger user base than most music-only streaming services. It typically has a good thumbnail and title too.
Soundcloud: Stop sending me Soundcloud links. I don’t use it and I don’t know anyone else who does. I want download links or the ability to add a stream to my library and I won’t get that with this platform. I just can’t recommend it for metal, it’s not convenient.
iTunes/Apple Music: I don’t know much about this platform on the artist side of things, I mostly know it from a user perspective. I feel it’s the same sort of deal as Spotify in that it works best if people are already searching your band name. When you get to a point where people on all platforms are searching for you, then you best be on all platforms and probably don’t need this article.
Low link value due to lack of popularity.
I don’t really see anything else shared in the metal community. If there are others than they are probably more of a distraction from doing other more rewarding work.
Continue to Social Platforms
Social Platforms:
Facebook: The biggest and most obvious source for traffic, pretty much every band has a Facebook page. The number one way to grow a Facebook page is to post your content on the page first and then share it to groups, or you can join groups as your page and post direct links to your work and people who enjoy it will likely then like your page.
The key is to join as many different groups as you can. By having more options for groups at your disposal you can avoid spamming one group too much and spread your content across many groups over the course of a week and do this every week. It keeps you in the public eye and most giant groups move so fast that a completely different set of people will see the next post you make in a few days. Smaller groups should be posted in less often. You’ll become attuned to them after a while, some are outright spam tier and you could probably post in there daily – Groups with like a 100 posts a day and 40k members. Join a good variety of them, bigger doesn’t mean better it just means busier.
Facebook is responsible for the majority of my social media referrals to my site despite being my smallest following. There’s avenues that allow you to reach beyond your own following that aren’t as streamlined on other platforms. For starters, any link can be posted on Facebook, it really just comes down to what the content is and which platform is popular in that genre or niche. Youtube, bandcamp, spotify and articles about your band can be shared with wild abandon.
Sharing reviews and interviews can be another good way to get your page across other pages fanbases, Facebook is one of the easiest ways to share coverage of this nature when compared to more image based places like Instagram. You can make long or short posts, it doesn’t really matter here. Do whatever you want and what you know your fans will enjoy.
Twitter: This is the second friendliest place to post links and that’s not saying a whole lot because Twitter has a tendency to soft hide a lot of external link posts and favors text only posts (take a look at most highly retweeted stuff, it’s usually text only viral shit). There’s also the character limit to consider.
I advise a balance of tweeting links and text only. The text only ones will bring more people to you who will then be more likely to see your links, or your profile links. When posting links be quick and concise about it, draw all the attention to the link itself and save any rambling for a text only tweet. People’s feeds can go pretty quick as can their attention. Twitter’s actual link presentation is solid and like Facebook can share any kind of link but it’s difficult to get it outside of your own following unless some people retweeted it. Even then it could very well just sit there and go no further, I have nearly 1k followers on Twitter and a lot of my stuff just dies
On twitter engagement works really well because replying to other people’s tweets both makes their tweet more visible due to now being on your timeline, and makes you more visible because you’re now on their timeline. Generally being supportive of other people’s music or having an interesting take will bring more people to you – and naturally, if you have shit takes you will probably attract a shit crowd or lose followers. Leading to my advice on content protection…
Your band is your brand and anything you say will be a reflection of that brand. Sometimes people will see things you say and attribute it to being a part of your band. I highly discourage any political discourse or aggressive takes as a band or professional page. Get a personal alt for that. I don’t care what you see that triggers you, getting involved in a negative interaction is just never worth it. For one it can make you look bad or petty, and two it makes Twitter a more hostile place. Yes I know everyone is posting mad dumb shit, but just ignore it or else you’ll be sucked into it. It’s not worth trying to control narratives or teach people, it won’t go down like that.
The number one tool for surviving Twitter is the ability to mute phrases and words. This way you don’t have to block or mute people following you, just mute the words that most commonly piss you off or bait you into arguments. Sick of a serial retweeting putting tons of porn or low quality content on your feed? Disable retweets from that person via their profile. There’s a lot of ways to control what you see from people. It really helps, go through your settings and customise the crap out of the whole app until you’re comfortable. Strive for only positive engagements and avoid vague anxiety posting, it’s not good for you or people reading it as it just spreads discomfort.
Create good relationships through retweeting. Sometimes a retweet is greatly appreciated. A good way of sharing coverage of your band is as simply as retweeting the post from the publications. Retweet your peers in your scene. It’s always good to help out others, people don’t tend to get a lot of help without first being a helper. It becomes pretty obvious when someone is allergic to the retweet button.
Instagram: Bands are becoming more prevalent on here and I think the sharing of album art has a lot to do with that, as well as the story shoutout economy. Let me just say, Instagram has always been my biggest following and yet is responsible for the least amount of referrals to my site. People don’t really click links (Bio link) on Instagram. It’s a pretty vapid place that’s primarily for sharing images and getting likes – it’s full of people who will spam shoutouts to get shoutouts. It’s still worth being on, because it’s more visibility for your band and having a strong following across platforms is often an indication of your popularity to outsiders, whether that’s accurate or not.
Over the course of using IG a lot I’ve found ways as a promoter of music to try and use the various features to maintain a good following and engagement level but as a band, it’s a bit different. I recommend making your biolink the music page you most want support for and posting images regularly. Don’t just post the same thing over and over again like your own album art, post a variety of things both relevant and not relevant directly to your work. Take behind the scenes photos and videos of rehearsal or gig greenrooms. Post photos of your members with members from other local bands. Get shots of other bands playing on the same bill as you to promote the shows. Instagram Live stories are good for this too. Otherwise post your favorite albums of the month with a good collage or a favorite album cover at the moment. Be active and be interesting but don’t stress the body text because it doesn’t really matter that much.
People tend to look and scroll, if it interests them they might read it but I feel it largely goes unread and so you want the content to speak for itself. Taking the right pictures and having a weekly plan can greatly reduce the amount of actual work put in that can be spent in places more likely to click your links like FB or Twitter. I personally use a post planner called Planoly to schedule my posts to auto posts weeks in advance so I don’t have to put in work on IG every day, just a few likes, comments and stories every day – nothing too time consuming. Most of IG is honestly a bullshit illusion and you will be a victim of it’s ridiculous algorithms, it’s not even worth complaining about. They do this to encourage paid promotions which are rarely worth it. Just get what you can out of the platform and keep moving.
Engagement matters more to the algorithm here and doesn’t improve your visibility a whole lot. A balance of liking, commenting, posts and stories will generate the best results but I wouldn’t focus too hard on one in particular or channel too much time into fighting the algorithm. Be consistent with quality and timing of posts and create a good story following by having consistently interesting stories. I do this by doing a lot of giveaways through my stories so people are more invested in seeing what I have to post each day. I will also occasionally post questions and then share the responses.
USE HASTAGS. I see too many peoples waste their great content by not giving it any reach. Hashtags are crucial on instagram and are essentially the equivalent of posting to a bunch of facebook groups. You can use 30 hashtags I suggest using 20 – 30 depending on the post. You can google best hashtags for whatever kind of post and make your own custom batch of hashtags to use – keep them pasted in your notepad or google doc for convenience. Hashtags are the primary way to explore IG outside of your own following.
Reddit: This platform is very hard to get into as it requires a fair bit of community participation before being able to post properly and it also tends to dislike it if you post links to your own content. It’s weird like that. Some places are more friendly to it and have specific areas for self promotion. r/metal for example has a thread every Friday but it’s nothing huge. It’s also super dependant on time but not any local time, the best time for each subreddit. You can generally figure out the best time by looking at what time the popular posts were made (8hours ago etc) as well as how many people are currently online versus how many are following the subreddit.
The primary links for metal that get shared here are YouTube links. Be sure to check the subreddits guide for posting, each one is different and have title requirements. It’s a strict place full of nerds but it can really yield results once you find a groove. It’s not really beginner friendly and will require the most online savvy in your band. I recommend making your user name something unrelated to the name of your project to avoid admins marking you as self promoting spam. I also recommend that you post a variety of content and not just your own to also avoid having your account marked as a spammer.
Expect A LOT of trial and error as well as frustrating experiences with admin. The genre specific subreddits outside of doom, death and black and pretty small and it’s not the best place for metal overall. There’s a lot of censorship issues too but if you can get it working it will benefit you on a practical level more than Instagram. There’s also the potential of something seriously hitting and making it to the subreddit front page with many upvotes but I wouldn’t hold your breath, this is more for already popular bands like Slayer.
Underground metal sites: A good way to get some attention is get a review or interview but it can be very difficult depending on the quality of your music. It may very well yield a negative review which you don’t want.
I recommend googling reviews of bands in the same scene as you and on the same level of exposure. People you play gigs with frequently. See who is reviewing them and submit your music to be reviewed on there. This works best for the more underground publications because bigger publications are far more likely to take promo submissions from PR firms and labels due to the reliable and uniform nature of those submissions. There’s generally a level of quality expected from bands who invest in their music this way as opposed to bands with a mediocre self made promo pack using the wrong links (like soundcloud). You’re more likely to make it to bigger publications organically without submitting by first being spread through the underground.
Most publications with their shit together will take submissions via email. Don’t bother submitting via social media tags or DM’s unless they’re a smaller promoter. We lose those links so quickly and get so many submissions that we’re likely to forget we lost the link. Email is key for submitting to blogs most of the time, learn good email.
Continue to Paid Promotions
Paid Promotions (FB & IG):
Here’s my take, it’s largely a scam in that it lures small business and projects when it can’t actually help them in a meaningful way. The real way it works is through the corporations that can drop THOUSANDS of dollars into ad campaigns without officially being a partner with the platform. Facebook and by extension Instagram get the most of their money this way but also encourage small amounts from independent projects because get a few dollars from millions of people adds up. It doesn’t however add up to success for you.
I’ve tried a lot of ad campaigns for various amounts and as far as I can tell, on the smaller scale, it’s bots or accounts not relevant to what you’re promoting, often not even from the locations specified in my campaign. Unless you’re spending thousands to be on every feed like Pizza Hut, you’re not going to go very far. You at least have to be willing to drop like a 100 or more and have well researched the parameters for the most effective campaign. Walking in blind will just rob you blind. Google everything you do.
Unless you’re obscenely rich, I’d advise against dropping a lot of money into ads that aren’t suited to the metal world and instead just hire PR. It’ll be more effective advertising as it’s directly targeting the global metal scene.