Ben’s Indie Digital Music Promotion Guide
What is this?
My guide to indie music promotion is all about how to approach music promotion and what to do to get your music heard and maximize your return on investment or ROI for short. I have decades long experience promoting music online (both free and paid techniques). That said, it should be noted here that I haven't been able to make money from my music in a significant way over the 16 years (as of August 2026) I've promoted my music online. What I outline in the guide is simply my experience with music promotion and how it works. I recommend many things here and many things I'll state like facts; That doesn't mean it's always 100% correct or will work entirely for you. When promoting your music, you need to do what works for you.
The guide goes over the main techniques I've heard about and used myself to promote my own music. You can take what you like from it and use it to help you along your journey in audio recording. I also want to note here that, while the internet continues to grow and is an enormous part of the ecosystem that is the music industry, doing live shows remains one of the most important steps to take for your music career. I know this from my own experience with music both as a fan and as an artist. However, knowing it and taking steps to make it happen for myself are two entirely different things. Unfortunately, I've never performed live. As an artist, I only have experience recording music. It should be noted that I have a large amount of experience with promoting music online, and not via concerts or events.
Whatever your reason your reading my guide, I hope you find it informative and it helps you in some way. You should take the parts that work for you and use them. So, without further ado (for now), I am proud to present my guide to music promotion for indie artists.
Part One
Welcome to part one of my guide on digital music promotion for independent recording artists. In this series I cover how indie artists can promote their music online! This guide focuses on the basics of digital music marketing and outlines what artists should do before, during and after promoting their music. I’ll go over some of the steps to take to maximize return on investment, commonly referred to as ROI and things to avoid when promoting music. Part one covers the basics of how to approach music promotion. The following parts will ellaborate and bring up other ways of promoting music.
The first step to take before promoting your music online is to make sure your product, which in our case is the music itself, is as good as it can be. This doesn’t mean the music has to be completely perfect; it means the music should be up to par in terms of competing with all the other music that’s out there. If you’re unsure of whether your music is good enough, listen to your track and then listen to a commercial release from another artist at the same volume and think about which you prefer and why. If your music isn’t ready, you should focus on making the music better. That could mean hiring someone to mix or master the tracks, or working on your skills with music and re-recording some of your songs or tracks.
Once you’ve decided your music is ready for promotion, it’s important to make sure you have a way to monetize the music. Usually that means uploading it to iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, etc through a distribution service. These distribution services generally charge a monthly or yearly subscription fee and take a small percentage of your sales and streaming revenue. It’s generally the best way to go since millions upon millions of people already stream music on these platforms every day. However, that’s not the only way to monetize your music. Services such as Bandcamp allow you to sell your music and merchandise yourself without paying anything upfront. SoundCloud also allows you to link a donation page such as PayPal, Cash App or similar to receive donations and Shopify or similar to sell items. Some paid tears of SoundCloud such as the Artist or Artist Pro plan allow you to get paid for your streams as well.
Keep in mind that artists make a very small amount of money per stream, in most cases less than a tenth a penny. Some services, such as Spotify, require a minimum amount of streams per track of 1,000 streams to qualify for earnings. The best way to choose which route to go in terms of where to upload your music depends on your past analytics. If you see you have fairly high streaming metrics already, for our purposes higher than an average of 500 streams per song or video, I recommend you upload using a distributor to iTunes, Spotify, YouTube etc. If you go this route, configure your uploads to distribute to all the digital streaming platforms (or DSP for short) and digital stores available. This way you get the biggest chance of more people finding your music where they already listen.
If you average significantly less than 500 streams per song or video, upload to Bandcamp. This way, you’ll still be able to potentially earn money from sales. Keep in mind, wherever you upload, you’ll generally retain the rights to your music after uploading so you can upload to the digital streaming platforms and digital stores, Bandcamp, and SoundCloud should you choose.
If you haven’t uploaded your music before, upload first to SoundCloud to see what engagement you might see from your music in terms of streaming numbers. This way, you’ll be able to see what it’s like to upload first and dig into some analytical data prior to uploading to other platforms.
It’s important to have a plan in place to promote your music prior to uploading it. For most of us, it’s not absolutely necessary to announce that you’re working on an album or single. However, for more experienced or well known artists, this is vitally important to sharing their release. While it’s not mandatory, all of us may benefit from sharing prior to release and it can be largely effective in terms of marketing. This release announcement can be as simple as a few social media posts. It can also include using a press release distributor to share your story with media outlets. While this is a relatively effective way of promoting music, it generally costs a fairly large amount of money. You can also distribute a press release to media outlets at the same time as release and afterwards to get the word out about your music. This is an effective way of sharing your music but be sure to write an interesting and professional press release or hire someone else to do it. However you create your press release, make sure it fits with your branding in terms of narrative. This means you should include part of your story in what you write or have written.
It’s a good time to note that music is a business just like any other business and it’s important to keep track of how much you spend on both recording and promoting your music. This way, you’ll know if you made money and how much you made, or if you haven’t made money yet, how much you are behind. To outline your plan on how you’re going to promote your music, you’ll need to write down exactly how much you’ve spent recording the project and what your budget is for promotion.
Determining your budget for promotion allows you to decide how to proceed with promoting your music. In the case of not having a budget at all, don’t worry. You can still use this guide to promote your music by following along and choosing the free options that the guide suggests.
Once you’ve determined your budget, you can decide exactly how you want to promote your music. Although this is a very comprehensive guide, I won’t outline all the ways possible to promote. As we continue, I will go over some ways you can promote your music. Keep in mind that what’s outlined here has been used prior by countless artists and has a history of working. However, new technologies and techniques are created every day and continue to evolve. Music promotion is an art (and business) in itself and however you promote you music is entirely up to you.
That said, the first way you should promote your music is by creating a landing page you can share that has all the digital streaming services and digital stores where your music can be streamed and bought. I also recommend including merchandise links on the landing page if you have merch for sale online. You can create this yourself if you have experience in creating websites or use a third party to find and share the links such as Songport.link or similar. These services will help create the exact landing page you need, but with minimal effort you can create a page yourself that allows you to share the links using a website creator such as Canva. Canva is also a good resource in terms of creating album artwork and basic video editing.
Once you create the landing page it’s time to create content with your music for social media. This could be recording a video performance of your track, dancing to your track, creating a visualizer, etc. While short form video is recommended for music promotion, those with an adequate budget or experience filming themselves can create full length music videos. Although music videos are still popular, it’s recommended that you create short form content that promotes your music. This could mean hiring video creators on a site like Fiverr to create videos that use your music.
Once you’ve recorded these videos (or had them recorded by other people), it’s time to upload. However, first you’ll want to ensure you have enough content for a few days worth of sharing. A good starting point is to have 3 videos prepared. You’ll want to space out sharing your content as uploading all at once can overwhelm the algorithm and mean less engagement and views. Be sure to link the landing page to your social media account profile page and either include the link in the social posts as well or say “check link in bio” or something similar to ensure viewers can find your music.
Those with a budget can also use paid social advertising to boost views on the videos uploaded. It’s recommended to start with a relatively small amount of money per day on ad spend and go from there once you see how your videos perform. If you see good results, you can always increase how much you’re spending. The reverse isn’t true in that you can’t get money back for a ad campaign that you’ve spent a large amount on that underperforms. So, be sure to start small if you’re new to paid advertising.
Royalties, meaning the money made from album streams and sales, generally take a long time to go through and sometimes have a minimum withdrawal amount, so be sure to read the fine print that the distributor provides if uploaded to iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, etc. By starting small in terms of budget and spend, you can view the analytics and data from your social videos and music and go from there. If things work out well, you can upscale your budget and boost your return.
Something to avoid when promoting music is paying for a service to boost plays or followers. While some of these services are actually legitimately useful and effective, most will use bots to increase streams and follower counts and will often result in having your music removed from streaming platforms and digital stores. At the very least, be sure to Google or otherwise search the service you’re thinking of using and see what people have written about it online. Also, thoroughly read the fine print on the site that’s providing the promotion to ensure you know what you’re signing up for.
Another thing to avoid is spending money on promoting music with little to no chance of making a return. That is, if you’re not seeing sales or 1,000 streams in total for your project within the first month or promoting it, I recommend that you don’t spend any more money until you understand what’s not working about your project or promotion. While it can be exciting to promote music, it can also get very expensive over time if you aren’t making money from it.
This concludes the first part in my series on how to promote music as an indie artist. Be sure to check back for part two of the guide. Thanks for reading!