4 Simple Steps to Grow Your Music Career in 2021

It’s a New Year with new opportunities. Whether you have been making music for a long time or you’re a new artist, you will need to follow these simple steps to reach success in your music career.

Set Goals

The initial step to defining any objective is to take a look at what you need to accomplish in your future. Ensuring your short-term goals will eventually lead you to your long-term goals. You should anticipate your objectives. That will create a sense of urgency and inspire the work ethic to accomplish them. We all have high ambitions towards our passions but as artists, we need to comprehend what we’re equipped to accomplish in our present and future. You are putting forth the attempt to propel your music career ahead so recognize what you seek and the means it will take to achieve it. Although the music industry can be unpredictable at times, staying positive is key to achieving your goals.

Release/Promote Music Videos

Making quality music videos is essential to gaining new attention to your releases. Music videos can provide a significant advance to any artist regardless of how small or large their fan base is. The videos will help to highlight songs, pull in watchers, and will extend your ability to communicate your art with a wider audience. Make sure you are increasing the engagement and watch time in your music videos by:

-Releasing multiple videos to gain the favor of the YouTube algorithm.

-Placing all of your links in the description section

-Responding to all positive feedback and comments

-Releasing quality content, ONLY. No more crappy quality visuals

-Adding multiple tags. Use a service like TubeToolbBox to find relevant tags that fit your videos

-Capture the viewer in the first 10 seconds

-Make sure the title of the song is at the beginning of your video.

Make Connections

Increasing your fans and engagement is not an easy task but if you apply the effort necessary it will be a very rewarding task. In order to increase your fans, you must first understand your brand and how you are presenting yourself to potential fans. Optimize your social media profiles and remove any clutter. A lot of artists get too caught up in their image or antics. Make sure you show them what you’re good at as well since that’s what they ultimately should be there for. Keep your followers updated on your next moves. Don’t be afraid to engage any fans you make along the way either. They will remember and cherish the moment when you’re a bigger artist. Be consistent with your interactions as well as your music releases to satisfy the fans you make. Use hashtags on social media posts, YouTube videos, and SoundCloud uploads. Submit your music to as many playlists and blogs as possible, experiment with Facebook/Instagram ads, post YouTube covers, build relationships with influencers, anything you can think of. Get creative. That will spread your music to a wider audience.

Increase Revenue

As an independent artist, you can profit from your streams, merch, collaborations, shows, personal skills, and possibly even get an advance without singing your rights away to a major label. The more fans you have the more exposure you have. Gaining new fans will obviously increase your streams and revenue from your distributor. Exposure leads to opportunities. Opportunities lead to money. The more exposure, the more artist in your genre will find you and want to collaborate with you. If you have a larger following than them you can charge a fee for a collaboration. If your following is smaller than theirs, collaborate to expose yourself to their fans. If you are able to gain enough fans to break into Spotify’s algorithm you will be sure to see success from your music releases. CDBaby wrote an article on the artist Lucidious who grew to 500,000 monthly listeners on Spotify without playlists. Utilizing paid advertisements like Facebook and Instagram will also be essential to achieving these results.

The more fans you have the more merchandise you can sell. Once you have a significant following reach out to booking agents in your area to perform at shows or set up your own small shows and make a profit from the ticket, door, and bar sales. Make the most out of every skill you have. If you’re good at graphic design, mixing/mastering, or anything else, offer your services to other artists. All of these will lead to an increase in much-needed revenue to fund your career and lifestyle. Another little known option would be to get a music loan. There are many different services that offer independent artist an advance on their streaming income. Instead of stressing about how you will fund your next project, let someone else do it for you.

Stay tuned to our blog post and we will go more in-depth with steps you can follow to achieve the most out of your efforts, as well as resources you can use.