Marketing Instrumental Music
Marketing your instrumental music is much easier now with social media marketing. Instrumental music videos are now gaining recognition because of using stock footage or art work.
Step 1: Marketing Youself As An Instrumental Musician
Feeling awfully festive, aren't I, today? Nice aloha shirt today. Anyhow, I wanted to talk to you real quick about something, and it's about marketing yourself as an instrumental musician. I can't imagine what that was like in the old days - and I hate to sound like it was 'old days', probably only 10, 12 years ago - but pre-internet and the fact that we have abilities like this to share our music so people can see - it's very visual. Obviously, I come from a very big family in the music industry, and one of my uncle's bands in the late 70's was a very famous latin/jazz fusion underground band - couldn't have been that famous - Caldera. Alex Acuna and Jorge Strunz and my uncle, Eddie del Barrio, were very, very well known in the 70's. But being an instrumental musician back in the day, you really didn't have a lot to be able to brand and image yourself with to the public. You either went and saw them live or not at all. Obviously, the advent of music videos still was, "Oh, instrumental music over here." It really didn't get a good thrust, and I still think that's a travesty, because there's so much fantastic music out there that's instrumental of all kinds.
Step 2: More Marketing Tools Available Today
Of course, here we are, in a different day and age. Marketing yourself as an instrumental musician, you now have ten times more tools in your pocket. As I market myself as a media composer, it's the same way. And that is in most cases, in my demos and stuff that I have on my reel, will be music up against film. But with yourself, if you're doing your own music at home and you're trying to get the message out there - and sometimes, outside of actually watching somebody play and be entertained by the movement of whatever the instrument may be. Now in our case, with guitar or something like that, it's kind of fun to watch people make comments about voicing and technique and stuff like that.
Step 3: Create A Viral Social Profile
Outside of actually watching a musician execute one of their tracks actually playing, the other way to do it is something that I do. Now I'm not promoting myself, because I don't sell my music, so I don't feel bad about mentioning this. But I have another profile, a viral social profile, where I do just my instrumental stuff. It's just my throw-away guitar stuff. But what I do is I go find great pictures on the internet. And a lot of times, I try to find pictures or prints or digital artwork from a single artist, and I will do just static videos; the picture kind of fades and then fades and then does things. And in this case on a couple of my videos as you see right here. I used Christopher Lassen - I think he's just a tremendous artist in what he does and I give him props. Another way to do it, too, is to look for stock footage. If you want stock footage and your music represents the beautiful outdoors or underwater, but you want motion, you can go to a stock footage library and spend a couple hundred bucks and get a ton of footage and assemble your instrumental music.
Step 4: Conclusion
Anyhow, in marketing your instrumental music, don't be afraid to take the pictures and do the things and put up these slide shows. It really works. Really, really well. So that's my suggestion. That's just one of many marketing music tips, and marketing your instrumental thing. So that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Don't forget to visit me on TalkMusicBiz.com. I'm rebuilding the site, and you can get a ton of information there. So I'm going to say a big fat "aloha" to you, since I've got my aloha print shirt on, and that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
