Yes, it’s a recession. Yes, music industry sales are low. With Atlanta being known as “black hollywood” what does this mean for a dominated indie rap music scene?
Getting signed to a recording contract is a thing of the past and if an artist thinks this is the way because they heard Drake got $2.5 million, it is going to be a long hill to climb.
First, indie rap and r&b artists need to put a full court press on their music marketing efforts. This is not leaving comments on other peoples myspace boards saying “I’m the next next”. First, complete a CD’s worth of music and contact a digital distributor such as The Orchard to upload all of your music and make it available on iTunes for downloading. You do not need a record label to do this for you. It’s free and there is no cost to put your music up there.
Your music must be advertised heavily. I recommend running ads on two social networks primarily: Myspace and Facebook. You can design and run pay per click advertising and set up a daily budget to run your ads. You can set budgets for as low as $10 a day and get people to click on your website and go listen and purchase your music. In fact, you can link them directly to the iTunes store and have them listening and purchasing your music yourself.
Once you do this consistently for 6 months to 1 year, you will build a solid fan base and play around with different advertisements to see what works and what people respond to. You want to accomplish and measure two things: how many impressions you receive and how many click throughs you receive. The amount of impressions is how many people see your name which is the branding part. It takes awhile to build your brand name so do not expect to build this overnight. Be patient and grow your fan base over time. It is also imperative to build a Facebook Fan Page which is better than having a personal page especially as your fans grow.
Most importantly, have fun and be sure to focus on the business side of music. Do not solely focus on the artistic side as you will not last long in the industry. Music is a pure numbers game. Once you compile big numbers in impressions, click throughs, and sales through, you can take this to a label and get funding support. Labels will only fund the artists who show a track record and sales history. No sales history, no deal.
