Free Music Promotion
Do you Rap or Sing? Do you have a high quality music video? Do you want free music promotion? Provide us with your music, links, and detailed bio (2000 Character Minimum) by filling out the form below. **Poorly written bios will be rejected**. Your submission will be shared on our hip hop blog that gets thousands of visitors a week, as well as across our Facebook and Twitter accounts. Note: This promotion is not for producers or artists in genres outside of Hip Hop and R&B.
Here are some helpful articles for recording artists
How To Promote Your Music For Free
No money, no problem. Promote your music for free with these tips. As an artist, sometimes it can feel if you don't have money,
then you can't succeed, but that's just not the truth. In this digital era, there are plenty of ways for musicians to get their music out there, get those opportunities, which mean their music is going to blow up, with absolutely no money. With so many different avenues to communicate with your fans you can promote your music for free, and not rely on anyone else to get your music out there. Running social media ads, hiring a PR team, getting a videographer to do a music video. All of these things cost money, and we know that not all of you have this massive budget to promote your music. 'm going to outline some simple tips, which mean you can promote your music for free. We're going to start with online promotion. The internet has opened up endless opportunities
for musicians to get online coverage. In the past, the labels were the only ones that could really get their artists in newspapers,
in magazines, and top-performing blogs. But now you can simply write a press release, send it to the right journalist, and get featured in massive blogs, which means your music is reaching a huge audience, which you never would have had before. And to top it off, it's completely free. Imagine getting coverage in Clash Magazine, HipHopDX, even Pitchfork, well it's doable. So let's start with how you write the press release. The press release is the main thing that you send to these journalists. It's how you pitch yourself. It's how you sell yourself to the media and get the coverage that you deserve. The structure of it has to be quite simple
because they need to be able to scan through it to work out whether they want to feature you. And if from one scan, they're interested, then they'll read it fully. So it needs to have a really engaging headline. It needs to have a picture of you as an artist, the artwork for the single, and then information about that release, information about what you've done in the past, what you have to brag about, and then your social media links.
Now you've got that press release, you need to have the pitch. So you simply get the press release, copy and paste it into the email,
and above that, you're going to write the pitch. It's basically just summarizing the press release so that the journalist can read that topic and work out whether they want to carry on reading. Therefore, it needs to engage them. It needs to say something about where you've been featured in the past, who you've collaborated with, something about an angle perhaps. Anything that makes you different, and then you need to have a streaming link as well. We would suggest a SoundCloud link because that's the easiest way for journalists to stream. This process can be quite time consuming because you can spend hours finding the right journalist, finding the right email, sending the emails, and then not getting much feedback. But we've got a tip for this one. If you use that SoundCloud link to send to journalists, you can then click on that private SoundCloud link and see how many people have listened. If you send that SoundCloud to a hundred people, and it's only got 10 listens, that means that either your pitch isn't strong enough, your press release isn't strong enough, or you're sending it to the wrong journalist. So definitely go back to the drawing board if you're not getting those listens, but you can also make sure to follow up with these journalists because they get thousands of emails, so if they haven't replied for a week or so, send a polite follow up and see if they're interested. And if they still don't reply, then it may not be the track for them. Although this can be time consuming, the results are huge. We've had artists placed in major blogs, which has led to them being discovered by massive labels, massive booking agents, and even placed in Spotify editorial playlists. Because these blog features act as a springboard to major areas like playlisting so it's definitely worth it. And the best thing is, it's free.
Next up, we've got radio plugging. Radio pluggers can be extremely expensive because you're paying not just for their time
but for their years of experience and years of contacts, but you can do it yourself if you invest the time. And yes, this one's free, but it also means you can start generating money because if you get a really, really good radio play, you're gonna start collecting royalties. Before doing anything else, you need to make sure that your track is under four minutes and also has no swear words.
So if you do have a track that's too long or has swear words, get a radio edit. From here, you're going to start pitching. So you're going to get that press release that you've already written and the pitch that you've already written for online promotion, and you're going to edit it slightly. Firstly, you're going to change the end of the pitch because for your online pitch, you're asking for a feature or a review, but for radio plugging, you're going to ask for a play, an interview, a session, and then you're also going to include a download link. For producers, for presenters, for radio stations, it's really useful to have a download link in that first email because if they read the email and love the track and wanna play it that day, they wanna be able to download it and spin it. But if they have to go back, ask for the download link, wait for that, and then download it, that means you could lose that opportunity, so either include a WeTransfer link, a Dropbox link, a Google Drive link, anything that allows them to download the track really simply. Getting national radio play is obviously the dream for all of you, you wanna get placed on radio stations like BBC Radio 1, KISS FM, and this is doable.
And you don't need a radio plugger, but to start with, you need to start small. So get those plays on local radio, community radio,
hospital radio, online radio, going to those genre-specific shows and genre-specific stations. Cause once you have that and you've got those portfolio of plays, and you can go to the nationals, stating that you've had X amount of plays and you've got really good feedback.
Our next tip for getting free music promotion for your next single is influencer marketing. For those of you who don't know, influencers are people that have very high following on social media, and they're called influencers 'cause they can influence your buying decisions. So a lot of you have probably bought something because of an influencer without even knowing. So you might be scrolling through Instagram and they're promoting a skincare routine, and then a few months later, you might see that in a store and buy it. This is exactly the same for the music industry, and labels are jumping on this. They're getting their music placed in influencer's videos, they're getting them to promote the content, they're getting them to be in music videos, all to promote the music. However, these things you have to pay for, so a lot of you are probably thinking, isn't this about free music promotion?
Well, you still can get free music promotion with influencers, and the way you're going to do that is getting your music placed in their videos. So simply pick up your phone and go onto Instagram, and you're going to start to find influencers that use music within their videos. An example I'm going to use is makeup influencers. You're basically going to type in a hashtag, which is relevant to that style. So you can type in hashtag makeup, and then you're going to look through the top performing content, click on them
and see how many followers these influencers have and then watch a few of their videos to see if they use music. If they use music, you're gonna jump straight into their DM's and simply say, hi, so and so, I'm loving your content and I noticed you use music.
I'm an artist myself, and I would love to provide you some music for your videos. Here's a link so you can listen to some,
if you wanted to use some, I can definitely send some MP3's. The results for this one are huge. We've had artists placed in videos with Instagram accounts of up to 1.5 million followers. And we didn't pay them, we did the exact same thing as I'm telling you now.
So if you dedicate the time to this, you do get the results. Another side of influencer marketing that could be beneficial to you guys is YouTube sink.The YouTube sink is exactly the same as Instagram, but it's over on YouTube. The only issue with this is you need to opt out of YouTube Content ID. For lots of you that were with people like DistroKid, you don't even opt into YouTube Content ID.
That's a separate package, so you probably don't even have that, but if you're with someone like AWAL or The Orchard, you're collecting royalties from anyone that uses your track so this one is completely your shout. If you wanna collect royalties and you don't want the YouTubers to use your music royalty free, then this one isn't for you, but we did this with one of our artists. We made them opt out of YouTube Content ID, and we got their track placed in videos with subscriber counts of up to three million. That artist then went and got signed to a major label. So it doesn't damage anything. It just means that you're not collecting those royalties.
So if you want to opt out of YouTube Content ID, you can start emailing YouTubers stating that you have royalty free music that you'd love them to use.
You do exactly the same as Instagram, you type in a theme that you want to go with, so let's do makeup again.
So you might put something like makeup routine, and then you find the YouTubers that use that kind of style of music, you hit About on their channel, and you'll find their email address. Pitch very similarly to Instagram, but you need to make sure that in the first line,
you say that your music is royalty free because if you do that, they're going to read on and they're definitely going to listen. If they confirm that they want to use the track, you can send them the MP3, but you can also ask for them to tag your socials, or have a link
to your Spotify in the description of the video. This one is very time consuming, like the Instagram influencers, but the results are huge because if you get placed in a video which gets an average of a million views, you've got a million people listening to your track, and if your track is good, those people are gonna go over to Spotify, or over to your socials, and be a fan.
Our final tip, the final way to promote your music for free, is by creating content. The content that you put out in this digital era
is completely your brand. There are musicians out there at the moment that their content is the reason that they're succeeding.
Creating high quality content is honestly the quickest way to get your music out to the world, and it's completely free. In this day and age, the majority of you have a phone so the content that you can create can literally be a picture or a video taken on your phone. And it still looks very high quality. You don't need to invest in camera equipment, a videographer, lights, because Instagram
is made for this raw content, and people engage with raw content a lot more. The two things that we find that musicians struggle with the most is what content to create and how often they should be creating it. So the content that you create is actually spit up
into three separate areas, and those are entertaining, documenting, and educating. So choose which of those you're best at,
which of those suits your music, suits your brand, and start creating content around it. Spend a few months being experimental with your content, and see which engages the largest audience. And then, stick to that theme. Stick to it for as long as you can possibly can and create as much content around it as you possibly can, which leads us nicely into how often should you be creating content.
And the answer to this one is basically how often can you post high quality content? If you can create high quality content daily, do it. The more content, the better, but if you struggle to create that high quality content, then don't be forcing yourself to post daily because you'll start putting out awful content, which means you'll lose that loyal audience. You can make up for the lack of content
by posting on stories. Stories can be a lot more spontaneous, and you can pick up and talk to the camera whenever. And if you can't post that often onto your feed, stories are the way to make up for that.
We do these tips daily, and they get the results
so I promise you if you start doing them,
you'll get results too.
then you can't succeed, but that's just not the truth. In this digital era, there are plenty of ways for musicians to get their music out there, get those opportunities, which mean their music is going to blow up, with absolutely no money. With so many different avenues to communicate with your fans you can promote your music for free, and not rely on anyone else to get your music out there. Running social media ads, hiring a PR team, getting a videographer to do a music video. All of these things cost money, and we know that not all of you have this massive budget to promote your music. 'm going to outline some simple tips, which mean you can promote your music for free. We're going to start with online promotion. The internet has opened up endless opportunities
for musicians to get online coverage. In the past, the labels were the only ones that could really get their artists in newspapers,
in magazines, and top-performing blogs. But now you can simply write a press release, send it to the right journalist, and get featured in massive blogs, which means your music is reaching a huge audience, which you never would have had before. And to top it off, it's completely free. Imagine getting coverage in Clash Magazine, HipHopDX, even Pitchfork, well it's doable. So let's start with how you write the press release. The press release is the main thing that you send to these journalists. It's how you pitch yourself. It's how you sell yourself to the media and get the coverage that you deserve. The structure of it has to be quite simple
because they need to be able to scan through it to work out whether they want to feature you. And if from one scan, they're interested, then they'll read it fully. So it needs to have a really engaging headline. It needs to have a picture of you as an artist, the artwork for the single, and then information about that release, information about what you've done in the past, what you have to brag about, and then your social media links.
Now you've got that press release, you need to have the pitch. So you simply get the press release, copy and paste it into the email,
and above that, you're going to write the pitch. It's basically just summarizing the press release so that the journalist can read that topic and work out whether they want to carry on reading. Therefore, it needs to engage them. It needs to say something about where you've been featured in the past, who you've collaborated with, something about an angle perhaps. Anything that makes you different, and then you need to have a streaming link as well. We would suggest a SoundCloud link because that's the easiest way for journalists to stream. This process can be quite time consuming because you can spend hours finding the right journalist, finding the right email, sending the emails, and then not getting much feedback. But we've got a tip for this one. If you use that SoundCloud link to send to journalists, you can then click on that private SoundCloud link and see how many people have listened. If you send that SoundCloud to a hundred people, and it's only got 10 listens, that means that either your pitch isn't strong enough, your press release isn't strong enough, or you're sending it to the wrong journalist. So definitely go back to the drawing board if you're not getting those listens, but you can also make sure to follow up with these journalists because they get thousands of emails, so if they haven't replied for a week or so, send a polite follow up and see if they're interested. And if they still don't reply, then it may not be the track for them. Although this can be time consuming, the results are huge. We've had artists placed in major blogs, which has led to them being discovered by massive labels, massive booking agents, and even placed in Spotify editorial playlists. Because these blog features act as a springboard to major areas like playlisting so it's definitely worth it. And the best thing is, it's free.
Next up, we've got radio plugging. Radio pluggers can be extremely expensive because you're paying not just for their time
but for their years of experience and years of contacts, but you can do it yourself if you invest the time. And yes, this one's free, but it also means you can start generating money because if you get a really, really good radio play, you're gonna start collecting royalties. Before doing anything else, you need to make sure that your track is under four minutes and also has no swear words.
So if you do have a track that's too long or has swear words, get a radio edit. From here, you're going to start pitching. So you're going to get that press release that you've already written and the pitch that you've already written for online promotion, and you're going to edit it slightly. Firstly, you're going to change the end of the pitch because for your online pitch, you're asking for a feature or a review, but for radio plugging, you're going to ask for a play, an interview, a session, and then you're also going to include a download link. For producers, for presenters, for radio stations, it's really useful to have a download link in that first email because if they read the email and love the track and wanna play it that day, they wanna be able to download it and spin it. But if they have to go back, ask for the download link, wait for that, and then download it, that means you could lose that opportunity, so either include a WeTransfer link, a Dropbox link, a Google Drive link, anything that allows them to download the track really simply. Getting national radio play is obviously the dream for all of you, you wanna get placed on radio stations like BBC Radio 1, KISS FM, and this is doable.
And you don't need a radio plugger, but to start with, you need to start small. So get those plays on local radio, community radio,
hospital radio, online radio, going to those genre-specific shows and genre-specific stations. Cause once you have that and you've got those portfolio of plays, and you can go to the nationals, stating that you've had X amount of plays and you've got really good feedback.
Our next tip for getting free music promotion for your next single is influencer marketing. For those of you who don't know, influencers are people that have very high following on social media, and they're called influencers 'cause they can influence your buying decisions. So a lot of you have probably bought something because of an influencer without even knowing. So you might be scrolling through Instagram and they're promoting a skincare routine, and then a few months later, you might see that in a store and buy it. This is exactly the same for the music industry, and labels are jumping on this. They're getting their music placed in influencer's videos, they're getting them to promote the content, they're getting them to be in music videos, all to promote the music. However, these things you have to pay for, so a lot of you are probably thinking, isn't this about free music promotion?
Well, you still can get free music promotion with influencers, and the way you're going to do that is getting your music placed in their videos. So simply pick up your phone and go onto Instagram, and you're going to start to find influencers that use music within their videos. An example I'm going to use is makeup influencers. You're basically going to type in a hashtag, which is relevant to that style. So you can type in hashtag makeup, and then you're going to look through the top performing content, click on them
and see how many followers these influencers have and then watch a few of their videos to see if they use music. If they use music, you're gonna jump straight into their DM's and simply say, hi, so and so, I'm loving your content and I noticed you use music.
I'm an artist myself, and I would love to provide you some music for your videos. Here's a link so you can listen to some,
if you wanted to use some, I can definitely send some MP3's. The results for this one are huge. We've had artists placed in videos with Instagram accounts of up to 1.5 million followers. And we didn't pay them, we did the exact same thing as I'm telling you now.
So if you dedicate the time to this, you do get the results. Another side of influencer marketing that could be beneficial to you guys is YouTube sink.The YouTube sink is exactly the same as Instagram, but it's over on YouTube. The only issue with this is you need to opt out of YouTube Content ID. For lots of you that were with people like DistroKid, you don't even opt into YouTube Content ID.
That's a separate package, so you probably don't even have that, but if you're with someone like AWAL or The Orchard, you're collecting royalties from anyone that uses your track so this one is completely your shout. If you wanna collect royalties and you don't want the YouTubers to use your music royalty free, then this one isn't for you, but we did this with one of our artists. We made them opt out of YouTube Content ID, and we got their track placed in videos with subscriber counts of up to three million. That artist then went and got signed to a major label. So it doesn't damage anything. It just means that you're not collecting those royalties.
So if you want to opt out of YouTube Content ID, you can start emailing YouTubers stating that you have royalty free music that you'd love them to use.
You do exactly the same as Instagram, you type in a theme that you want to go with, so let's do makeup again.
So you might put something like makeup routine, and then you find the YouTubers that use that kind of style of music, you hit About on their channel, and you'll find their email address. Pitch very similarly to Instagram, but you need to make sure that in the first line,
you say that your music is royalty free because if you do that, they're going to read on and they're definitely going to listen. If they confirm that they want to use the track, you can send them the MP3, but you can also ask for them to tag your socials, or have a link
to your Spotify in the description of the video. This one is very time consuming, like the Instagram influencers, but the results are huge because if you get placed in a video which gets an average of a million views, you've got a million people listening to your track, and if your track is good, those people are gonna go over to Spotify, or over to your socials, and be a fan.
Our final tip, the final way to promote your music for free, is by creating content. The content that you put out in this digital era
is completely your brand. There are musicians out there at the moment that their content is the reason that they're succeeding.
Creating high quality content is honestly the quickest way to get your music out to the world, and it's completely free. In this day and age, the majority of you have a phone so the content that you can create can literally be a picture or a video taken on your phone. And it still looks very high quality. You don't need to invest in camera equipment, a videographer, lights, because Instagram
is made for this raw content, and people engage with raw content a lot more. The two things that we find that musicians struggle with the most is what content to create and how often they should be creating it. So the content that you create is actually spit up
into three separate areas, and those are entertaining, documenting, and educating. So choose which of those you're best at,
which of those suits your music, suits your brand, and start creating content around it. Spend a few months being experimental with your content, and see which engages the largest audience. And then, stick to that theme. Stick to it for as long as you can possibly can and create as much content around it as you possibly can, which leads us nicely into how often should you be creating content.
And the answer to this one is basically how often can you post high quality content? If you can create high quality content daily, do it. The more content, the better, but if you struggle to create that high quality content, then don't be forcing yourself to post daily because you'll start putting out awful content, which means you'll lose that loyal audience. You can make up for the lack of content
by posting on stories. Stories can be a lot more spontaneous, and you can pick up and talk to the camera whenever. And if you can't post that often onto your feed, stories are the way to make up for that.
We do these tips daily, and they get the results
so I promise you if you start doing them,
you'll get results too.