Skip to main content

Growing Your Brand As An Indie Artist: 4 Important Steps

AI-Solutions for The Music Industry , Indie artist growing their brand by playing and interacting with the music industry using AI assistant

Growing your brand as an indie artist can seem like a daunting task because there are hundreds of different ways to go about it. For the team at Virtual Publicist, our best advice to an artist looking to make a brand that insights, converts, and attracts is to keep things simple.

Simplicity as the golden rule of branding means that whatever message you are trying to advance through your image needs to be easy to understand, and relatable enough to be appropriated by your audience.

We put together a concise guide to the basics of how to set yourself up with a brand that makes sense and has all the elements required to be properly used in your career.

Branding is divided into 3 angles

  1. Brand Strategy is the way your different branded elements are working together, and the timeline of their appearance. This pattern will have a positive strategic output or a negative one, that you must analyze in order to pursue a profitable path.
  2. Brand Identity is the combination of all the physical and conceptual elements that define the brand as an entity of its own. Think of your brand as a living thing, its identity combines all the sides of the puzzle that can make it walk and talk.
  3. Brand Marketing is the methods and mediums used to bring the brand forward. the difference between marketing and strategy is that marketing style
record labels, music industry, the record company, music business, music publisher, record companies, the music industry, music label,music publishing companies, record deal,independent record labels, music companies,biggest record labels, starting a record label, label artists, record label jobs, branding, brandin on Virtual Publicist, Virtual Publicist

1. First off, SOCIAL MEDIA. 

Yes, it takes time, and it isn’t the easiest thing to do, but it’s proven to bring about results and it can be fun, too! Building a following, and a loyal community that is interested in your content is key to any kind of promotional campaign you run later on. 

Spend all the money you want, but if you don’t have a real fan base — it doesn’t have to be huge, either — your promotional efforts will just go down the drain.

Keep in mind that the creation and sharing of art connect you to a large number of people. Being polite and respectful to the community can help you create a good reputation and be recognized.

2. Musician Website 

Create a website that carries your brand identity and has relevant sections like Bio, Music, Merch, and so on. This is your unique space to show who you are as an artist, and it’s super easy to create.

Information Hub: You may consolidate all of your promotional material by creating an artist website. It will be easy for both you and the audience you’re attempting to reach if you can house it all in one location and update it as needed.

Full Ownership And Control of your online identity are permanently established once you have a website. You may simply transfer your domain and all of your material if you wish to switch website hosts. You have complete control over when and how the audience interacts with your material.

Websites convey your unique personality A website may be anything you want it to be since it is not constrained by a news feed or a set number of characters. With blog articles and images, you may be as personal as you would on social networking.

3. Create the perfect EPK (electronic press kit). 

Improve and add on to what you already have, and if you don’t have an EPK, what are you doing? Keep things simple and easy to read, add information about yourself, details about your past and upcoming releases, major shows, and press coverage, and don’t forget to include artist pictures and any music videos you have. A strong EPK will go a long way!

An EPK functions as a one-stop shop where potential employers can get all the information they want without having to search or inquire. It should include specialized details and materials for event planners, promoters, journalists, bloggers, and other business professionals — materials that you would not want the general public to view or have access to.

Why Do You Need An EPK? You’ll place yourself in the best possible position to pitch your tracks, gain press attention, secure gigs, and perhaps even draw the attention of a manager or label executive with a solid EPK.

4.Get on Playlists with different distributors

This is a task that requires persistence because as an indie artist you have to pitch to editors and curators from all around. The trick is to find as many different people to reach out to as possible, and do just that — network. Once you pitch your track to enough people, you’re bound to get results by being featured on various playlists.

Playlist marketplaces are a jungle of questions for most artists. Will the streams count, will they lead to more, and is it really worth it? Usually composed of a shadowy SEO-jammed website with user-friendly buy buttons, playlist marketplaces are in the grey zone of the music promotions tool kit.

As buying views is pretty controversial on account of bot accounts and automation, the proper way of addressing playlist curators is the classic pitch, which an artist can do via submission portals or directly by finding the owner of the playlist in question.

Not always the simplest method, nor does it usually garner a lot of response, but if your music is fly, your pitch is clean and your timing on when you sent the message was proper throughout, you should expect at least a 15% positive response rate. Which is not bad, considering it’s a question of numbers. The more playlists you are on, the more views or streams you get.

Virtual Publicist, the one-stop shop for all your media needs

With these key elements in place, you are ready to start marketing yourself as an artist. With Virtual Publicist by your side, most of the people that will need to be seeing this branding are properly cataloged and ready to be pitched to.An all-inclusive platform where you can execute all these strategies with ease and track their progress.

As an artist, you can find all the necessary contact with the help of Virtual Publicist, grow your social media presence, pitch directly to playlist curators, and so much more!