How to Sell, License, and Market Music


I see a lot of incredibly talented musicians out there releasing music with a marketing plan of hopefully it will go viral. Maybe for a very small percentage that has happened, but for the majority of us, the music needs a little push to get it going. It's true that a great track will market itself, but you still need to do some work to give it the best chance for success.

With music, the name of the game is revenue streams, and the more ways you can diversify your income the better. One of the best revenue streams I've found is through music licensing. Marketing and promoting music for licensing is a little different from releasing an album but I want to go over some of the strategies that have been effective for me.

Step 1: Build Website
The first step to effectively market and license your music is to create a website. This might seem like a huge obstacle but anymore building a website is easier then ever. One of the best platforms I've found for easily creating a website is Webstarts. It's free for a basic membership and works on a point and click system kind of like Power Point. The website themes are easy to customize and there is a solid audio player with customizable skins and the ability to play singles or playlists. If you're just getting your feet wet into building a website Webstarts is definitely worth checking out.

It's far from the only option however. Blogger is another free option which works really well for building websites. You don't need to be an expert in coding to get solid results from Blogger.

If your technical skills are a little more advanced, I definitely recommend building a site using Wordpress. You can setup a Wordpress site easily through GoDaddy and the sky is the limit to what you can do.

When you are creating your site you have a two options on how your going to make your music available for licensing. You can either license the music directly from your site or you can use affiliate links to drive traffic elsewhere to make the purchase

Step 2: Decide Licensing Option
If you choose to license music directly from your website you can either build the licensing framework yourself or you can use a service like LicenseQuote, YouLicense, or SourceAudio.

If the idea of licensing music directly from your site seems like a little bit of a technical challenge, a better option may be to drive traffic elsewhere using affiliate links. To do this, you will need to have your music available in a stock music library.

There are tons of great music libraries out there to choose from but ideally you will need to use one with a good affiliate program and embeddable code for your website. Some good examples of this are Pond5, Audiosparx, and Audiojungle.

*A very useful resource for researching the best music libraries the Music Library Report.

Step 3 Market and Promote
Once your music is available for licensing you need to develop a marketing and promotion strategy. This is not easy but it's incredibly important. Marketing and promoting should be a part of your routine. A number that floats around a lot is 25-30% of your time should be spent promoting.

Now there are a number of ways to go about doing this. Some real world ways include networking, advertising, and cold calling. You also have some virtual ways to promote via YouTube, Soundcloud, Social Media, blogging, and the ever important email list.

Marketing and promotion ideas are endless. Research everything you can and develop a plan. Some good music marketing resources can be found at:


Also, don't think you have to do it alone. There is always the option to hire someone to help you. Fiverr is a good choice for a low cost option to find people to help you market and promote your music.

The goal for marketing is developing and building a strong fan base. Without fans you have nothing.

Thanks for reading and please fell free to share, like and comment below.

No comments:

Post a Comment