This article is going to be talking about what I would probably consider to be the best business plan available for a rapper trying to come up in today's hip hop music industry. I'm going to discuss all sorts of subjects including where and how to buy beats online that you own, why it's important to own your own tracks and most importantly, yes, how to promote yourself.
Hopefully by the time you're done reading this article you will have a much better understanding of what goes on in the market today. In fact I am confident that this article may just be enough for you to make an impactful approach to marketing your own music.
The industry has changed dramatically in the past few years, a lot is different. The first most important thing for you to understand is that the game is basically built for independents these days. It's not a dying industry, either, that's complete nonsense.
Don't get caught into the hype that cyber pirating is somehow ruining the entire music industry, that's quite frankly a lie. 80% of music lovers still buy music, meaning only 20% of sales are lost due to cyber pirating. Also, Billboard magazine estimated that in 2009, 50% of all album and single sales were made by independent artists. Those numbers were seriously far lower just a couple years ago... This is the independent age, baby.
We'll start at phase one... The most important thing for you to do as a hip hop rapper is to simply buy hip hop beats. You need to own the music you create or you're not going to be able to sell your tunes. This is the biggest and most important factor to your success. Don't waste time, money and energy recording over beats you can't use because rap beats are cheap these days.
To distribute yourself there are a few options available that you may find interest in. The good old fashioned way of distributing yourself online is still just approaching small store owners and trying to convince them to put your music on the shelves. You'll have to negotiate a commission so the store owners get some money out of the deal, too, but that's pretty easy to do.
Now there's online distribution through Tunecore, though, which is quickly becoming the most popular approach to selling music. If you own the rights to your music then you can easily use Tunecore to get your stuff on all the major mp3 retailers such as iTunes, Rhapsody and others. This is seriously affordable, even to the point to where you can pay with a fraction of your monthly pay check.
Once you have your beats and you're distributed in a lot of online stores, you can start promotion. Let's discuss the best ways to promote yourself without spending a dime, and by best ways I mean you can seriously make a living promoting music for free using these tactics. The first tactic I'll cover is online promotion using websites such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. If you can find a way to effectively promote on these websites then it's free, extremely effective and it's promoting to an online audience that can easily go to iTunes right from your page.
Having said that, your next best option is PR. PR has always been the driving force for most labels and artists. It's free and it's extremely effective. All you have to do is write some really great articles about yourself and your band, put an interesting spin on it and submit it to the top editors of all the biggest magazines (and smaller ones, too). This is called doing a press release and you can do it through a PR company but honestly the best way to do this is to contact the editors yourself and establish relationships. You should start small with local publications such as college news papers, then slowly work your way up to the biggest magazines worldwide.
Hopefully by the time you're done reading this article you will have a much better understanding of what goes on in the market today. In fact I am confident that this article may just be enough for you to make an impactful approach to marketing your own music.
The industry has changed dramatically in the past few years, a lot is different. The first most important thing for you to understand is that the game is basically built for independents these days. It's not a dying industry, either, that's complete nonsense.
Don't get caught into the hype that cyber pirating is somehow ruining the entire music industry, that's quite frankly a lie. 80% of music lovers still buy music, meaning only 20% of sales are lost due to cyber pirating. Also, Billboard magazine estimated that in 2009, 50% of all album and single sales were made by independent artists. Those numbers were seriously far lower just a couple years ago... This is the independent age, baby.
We'll start at phase one... The most important thing for you to do as a hip hop rapper is to simply buy hip hop beats. You need to own the music you create or you're not going to be able to sell your tunes. This is the biggest and most important factor to your success. Don't waste time, money and energy recording over beats you can't use because rap beats are cheap these days.
To distribute yourself there are a few options available that you may find interest in. The good old fashioned way of distributing yourself online is still just approaching small store owners and trying to convince them to put your music on the shelves. You'll have to negotiate a commission so the store owners get some money out of the deal, too, but that's pretty easy to do.
Now there's online distribution through Tunecore, though, which is quickly becoming the most popular approach to selling music. If you own the rights to your music then you can easily use Tunecore to get your stuff on all the major mp3 retailers such as iTunes, Rhapsody and others. This is seriously affordable, even to the point to where you can pay with a fraction of your monthly pay check.
Once you have your beats and you're distributed in a lot of online stores, you can start promotion. Let's discuss the best ways to promote yourself without spending a dime, and by best ways I mean you can seriously make a living promoting music for free using these tactics. The first tactic I'll cover is online promotion using websites such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. If you can find a way to effectively promote on these websites then it's free, extremely effective and it's promoting to an online audience that can easily go to iTunes right from your page.
Having said that, your next best option is PR. PR has always been the driving force for most labels and artists. It's free and it's extremely effective. All you have to do is write some really great articles about yourself and your band, put an interesting spin on it and submit it to the top editors of all the biggest magazines (and smaller ones, too). This is called doing a press release and you can do it through a PR company but honestly the best way to do this is to contact the editors yourself and establish relationships. You should start small with local publications such as college news papers, then slowly work your way up to the biggest magazines worldwide.
About the Author:
This is the link to Buy Beats Online, and check out the beat CD's at this link here Beats 4 Sale.
Useful information, thank you very much! btw guys, probably you can recommend some beats website for me. I discovered Raj beats while I was trying to buy beats online
ReplyDelete. What do you think about it? Can u recommend it?