The music industry is filled to the brim with underground artists who’ve striven for years to make a living, while watching other undiscovered talents hit the big time in a matter of months. Rappers like XXXTentacion rose from nothing to dominate the rap industry in a manner of a couple of years. However, artists like Milo, Aesop Rock, Busdriver, Open Mike Eagle – these are artists who consistently release critically acclaimed material, but have nowhere near the followings of other rappers. This could be considered a measure of talent by some, but others might view the situation in a more pragmatic sense. What are these unknown artists doing wrong?
In terms of marketing music, artists have always been limited in their ability to self-publish their own work. With the arrival of the internet and more affordable recording equipment, this is no longer as much of an issue as it once was. Artists can record their own music in a home studio, edit and master it in Garageband, and self-publish their own work on streaming sites like Soundcloud for free. However, getting the word out about your music is a tough task to attempt. You don’t want to abuse your friends and family with content updates, and new artist pages typically flounder and stagnate after accruing a few hundred followers. Hiring an ad agency like Avidon Marketing Group can be ridiculously expensive, and is not realistic for most self-started music performers. However, there is a tool that rappers could utilize if they were aware of it — that tool is search engine optimization, or SEO.
Google, the search engine giant, receives over 63,000 searches every second. This number of daily visitors is astounding, and a potential audience for musicians to reach. However, how can you advertise your music to these people? You could invest in becoming a sponsored search result so that you’ll appear first, but people don’t tend to click on advertisements, especially when it comes to their music. People want organic material that they found themselves. So, you have to be at the top of the Google search results, but don’t want it to look like you conned your way there. The key to this is SEO. SEO can help you become the number one search result for anyone Googling hip hop – however, you have to use it correctly.
How to Do It
We won’t go fully in depth on how to incorporate SEO, but there are plenty of free guides and materials online. But first off, you’ll either need a little money or make some friends with website owners. To place your new hip hop banger on the top of Google and YouTube search results, you’ll need embeds, backlinks, and other technical terms in order to have other website’s content link to your video. Think of a hip-hop article on WorldStar — imagine if a link to your music video was in that article.
Getting this accomplished will likely take some investment. Many rap blogs participate in pay-for-play schemes in which hopeful artists will pay blogs to have their work featured. However, through simple networking at music events, you can make friends with people in the online music world, and if the right person likes your demo, then you can possible get featured for free. Do this enough times while still producing content, and the statistical probability that you’ll get a viral hit will be increased exponentially.
Owning Your Content Is Key
Today, many YouTube music channels like T-Series work with unknowing rappers utilizing a more advanced version of basic SEO. After these channels and companies buy backlinks and build content around new artists, the artists will receive a tremendous uptick in viewership and recognition. In exchange, the channels will both profit off of the ads placed on videos, but the artist will oftentimes be forced to sign over rights to their music and videos. Essentially, it’s just a modern version of the classic record label scenario – streaming sites pay next to nothing, so the real money is in videos – but when you sign them over, you’re forfeiting profits in exchange for fame.
So Can I Skip the Middleman and Do it Myself?
If you’re serious about delving into the world of self-marketing your own music, then you’re going to need a budget to start. There are services that can provide you with exposure, but many of the ones big enough to generate the kind of attention you might be looking for can be quite expensive. For anything beyond a regional campaign, your budget will go from a few hundred dollars a month to tens of thousands per year.
You can find video ranking services for cheap on sites such as SEOClerk.com, or Konker.io. These can be a good way to help build a market for your project if you’re just starting out. Just remember that the more general you are, the less likely you are to generate viewership for your project. You want to be as specific and precise in your marketing as possible.
The Indian market is a lucrative one, but also highly competitive. India’s music talent is currently being broadcast to enormous audiences as online channels and websites have used massive funds to generate huge streams of SEO-inspired activity. However, engaging in this market is a risky proposition, as your work can quickly be swallowed up by the overwhelming activity active in Indian online markets.
Below, you can see the 2010 rap video “Yeah Yeah,” a viral hit by rapper C.KHiD. The artist utilized online resources like DFYLinks.com to hit over three million views on the video, in addition to accruing over one million ringtone downloads of the song. Tyler the Creator did the same with “Yonkers”, with the additional shock factor of eating a cockroach. It just goes to show that regardless of how much you spend on your marketing strategy, if your music and image isn’t up to snuff, then people won’t want to watch your videos more than once.
