How You Waste Your Money On “Music Promotion”

Today, it’s relatively cheap to buy video views through paid ads, whether it’s Facebook Ads or Youtube Ads. Many musicians put a few dollars into “boosting” the number of views on their music videos.

While you may think you are promoting your music this way, and getting real views, it is actually almost completely useless and a waste of money. In this article, I will explain why this is ineffective and offer a much better strategy to promote your music with paid ads.

At first, it may seem logical to push your music to potential new fans with paid ads since they may never find your music otherwise. However, here’s what happens:

You pay $50 or maybe a few hundred dollars, and thousands of people watch your music video, maybe even up to 100,000 people. And then what happens?

Nothing. You end up with a vanity number of 100,000 “views” on your video, but no fans at all, maybe only one or two.

Here’s why this promotion technique is useless:

Even if your song is REALLY good and really catchy, a listener needs to hear the song at least THREE TIMES to start liking it.

I want you to try this experiment on yourself. Go to Youtube or Spotify, and search for a song you’ve never heard before. Listen to the song ONCE and notice how you feel about it.

Now listen to the same song again, and then again for the third time. Now, notice how you feel about the song when you hear it for the third time.

Maybe you don’t like the song even if you are listening to it for the third time either. But if you do like the song, it’s NEVER the first listening. “Liking” the song usually comes the third or fourth time you listen to it.

And there is a simple explanation for this: you only like a song if you already know it. And how do you know a song? By listening to it again and again.

I remember someone telling me that his friends started to listen to a band, but he didn’t like the music at first. But after listening to the songs repeatedly, he became a huge fan of the music.

So here’s what happens when you push out your music with paid ads: you reach 100,000 people, and all of those people will hear your song ONCE. The problem is, as you already know, they won’t get it.

Here’s a better strategy: instead of promoting your music to 100,000 people once, promote the same song to 30,000 people three times. Or even better, promote the same song to 20,000 people five times.

How? Remarketing.

Let’s say you create a video ad on Facebook. You can then create a custom audience in your ads manager, for example, a list that contains “people who watched your video”. When you start promoting the video, Facebook will put those people into this custom list.

(An advanced-level trick: exclude people who watched 95% of the video.)

Then you can create a new ad with the same song and target this custom list. So these people will see your music video the second time… and repeat that with a third ad.

So instead of wasting your money pushing your music out to random people, try this strategy… and let me know how it works for you!