How to Promote Your Music

Promotion is not a single activity. It is a collection of channels, each reaching different people in different ways at different costs. The artist who posts a Spotify link on Instagram and calls it promotion is using one channel poorly. The artist who understands which channels reach which people, and sequences them around a release, is building an audience systematically.

This guide covers every major promotional channel available to artists: organic social media, paid advertising, press and PR, playlist pitching, sync licensing, email marketing, live performance, collaborations, and direct outreach. For each channel, you will learn what it does, who it reaches, what it costs, and when to use it. The goal is not to use every channel at once. It is to choose the right ones for your stage, your budget, and your audience.

The Promotion Hierarchy

Not all promotion is equally valuable. The channels that build lasting audience relationships are worth more than the channels that generate temporary attention. Here is how to think about it.

Tier 1: Owned channels. Your email list, your website, your direct fan relationships. You control these completely. No algorithm changes, no platform risk. Every promotional effort should eventually drive people here. See Building a Fanbase From Scratch for the foundational strategy.

Tier 2: Earned channels. Press coverage, playlist placements, word of mouth, sync placements, and organic social media reach. You do not pay for these directly, but you earn them through the quality of your work, your relationships, and your pitching. These carry credibility because a third party chose to feature you.

Tier 3: Paid channels. Social media advertising, paid playlist submission services, paid PR campaigns, and radio promotion. You pay for access to an audience. Paid channels can be effective, but they amplify whatever already exists. If your music connects, paid promotion accelerates growth. If it does not, paid promotion accelerates waste.

The principle: Build Tier 1 infrastructure first. Invest in earning Tier 2 opportunities. Use Tier 3 to amplify what is already working. Artists who start with paid promotion before they have a song that connects or a funnel that converts are spending money to learn that their foundation needs work.

Organic Promotion

These channels cost time but not money. For most artists, especially early in their career, these should be the primary focus.

Social Media

Your social media presence is your ongoing discovery engine. Between releases, it builds the audience. During releases, it activates the audience. The full strategy is covered in Social Media Strategy for Artists.

For promotion specifically: The most effective social media promotion does not look like promotion. A video of you performing the song is promotion. A behind-the-scenes clip from the recording session is promotion. A story about why you wrote it is promotion. "Go stream my new song" with a link is not promotion. It is an announcement that most people will scroll past.

Email Marketing

Your email list is the highest-converting promotional channel you have. Email consistently outperforms social media for driving streams, ticket sales, and merchandise purchases because the people on your list opted in to hear from you.

For promotion specifically: A well-timed email on release day to a list of 500 engaged subscribers will generate more first-day streams than a social media post seen by 5,000 followers. The math is straightforward: email open rates for artists typically run 30-50%, and click-through rates of 5-15% are common. Social media organic reach is 5-10% of followers, with click-through rates below 1%.

Build and maintain your email list as the foundation of every promotional effort. For detailed email strategy, see the email marketing section of Building a Fanbase From Scratch.

Playlist Pitching

Playlist placement on Spotify, Apple Music, and other platforms puts your music in front of listeners who are actively looking for new songs in your genre.

Editorial playlists are curated by platform staff. The primary access point is the Spotify for Artists editorial pitch tool. Algorithmic playlists (Discover Weekly, Release Radar) are driven by listener behavior and cannot be pitched directly. User-generated playlists are curated by independent playlist makers and can be pitched through direct outreach or submission platforms like SubmitHub, Musosoup, or Groover.

The full playlist strategy is covered in How to Get on Spotify Playlists. The key promotional insight: a playlist placement is a discovery event, not a growth strategy. What you do with the attention (converting listeners into followers and email subscribers) determines whether the placement has lasting value.

Live Performance

Every show is a promotional event. The audience in the room is experiencing your music in the most compelling format possible. The promotional value depends on what you do with that moment.

Capture content. Every show should produce content for social media: performance clips, crowd shots, behind-the-scenes moments. Live content is some of the highest-performing content on social media because it communicates energy and authenticity in ways that studio content cannot.

Collect contacts. A QR code on a merch table, a verbal call-to-action from stage, a text-to-join number. Every show should have a mechanism for converting audience members into email subscribers. "Follow me on Instagram" is better than nothing, but "join my email list and get the setlist" is better because it moves people to an owned channel.

Support slots matter. Opening for a larger artist in your genre puts you in front of exactly the right audience. The promotional value of a good support slot often exceeds the promotional value of a headlining show with a smaller audience.

Collaborations

Creating music with other artists exposes you to their audience and creates shared promotional incentive. A feature, a remix, a co-write, or a joint performance gives both artists a reason to promote to each other's fans.

The strategic approach: Collaborate with artists at a similar level or slightly above. An artist with 10,000 monthly listeners collaborating with an artist who has 50,000 is a reasonable pitch. An artist with 500 monthly listeners pitching a collaboration to someone with 500,000 is not realistic unless there is a genuine creative connection.

Beyond music, content collaborations (joint livestreams, reaction videos, studio sessions) serve the same function: cross-pollinating audiences.

Direct Outreach

Reaching out directly to blogs, playlists, venues, sync supervisors, and other gatekeepers is unglamorous and effective. Most artists avoid it because it feels like cold calling. The artists who do it consistently build opportunities that those who wait for inbound never access.

How to do it well: Research the person you are contacting. Reference something specific about their work. Explain concisely why your music is relevant to their audience. Include a private link to the song (not a Spotify link for unreleased music). Keep it short. Follow up once. Accept silence gracefully.

What not to do: Mass emails with no personalization. "Hey, check out my new single!" to 500 blog editors is spam. Ten personalized emails to editors who cover your genre will produce better results than 500 generic ones.

Paid Promotion

Paid channels cost money. When used strategically, they amplify what is already working. When used poorly, they drain budget with nothing to show for it.

Social Media Advertising

Paid ads on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube can put your music in front of targeted audiences based on demographics, interests, and listening habits.

When it works: You have a song that is already showing strong engagement signals (high save rate, good listen-through rate, positive organic response). Paid ads accelerate discovery of a song that people like. Budget: $5-$20/day for a focused campaign is a reasonable starting point. Scale up only if the metrics justify it.

When it does NOT work: The song is not resonating organically. Paid ads will show it to more people, and more people will ignore it. "Maybe it just needs more exposure" is the most expensive assumption in music marketing.

Creative format matters more than budget. A $100 ad with a compelling 15-second video of you performing the hook will outperform a $1,000 ad with a static cover art image and a "stream now" caption. The ad creative follows the same rules as organic social content: hook in the first 2 seconds, use the music as the centerpiece, make someone want to hear more.

Targeting: Start narrow. Fans of 3-5 similar artists in your genre, in your key geographic markets. Broad targeting wastes budget on people who will never care about your music. Narrow targeting reaches the people most likely to convert.

Metrics to watch: Cost per click (under $0.50 is good, under $0.20 is excellent), click-through rate (above 1% is strong), and most importantly, downstream conversion: did the people who clicked actually save the song, follow you, or join your email list? If clicks are cheap but nobody converts, the targeting or the song is the problem.

Playlist Submission Services

Services like SubmitHub, Groover, and Musosoup connect artists with independent playlist curators and bloggers for a fee (typically $1-$5 per submission). You pay for guaranteed consideration, not guaranteed placement.

When it works: You have a strong song that fits the curator's genre and the service curators are legitimate (real listeners, organic playlists). A few targeted submissions to well-matched curators can generate placements that drive genuine listeners.

When it does NOT work: Mass-submitting to every curator regardless of genre fit. Paying for "guaranteed placement" packages (this is a scam signal). Using services that connect you with bot playlists.

Budget: $20-$100 per release cycle for targeted submissions through legitimate services is reasonable. Anything promising thousands of streams for a flat fee is not a legitimate service.

PR and Press Campaigns

Hiring a publicist to secure press coverage (reviews, interviews, features, podcast appearances) around a release.

When it works: You have a story worth telling and a release that is strong enough to stand up to editorial scrutiny. A publicist's value is their relationships with journalists and their ability to frame your story in a way that earns coverage. This works best when there is something genuinely newsworthy: a debut album, a significant collaboration, a compelling personal narrative, or a notable career milestone.

When it does NOT work: You have a single with no story, no angle, and no existing traction. A publicist can pitch, but journalists receive hundreds of pitches per week. Without a hook, the pitch dies.

Budget: $1,000-$5,000 for an indie publicist campaign (typically 6-8 weeks). $5,000-$15,000 for a larger firm. See Building Your Artist Team for more on working with publicists.

Radio Promotion

Getting your music played on terrestrial, satellite, or college radio. Traditional radio still reaches millions of listeners, particularly in genres like country, rock, Christian, and urban formats.

Indie radio promotion (college, community, and independent stations) is accessible to independent artists. Services and independent radio promoters charge $500-$3,000 per campaign to pitch your music to station music directors.

Commercial radio promotion is expensive ($5,000-$50,000+ per single depending on format) and typically only viable with label support. The economics only work if significant revenue (touring, sync, merchandise) follows the radio exposure.

When it works: Your genre has an active radio audience, and your song fits a specific format. Country, Christian, and rock artists often benefit from radio promotion more than pop or hip-hop artists, where streaming has largely replaced radio as the primary discovery mechanism.

Promotion Scams

The music promotion space is full of services that take money from artists and deliver nothing of value. Know the red flags.

Guaranteed playlist placement for a fee. Legitimate playlist curators do not sell placements. Services that guarantee placement are either using bot playlists (which will trigger Spotify's fraud detection and potentially get your music removed) or lying about the guarantee.

"We'll get you 100,000 streams." Any service promising a specific stream count is using bots or click farms. Bot streams do not convert to fans, they trigger fraud detection systems, and they can result in your music being removed from platforms.

Vague "marketing packages." Services that charge $500-$5,000 for a "comprehensive marketing campaign" without specifying exactly what they will do, which outlets they will pitch, and what metrics they will report are selling a box of nothing.

Unsolicited DMs offering promotion. If someone messages you on Instagram saying they can promote your music, they are almost certainly running a scam. Legitimate promoters do not cold-DM artists.

The test: Can the service tell you exactly what they will do, which specific outlets or curators they will contact, and show you documented results from previous campaigns? If the answer is vague, walk away.

Building a Promotion System

Promotion is not a one-time effort. It is an ongoing system that compounds over time.

Between releases: Build your audience through organic social media, grow your email list, maintain relationships with curators and press contacts, play shows, and create content. This is the foundation that makes release promotion effective.

During releases: Activate every relevant channel in sequence. The full release campaign framework is in Pre-Save Campaigns and Release Marketing. Layer organic and paid channels: organic content creates the foundation, email activates your core audience, playlist pitching and press expand reach, paid ads amplify what is working.

After releases: Analyze what worked. Which channels drove the most engagement? Which converted the best? Where did you waste time or money? Use the data to refine your approach for the next cycle. See Music Data and Metrics That Actually Matter for the measurement framework.

The compounding effect: Every promotional cycle builds on the previous one. Your email list grows. Your social audience grows. Your relationships with curators and press deepen. Your content library expands. Your data gets sharper. An artist who has run 10 intentional release campaigns has a fundamentally different promotional infrastructure than an artist who has released 10 songs and promoted none of them.

Common Mistakes

Promoting before the foundation is ready. If you do not have a complete artist profile on streaming platforms, a website or link-in-bio with email capture, and at least a basic social media presence, promotional efforts leak. People discover you and have nowhere to go. Build the infrastructure before you spend on promotion.

Spending money to avoid doing the work. Paid promotion is not a substitute for building genuine audience relationships. The artist who spends $500 on ads but does not respond to comments, does not email their list, and does not engage with their community is paying for attention they cannot retain.

Promoting everything equally. Not every release needs the same promotional effort. Identify your strongest songs and invest disproportionately in promoting those. A focused campaign behind one great song will build more audience than moderate effort spread across five.

Giving up too early. Most promotional efforts take time to compound. An artist who tries playlist pitching for one release, gets no placements, and concludes "playlists don't work" has not given the strategy enough time to develop. Relationships with curators, press contacts, and audiences build over multiple cycles.

Not tracking results. If you do not know which channels drove results, you cannot improve your strategy. Track where your streams, followers, and email signups came from after each campaign. Even basic tracking transforms promotion from guesswork into a system.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I promote my music for free?

Organic social media content, email marketing to your list, Spotify editorial pitch tool, direct outreach to blogs and curators, live performances, collaborations with other artists, and engagement in your genre community. These channels cost time but not money, and for most early-career artists, they are more effective than paid promotion. The full organic framework is covered throughout this guide and in Social Media Strategy for Artists.

Should I pay for music promotion?

Only after your organic foundation is working. If your music is resonating (good save rates, engaged audience, positive response to organic content), paid promotion can accelerate growth. If your music is not connecting organically, paid promotion will not fix that. Start small ($5-$20/day), test one channel at a time, and scale only what works.

How much should I spend on promotion per release?

There is no universal answer. A $0 budget with a strong organic strategy can outperform a $5,000 budget with a weak strategy. For artists ready to invest, $100-$500 covers targeted playlist submissions and a small social media ad campaign. $500-$2,000 adds a publicist or broader ad spend. Above $2,000, you should have clear data showing which channels convert before scaling further.

How do I know if promotion is working?

Track three things: new followers gained during the campaign, email signups during the campaign, and save rate on the promoted song. If all three are growing, the promotion is reaching the right people and converting them. If streams are up but followers and email signups are flat, you are generating attention without building audience.

Read Next:

• Pre-Save Campaigns and Release Marketing

• Social Media Strategy for Artists

Coordinate Your Promotion:

Orphiq helps you plan your promotional strategy alongside your release timeline so every channel works together instead of in isolation.