If you’re a musician with a demo CD, you want to find the best ways to market. If you’re going to get your music out to anyone, you want to find the best ways to do this. The demo CD can help you in many ways with your musical career and the career of your band. This article will give you ten ways to market your demo CD. Demo CD’s cost money. The original recording will be one major expense. You need to go to a recording studio and rent time at the recording studio with your fellow musicians to make your Dem CD. Once the recording session is completed, you have to make copies of the cd. This will be your second major cost. Third, you need to get the Demo CD to people that matter. This could be a record label or a customer who will use your musical services, for example.
1. Determine what the purpose is of your Demo CD. This will help you figure out how to market it. If you are trying to have your band get picked up by a record label, you want record labels to hear it. If you are trying to get local gigs for your band at local bars and clubs, you want the demo CD to be heard by these local establishments. If you are trying to get a job as a singer with a band, you want bands to hear your Demo CD.
2. Find an online company that will market your Demo CD for you where you need it to be heard. If you want a record label to hear your demo CD, one such online company you could use is called Taxi. You pay them to get your music heard by professional record companies, and they do the work for you. Because of their contacts, they are able to get your foot in the door. Even though you have to pay them for this service, you have a much better chance of your demo CD being heard by someone that matters. Otherwise, you may never get a chance with a record label.
3. Give your demo CD directly to bands you are interested in playing for or singing for. Go to an online site that shows ads for musicians, and contact some bands. If they are interested, mail them a demo CD or give it to them in person when you try out for the band. If you give it directly to the band that may hire you, you are making good use of the demo CD. You don’t want to waste giving CD’s to bands that aren’t interested in your or bands that you wouldn’t want to play for.
4. Give your demo CD directly to a bar or club that you wish to play in. Find out what local clubs and bars hire bands or musicians to play. Find out which are interested in the type of music you play. Then, give them a demo CD directly. This is going to greatly increase the chance of you being hired, and you won’t waste CD’s by giving them to clubs you aren’t interested in.
5. Find a manager for your band, and have the manager make contacts for you. If you’re busy recording and making music, you may not have time to market your band and your demo CD’s yourself. You can hire a manager that knows exactly who to talk to and how to talk to them. She would have experience dealing with record labels and local venues and could get you hired or get you accepted at the record label to make a professional cd and have a contract. You have to have money to invest in paying the manager, but you’ll save money overall and won’t waste your demo CD’s.
6. Enclose a cover letter with each CD. If you are not going to give the demo CD to the manager of the club yourself, so that you have the chance to talk to them about what you wish to do, enclose a cover letter. You can put the demo CD and the cover letter in a manila envelope and get the package to the club manager. This way, the letter doesn’t get separated from your CD. The reason for the cover letter is to let the manager know what you want to do. For instance, it may say that you want to get your band hired to play there one Saturday night per month. It will also give important contact information.
7. Put contact information directly onto your demo CD. Why is this a marketing strategy? Because your demo CD won’t get wasted. If you give someone a demo CD that doesn’t have your name on it, how do you expect the club owner to reach you to hire you for a performance? This is one of the best ways to make good use of your demo CD. This doesn’t mean to just have your contact info on the cd jacket, but also to have it directly on the CD itself. The jacket can often become separated from the demo CD.
8. Enclose a lyric sheet for each song on your demo CD. This is a marketing strategy because it will make good use of your demo CD. Often, the club manager or band will want to know the words to your song. They might not be clear from the first listen of the recording. You certainly remember how you thought the words to a song were totally different than what you thought they were, and you realize you had been singing them wrong for the past year. The club manager isn’t going to want to have to listen to your song ten times to figure out what you’re saying. This makes better use out of your CD, and gets faster results.
9. Make your demo CD attractive and appealing. Often, your demo CD may be chosen before others to listen to because it caught the club owner’s eye. The club owner has 300 demo CD’s and there’s only one gig opening for Saturday nights. Whose CD is going to be picked to listen to first? The one that has some attention grabber. Of course, you won’t know what is going to catch a certain person’s eye, but you can in general make a demo CD cover that stands out and draws attention to itself somehow. This is okay even if it’s something crazy. Just be careful to make sure the design isn’t totally inappropriate.
10. Put only 3 songs on your demo CD, and put the best song first. Often, your demo CD may be listened to for only about ten seconds to decide whether your music is worth anything or not. If you get past that ten seconds, the person may be willing to listen to three songs. Past that, you are overloading the listener with too much information. If someone sees a demo CD with ten songs, they may choose to skip over it entirely. If you must have more than three songs, let the listener know which three to choose first.
11. If you need to reach a wide audience, find a way to get your demo CD heard by as many people as possible that matter. You might need a wide audience if you are trying to get discovered, or if you want your band to become known across the country. A good way to do this is to make the demo CD available on the internet. You can post it on a site like YouTube, for example. You could start your own band website and put the demo CD on it. Or, you could put the demo CD on your Myspace page and send alerts to all of your thousands of friends. You can make new friends and send them the music with a bulletin out to everyone on your friends list. Make some of your new friends record labels or bars or other musicians, for example.
