How to Promote Hip Hop & Rap Music
Musicians need to popularize their music to get listeners interested in their upcoming releases. Their challenge is unique since anyone can do it; they do not need special musical or technical skills. Despite the diversity of music genres, one thing unites them all-they can all be effectively promoted. You are responsible for composing, arranging, singing, and recording high-quality music as a musician. But music promotion is just as vital to your career as everything else.
How Promoting Your Hip Hop & Rap Music can Elevate Your Career
Promoting hip-hop and rap music is an essential part of any artist’s career. Whether you’re a major label artist or an independent artist, you need to create a buzz around your music in order to get noticed. It can put you on the radars of music industry professionals who can further escalate your career path to the big leagues. No artist has made it big without the use of music promotion; while for some, it's easier than others, you need to be ready to put in the work to get your music out there.
How Can I Start Promoting My Hip-Hop & Rap Music?
So you're ready to jump into the next big step to take your hip-hop or rap career to the next level, but you need to figure out where to start. That's okay; we've got you covered and have found a handful of the most useful tips to starting music promotion you could need. While a lot more can be done to promote your music, too, these tips will set a great precedent for kickstarting what will hopefully become a blossoming career.
Collaborate with Other Artists
Collaboration with other musicians can be a great way to promote your hip-hop and rap music. It can help create a buzz around your music and introduce your music to a new audience.
Collaborations can also help to build relationships with other musicians and help to create a network of artists that support each other.
It makes a unique and exciting sound and can provide you with multiple platforms to promote from.
The collaborating artist will need to promote the songs through their own network, too, for their benefit, broadening the horizons to who you can become exposed to. So it's a winning situation for both parties, and you have the opportunity to make something exciting, especially if you collaborate with artists from other genres.
Be Consistent with your Content
Consistency is key to getting your sound heard. Unfortunately, most of the advice you may listen to is continuously creating new tracks for your audience. While this sounds difficult, there are huge benefits to it.
Consistently posting on social media, creating new tracks and engaging with your audience will help you promote your style. It will also give your content more opportunity to find its way through the algorithms to more people.
It's not uncommon for artists to make small updates daily. When they pair it with consistent music, they create more opportunities for at least one of their songs to strike gold. But pay attention to quality, don't just post mediocre tracks.
Make Use of Streaming Platforms
Streaming platforms have become the bread and butter of the music industry, making music easily accessible on a global scale to all users. Its popularity has boomed over the years to the extent that even CDs have a run for their money.
In short, you'll be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn't have a Spotify or Apple Music account on their these days. It goes without saying that if you want your music heard, you need to get it onto various streaming services.
There are plenty of promotion companies that can help you achieve this, with GetPlaylisted being an excellent choice for getting your songs added to trending and popular Hip-Hop and Rap playlists to find a whole new audience.
Have an EPK
EPKs are important to artists and have been around in the music industry for ages. Electronic Press Kits behave similarly to an artist's portfolio and act as a resume to help you give a summary of your styles and versatility to music producers.
Having an EPK will help promote your hip-hop and rap music because you can link it to a smart link or your own personal website and have it be something easily accessible. If you join this with other methods on this list, people are bound to find it, and one of those people might just be a music industry mogul who loves your energy.
Become Known in Your Community and Let Them Spread the Word
Don't neglect your community in your search for stardom. You'd be surprised by the hefty amount of support and promotion that can be done by investing time in getting your music heard by your local community.
Go join in on public events, show your sound off at bars and clubs and let the community do some work for you. If they love your sound, they're bound to talk about it and will spread the word through their own networks to build a bigger fanbase for your hip-hop and rap music.
Have a Marketing Campaign
Having a media marketing campaign almost goes without saying. It's a crucial part of planning your hostile takeover of the music industry and lets you keep track of what's working for you and what isn't. You can also monitor your budget for using different promotion services and premium subscriptions to let you go further with your promotion techniques.
Unfortunately, you can't just wing it. Having a routine and a plan helps you keep track of what needs to be done and creates a sense of reliability that your fans can count on. They'll know you drop your new content on Fridays and will be waiting with bated breath until you do.
Conclusion
Getting started with music promotion is a lot less complicated than it looks. The use of music promotion services has only made it easier, so be sure to keep in mind services like GetPlaylisted to get advice from professionals on how to improve your promotion techniques and help you reach a broader audience. The world is your oyster, and there's plenty of work to be done if you want to make it 2000s Kanye big one day.