Collaboration Marketing
This is the process of aligning your musical interest and sound with other like-minded artists to accomplish much more marketing push than you would have been able to do on your own.
Collaboration marketing boils down to working with a lot of artists from different areas and different music styles.
For example: for example as a rapper, the minute you work with another prominent rapper on a song, your music gets marketed or exposed to the rapper‘s audience as well. Look at how AKA was able to get into other African countries, he collaborated with guys from these other countries.
Think of it like this, you as rapper A, have only 5k followers and rapper B has 5K as well but not entirely the same followers, Thus if A does a song with B, B also shares the song to his followers and tags A, thus both A & B have a potential of getting a certain percentage of new followers from one another.
So features in the music industry are important not only for established artists but also for up and coming artists, it helps you gain access to new markets and reaching more people.
Indirect Marketing
My definition in musical terms of indirect music marketing referrers to when you don’t market your musical abilities directly, what I mean by this, is embracing your other abilities if you can to grow your brand then leverage that to raise awareness of your music.
Most musicians turn to have multiple talents, for example a lot of artists got their big break in music through dancing for other artists or were first actors. Thus you get to build your brand and fan base as a Dancer or actor therefore by the time you introduce your music, people already love you and are now more willing to listen to your music because you’ve created a bond with them using your other talents.
In reality, we can look at a person like Nomuzi Mabena, She built her brand through being a presenter on TV and she later used that to break into the music industry. Essentially she was not necessarily a new comer when she entered the music industry, people already loved her work and it was easy to put her music out.
Another example using someone still on the up and coming category, DJ Khathu, a lot of people know this guy not through the fact that he is a DJ but through his comedian abilities. He was able to grow his fan base to more than 50K followers through his funny videos on facebook and that really opened up a lot of opportunities for him as a DJ.
Sometimes as an artist trying to make it in the music industry, you need to be smart and strategic. There’s no one formula to market your music, you just need to think out of the box.
