PROMOTION / MARKETING - discuss

Heartfeltdawn

Solo guitarist? Instrumental material? Wants to know how to get people to notice his stuff. 

Jesus, man! Think! There's one man in England you need to copy in order to get known out there. 

http://www.tonymckenzie.com/

dindude

Honestly, marketing is only one element. The biggest influence on its success will be how good the product is - can it compete with the best of the best? If not people won't want to listen to it, they will go and listen to the best of the best instead. Your friends or your parents will like it because it has emotional vested interest to them, but everyone else won't give a damn about the personal effort and struggle to get it out there - that's real life unfortunately.

I haven't heard your stuff by the way, I will try and give the samples a listen later today, but if it is competitive then I think getting some buzz on YouTube is the best way forward, it is a pretty level playing field as in the stuff that people like and relate to generally rises to the top.

Vaiai

Dave Brons did all this kind of thing and has blogged about it - check his YT/FB and Bandcamp
https://davebrons.bandcamp.com/releases

Gave up his job and does it full time - Kickstarted his 1st album etc but you need to COMMIT.

TBH - I think you should have done all the YT and FB presence stuff first - get a following then release an album - you are coming out of nowhere with no historical videos or demos for anyone to check out.

thomasross20

Thanks, guys! 

--> The demos on my sites are much improved now - I need to update them (but feel free to listen, anyway). I plan on getting somebody off Fiverr to do a video for me and I'll stick a portion of each (or a few) track in there. Agreed - the material has to be GOOD. I'm trying


That Dave Brons link.. interesting.. does he also sell on Spotify or similar or is it only sales through bandcamp? 
If I had somebody else helping me I'd have the time to do more YouTube videos and the like to "stengthen my brand" but I'm the only guy here doing everything and given it's already taken 2 years (plus the year or so about a decade ago when I actually did most of the guitars) you can see it's a mega time-soak. TBH I'm not massively into doing tons of YouTube videos - there are too many great players out there who have the time to do it. I'm 100% not giving up my day job. The album will either speak for itself or it wont. Good God I hope I get it done this year... 

I'm not sure what people think but I've been playing for nearly 20 years (christ!) now ... and I play a LOT... this is a serious endeavour. TBH it's hard enough to get people off here interested never mind others (local gigs, soundcloud, instagram videos - done all those and tough to get a crowd).