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Experiments in Music Marketing

I have a podcast called The MakeShift Mixes. It was created originally to fulfill my need for intelligent conversation on music creation, philosophy and methodology; most interviews only discuss the how, but not the why. It also promotes me as an artist under the alias MakeShift.

Problem #1: Though my listenership is growing, it’s growing VERY slowly. Why? Hypothesis: It is necessary to have a name or product in the market (online, or otherwise) before you initiate a marketing campaign, i.e. a music Podcast.

Further questions that plague me are: Do I promote my own music via the podcast? And how does an artist promote himself via a podcast if he hasn’t got his music out to his audience yet?

With this in mind, I will be exploring podcasting from a non-marketers perspective and will begin by examining 3 marketing podcasts/blogs:

Lastly, I’ve dusted off the book Self Promotion for the Creative Person by Lee Silber. Obviously, I’ll be checking into One Degree as well 🙂 Here I go!

One Comment

  1. Ken Schafer - One Degree
    Ken Schafer - One Degree November 9, 2006

    Yo Makeshift! 🙂
    I think you raise an interesting point here. The act of podcasting might be easy (although the quality of your content and production is WAY beyond the norm) but that doesn’t mean you can just as easily find your audience.
    I don’t think that podcasts benefit from the “podosphere” as much as blog posts benefit from the blogosphere. Text is a more searchable medium so podcast discovery is harder. There is also a commitment to a podcast that isn’t there with blogs. I can easily check out a new blog or two if I have a few minutes to spare, but adding a podcast to my iPod is a much bigger commitment.
    I think the fact that you do good show notes helps get over this limitation – you are in effect making a blog post (which is easily discoverable and sampleable) for each podcast episode.
    Good luck with our marketing plans and I look forward to reading about your fortunes and misfortunes!

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