In terms of the music industry, the marketing strategies below are pretty tame, and affordable. We’re not asking you to bribe a music program director with court seats to a LA Clippers game, but that wouldn’t be a bad idea. The 3 ideas below are as classic as rock and roll itself!

1. Hire fans

The original manager of the Rolling Stones, Andrew Loog Oldham, knows that the “first follower” is key to any movement. This is because first followers make it okay to be a fan and show others how to do it. So why not follow his lead and hire a gaggle of fans when you play your shows? How? Go to your local University/ College/ Community centre drama class and invite the folks to come down to an all you can drink affair at your shows. Sure it might cost you some beer money but if you bring 10-15 rabid crazy fans to your show, the venue won’t know what hit them. You’ll be invited back for sure.

2. Hire press/paparazzi

I watched Supermensch last night (recommended) and what struck me about Shep Gordon other than his incredible luck, is that he understands that perception is reality in the music business. He has hired fake paparazzi to follow around his artists when they had zero hits, and zero public awareness. All to make the artists feel like rockstars while getting the public interested in whats going on. According to him it worked every time. Also from Shep, coolness rubs off on others, so if you aren’t cool be photographed with cool people. Works all the time.

3. Buy plays / likes / views etc

There are a lot of services out there that can help you artificially inflate your plays, likes, and view counts. Fivver.com is one option. The idea is simple, big numbers on your tracks and videos are impressive to many people. Sure, maybe they don’t actually mean anything, but people want to be part of a winning team. So big artificial numbers can attract big natural numbers.

Obviously these strategies will only work for a certain type of artist, and are hype strategies not long-term plays. Yet they are legitimate ways to increase your hype and record labels have been using them in ways for decades (see Payola). Try them out and email me the results!