Finding Fans In New Places

Most musicians know the general way to make fans - find people who like the kind of music you play. Common sense, right? But what happens when you've hit up all the venues that play your genre, exhausted all the "I love Rock N Roll" groups on Facebook and connected to everyone who has "rock" listed in music interests?

Here's are some examples from a Music Think Tank article writen by Simon Tam.

Using “social” apps such as Foursquare or Yelp: 

You’re probably familiar with the concept of “checking in” to places but have you thought about creating a band account so that fans can follow you on tour? What about writing reviews of restaurants, bars, or venues? Your band could create “lists” of favorite places on each site. You can even take things a step further with this:

For example, my band is passionate about food, especially Asian food. So we collected everyone’s favorite restaurants and wrote simple reviews/recommendations for them and I created an Asian Food Guide that fans could download. In addition, we created window decals for each of the restaurants  to display at their restaurant and sent them a letter for display so that people would see they were selected by our band for being one of our favorite places in the city. These same places also posted the guide on their websites so their customers could download our restaurant guide. We also worked with some of the restaurants to give discounts to our fans who mentioned the guide too. It didn’t cost us much but it did lead to several thousand downloads of the food guide and many new, unexpected fans as a result!

Using something that you are passionate about:

 If you’re active in your community, chances are that at some point, you will be asked by someone to donate your time to perform for a fundraising event or charity. However, you could always take a proactive approach in finding causes that are close to home. Use sites like Charity Navigator or VolunteerMatch to find an organization, then contact them about volunteer opportunities or performing. But don’t just perform at a fundraiser, find ways to get more active.. and get more publicity - donate a portion of merchandise sales to the fundraiser, or offer free mp3's to people who donate. You can also sign your band up as a fundraising team (especially for events like March of Dimes, Relay For Life, etc.) so that your band’s name/story can be shared with all fundraising participants. 

Are you an expert?:

Speaking of passions, if you are an expert on something, consider writing Op-Ed letters representing your band (if there are related events). You can also sign up for Help a Reporter Out (HARO)  as a potential source that reporters can contact when they are writing an articles. HARO sends emails out three times per day and you have to be exceptionally quick in responding, but you can get some new/interesting publicity for your music. Best of all, this service is free!

For example, last year, Travel & Leisure Magazine had an article on America’s Worst Drivers. When the reporter was looking for sources, I responded as a touring musician with some crazy road stories who could comment on that. It was quick, fun, and I landed some immediate publicity for my band through Travel & Leisure, as well as weather.com, Hufftington Post, MSNBC, and other places that cited the article.

Click Here for the original article