Five Places To Send Electro Music Other Than To Labels
The overwhelming majority of people who make electro music do it for fun. They might get a few DJ slots out of it, and if they’re lucky, they might get the opportunity to appear on a few complication albums, but only a precious few ever get to call it a career. Even some of the genre’s best-known performers have day jobs to keep their bills paid. Electro musicians make music because they love doing so, not because they expect to get paid for it.
Not getting paid for making music is a sign of the times we live in. Nobody wants to own music anymore – everybody wants to stream it instead. Artists of all genres have stopped releasing albums because nobody buys albums. Audiences want to hear one or two songs at a time before moving on to another artist – very few people want to sit and listen to a whole album by the same performer from start to finish. It’s affecting everybody, and it can make you wonder what the point of making music is at all if nobody’s ever going to hear it – and yet that doesn’t have to be the case.
There’s probably very little point in submitting music to a record label anymore. In fact, between three and five years from now, there may be very little point in record labels anymore at all. Increasingly, musicians are submitting music to streaming platforms directly, and labels are being cut out of the deal. We can’t see that trend reversing in the future, and so the old way of doing things may soon be gone forever. Instead of sending your latest track, demo, or compilation to a label, consider trying one of these alternative avenues instead if you want your music to be heard.
YouTube
Let’s start off with an obvious point. If you don’t have a YouTube channel, you’re wasting your time as a musician. Musicians can make all the points they want to make about sound compression on YouTube meaning that songs don’t sound exactly the way they should be heard, but tens of millions of people use YouTube to play music and music videos every day, and so the mob has spoken. You can’t ignore it, so you may as well get involved with it.
Don’t bother starting your own channel, though. If you don’t already have a name or a reputation, you’ll get nowhere. Instead, you’ll want to try to get your music featured on a channel that already has a strong following. Look for electro channels with more than one hundred thousand subscribers (there are several), and click on the ‘about’ details of the channels to find out where to send your tracks. A new audience may be little more than a single email away.
Playlist Curators
The Spotify playlist curators of today fulfill the same role as the tastemakers and A&R people of the late 1990s and early 2000s. They’re the gatekeepers to the scene. If you can get one of your tracks onto a playlist cultivated or curated by a popular and widely-followed curator, it could be the next step up in your career. You never know who’s listening, and you might find yourself offered more work because of a prominent feature.
Getting onto a popular playlist isn’t easy, but there are plenty of them for you to try, so if you put in the effort, the law of averages says that you’ll be successful in the end. Don’t be put off by scare stories about bribery requests and other unpleasant conduct from playlist curators – there are some bad apples out there, but the majority of them are genuine music enthusiasts who just want to highlight good music. Don’t pay anyone for placement on a playlist, though.
Online Casinos
Almost everybody misses this trick, and yet it’s a sector that requires electro music all the time. If you’re not a gambler, you may not be aware that thousands of online slots websites exist all over the world. The better websites among them offer hundreds of different paypal slots all in one place, and those online slots need soundtracks. They’re no longer the old dusty cabinet games that used to stand in the darkest corner of your local bar.
The business of playing slots has now moved online, and the companies that create online slots are always looking to make their products sleeker, flashier, and more attractive to players. The soundtrack sets the ambiance of a game, and electro is a very popular soundtrack choice. Offer up your music to a company that makes online slots, and you could have an audience of thousands of new listeners every day. Remember to ask for a credit, though – you want your new audience to be able to find you!
Blogs
Internet blogs are ten a penny, but not all blogs are equal. There would be little point in sending your music to a blog that only has a few dozen readers every month, but even in this age of hyper-focused personalized content provision, there are still several sites that are read by hundreds of thousands of music fans per month. All blogs need content. Reviews count as content. Do you see where we’re going with this?
Never pay for a review (it’s unethical, and it’s not a practice that should be encouraged among artists or reviewers), but do submit your music to as many music blogs as possible within reason. A quick search for EDM blogs will give you a few candidates, and from there, you can assess their readership from their social media engagement and the number of comments on their posts.
Music Libraries
No, we’re not suggesting that you treat your music like a book on a shelf. A music library isn’t a dusty cyber-library full of ancient material and disused tracks. It’s the first place that television, movie, and radio producers go when they’re looking for the perfect track to feature on their soundtrack – and you never know when your music might get picked up and chosen for a feature film.
Every piece of background music you’ve ever heard had to be written and recorded at some point, and whoever wrote it gets paid whenever it’s used for commercial purposes. That could be you. Music Vine and PremiumBeat are good places to start uploading your tracks to but don’t stop there. Do your own research, and register with anyone who you like the look of. Be careful to read the small print, though. You don’t want to give your music away for nothing!
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