According to the 2025 IFPI report, record labels invested a total of $8.1 billion in A&R and marketing in the global music industry – nearly a third of their revenue in 2023. That’s because marketing is an integral part of a successful music career and it’s more important than ever for artists looking to stand out in today’s saturated market.
At its best, your marketing is an organic extension of your music, providing more ways for fans to access your artwork through storytelling and creative content. Marketing is also about building fan relationships by telling the right story, to the right people, at the right time. And that resonance is incredibly rewarding when you’ve found ways to turn first-time listeners into die-hard fans.
In this guide, we’ll provide you with an introduction to music marketing in 2026. We’ll explore the approaches, considerations, strategies and tactics you’ll need to give your music the spotlight it deserves. From assessing your artist brand to launching tactics that will help you reach your goals, read on for a comprehensive guide to music marketing.
PART 1: BUILDING A FOUNDATION
What is music marketing?
Music marketing is a strategic and long-term process, wherein an artist employs a strategy to reach their career goals over time. This requires developing an artist brand and story and sharing it across channels to build a fanbase. Music marketing is much more all-encompassing than music promotion, which is a series of tactics intended to drive certain actions around your music.
Music marketing is:
- Telling your story with clarity and consistency across formats
- Reaching the right people at the right time, not just more people at any time
- Creating a journey for fans to follow, from first-time listeners to die-hard fans
Marketing is not:
- Posting without strategy just to “stay active”
- One-off stunts with no follow-up
- Promotion over community-building
How do I build a music brand?
The anchor of your music marketing is your artist brand. When a new fan discovers your music, they’ll get to know you further through extensions of your brand – your bio, interviews, social media presence, merch designs, overall aesthetic, and so on. Marketing is about building relationships and your brand is a central point of reference.
Before developing your marketing strategy, evaluate whether your brand is in good shape to serve as a foundation by following our guide to artist branding.
Define clear, measurable goals for your artist career
With a strong artist brand in place, next define your goals. What are you hoping to accomplish by marketing your music?
A vague goal like “grow my audience” is too broad and lacks metrics to define success.
Follow the SMART framework to ensure your goals are practical and impactful:
- Specific: What exactly do you want to achieve?
- Measurable: How will you track it?
- Achievable: Is it realistic based on your resources?
- Relevant: Does it support your music career?
- Time-bound: What’s your deadline?
Some examples include:
- “Gain 500 TikTok followers in 60 days”
- “Get added to 15 user-generated Spotify playlists”
- “Sell 25 shirts from my Bandcamp in 30 days”
Know your audience
Once you have your goals, consider your audience. Who will you be marketing your music to?
Emerging artists often try to market their music to everyone. Marketing at this stage can feel like shouting into a void as your engagement and conversion rates will suffer from a lack of targeting. That’s why it’s crucial to know your fans and channel that knowledge into your approach.
Analyze who your fans are:
- What online platforms are they most active on?
- How did they discover your music and stay engaged?
- What kind of content resonates most with them?
- What other artists do they listen to?
Emerging artists should start experimenting with promotion and take detailed notes about what’s working. If you’re playing your first show, take note of who attends and what tactics led to ticket sales. If you’re posting about an upcoming release, identify what content formats and messaging resonated most. No matter the size of your fanbase, be observant and channel insights into action.
PART 2: PLANNING A STRATEGY
With a strong foundation in place, you can begin planning your strategy to accomplish your goals. In this section, you’ll learn how to evaluate different marketing channels, plan campaigns, optimize for conversions, and track your progress.
Choose your channels
First, choose which channels and platforms you want to market your music through. Consider what platforms play well to your strengths. What kind of content feels authentic to you?
- YouTube: Best for long-form content like music videos, vlogs, and live performances. Also supports short-form content via YouTube Shorts.
- Instagram: Ideal for visually driven content, including photos, Reels (short-form videos), Stories, and live streams. Great for dynamic brand building across content formats.
- TikTok: Designed for short-form, trend-based video content. Great for reaching new audiences quickly and encouraging engagement through challenges or sounds.
- X (formerly Twitter) or Bluesky: Best for real-time updates, quick thoughts, text-based content, and fan engagement through polls and replies.
There’s a platform out there for everyone! Remember, it’s best to be consistently active on one or two, than inconsistent and spread thin across many.
Plan, don’t just post: Marketing campaigns that build
Once you’ve chosen your platforms, it’s time to plan your content campaigns.
Here are some resources that can help:
- How to plan a social media campaign
- How to plan a music release campaign
- How to create an EPK and pitch the press
Ensure your marketing efforts serve your music by planning content around your calendar of releases, tours, merch drops, and more. Alongside campaigns for music releases or tours, consider other tactics you need to thread through to reach your goals.
You may need to line up resources and tools to help you execute on your strategy. Consider whether you might need any of the following:
- A photographer
- An email management platform and/or website platform
- A video editor or audio engineer
- A merch seller, designer, and printer
- An artist manager to help you balance marketing with other aspects of your career
Stay authentic and market to serve your career, not the other way around
When content creation starts to feel like a slog, it’s often because it’s not aligning with your activities as an artist. Fortunately, there are ways you can organically promote yourself and execute a marketing strategy without straying too far from your typical to-do’s as an artist. Consider some of the ideas below.
- Document studio time: Great pictures and short-form content can come from idle time in the studio. Film your bandmate tracking a part, interview your singer, capture b-roll, and more.
- Network with press: Stay up to date on music news and find some voices in the press who resonate with you. If an article clicks, reach out to the journalist and build a relationship. It will come in handy when you have a release ready.
- Send song sketches, demos, and alternative versions to fans: Workshopping a tune or landed on a new demo? Your fans might love hearing a song in the works or an alternative version of a previously released track.
- Play live: There’s no replacement for performing live. Concerts win you fans and keep your music top of mind. Bonus points for capturing soundboard audio and filming sets.
- Build community: Many artists make the mistake of focusing their marketing solely around self-promotion. Instead, look outwards to your local or online music scene and show support for others. That can organically spark curiosity in your own music and lead to rewarding relationships.
Create a marketing funnel that converts new listeners into fans
Once you have a content plan, it’s important to optimize it for converting your audience. You don’t want to launch a campaign and execute a bunch of tactics without a clear vision of how you’ll reach new audiences, convert them into fans, and retain them for the long run.
This work requires understanding your fan funnel. For a deeper dive on building your fan funnel, read our guide.
What metrics should I track?
Take a data-informed approach to your marketing to measure progress against goals and save yourself time and guesswork on strategic decisions.
Here are some other key metrics you should consider tracking on email, socials, and streaming platforms. For a deeper dive on music metrics you should measure, read our guide here.
- Email list growth over time: Understanding the growth of your email audience can help you identify what events drive signups
- Open and click rates: Identify whether your content is resonating at the subject line and copy levels
- Unsubscribes: how many fans have unsubscribed from your emails? Are certain sends diminishing interest?
Streaming
- Monthly listeners: how many fans listen to your music on a monthly basis?
- Streams by song: what are your most and least popular songs?
- Playlist placements: what songs are being playlisted and where?
Social media
- Follower count: Is content helping grow your following?
- Impressions: How many people is your content reaching?
- Engagement: Is your content resonating with the audience it reaches?
PART 3: LAUNCHING YOUR STRATEGY
Once you have your strategy, it’s time to put it in action! There’s no better way to test your new strategy than by marketing a new release. Distribute your next release through CD Baby and follow this guide to create a strategic marketing plan.
Marketing When You’re Not Releasing Music
You might be reading this at a time when you’re not planning a release. For a lot of artists, marketing during this time can be difficult. But it’s crucial to maintain momentum and nurture your fanbase so that they’re already engaged when it comes time to market your next “big thing.” Here are a few approaches you can take.
Lifestyle: Post about things in your day-to-day that fans might relate to! Create content around a new skill you’re learning, a musical idea you’re exploring, a recent trip you took, or a question you’re struggling to answer. These kinds of day-to-day posts may seem mundane, but if you’ve focused your media around marketing and music, these kinds of posts can be a refreshing change and enable fans to get to know you. This approach also works in a newsletter format.
Creative: Think of ways to repackage and enhance your latest release. That could mean dropping remixes or alternative versions, but it could also be grounds for a totally new spinoff. Record an album-long music video or documentary, curate a special show, or drop a complementary form of media like a lyric book or painting that adds to your latest release.
Community: You can stay active by supporting other artists and building community online. That can take various forms but a few quick ways to engage are sharing and reposting content from artists you love, commenting on other profiles, and creating playlists and mixtapes assimilating your music with others.
Conclusion: Think long game
As you’re putting these marketing tips into practice, it’s important to keep a focus on the longer term goals you want to achieve. What does success as an artist look like for you? Set goals that genuinely motivate and inspire you – with so many tools, channels, and content types today, it’s easy to overwhelm yourself by following general industry advice and spreading yourself thin. Reflect on what aspects of your artistry bring you fulfillment and align your marketing accordingly to grow your career in those directions.
Secondly, as you’re planning out marketing strategies and content, focus on how you can set yourself up for consistent rather than perfect content output. Consistent posting builds trust with your audience, establishes you as an active artist online, and plays well to algorithms.
Lastly, keep a log of key performance marketing metrics across all your channels. Long-term marketing success comes from data-driven decisions and after several months of output, you’ll be positioned to learn from your data. Track how an entire release campaign performs and you can leverage your insights to make your next release campaign even more successful. Leveraging metrics can optimize your marketing and save you time, allowing you to focus on the art itself.
We hope this guide helps you hit the ground running with marketing in 2026. At CD Baby, we’re committed to supporting you beyond your releases, to propel your career.