Breaking Into the Electronic Music Market

As a senior citizen, I started learning how to produce my own electronic music. You can get my backstory here. I thought my first readers might like an update to my story. First, I should say right now that I was told my music is not really EDM. So, I’ll just call it “electronic”, which covers an amazing number of genres and sub-genres, that I am just now starting to figure out.

So now I am in what I will call my “tooth and nail” period, because I have to fight tooth and nail to get listeners. I think my story is exceptionally tough because as a senior citizen, I don’t have friends and family who are interested in what I am doing. The older ones hate it. They like “real” or “normal” or “live” music. The younger ones can’t image an older person creating anything cool. It doesn’t matter if I think they should just give it a try, they wont. It turns out that it’s not legal to tie up people and force them to listen to your music, even though you have to hear about their dog and sciatica and whatnot.

Your friends and family are the backbone of your music marketing campaign. Then their friends, etc. Then next is a social media campaign. That is where you will get some decent feedback and encouragement and listener base.

But don’t set your goals too high, especially at first, because the music market is like selling novels became several years back. Ever since then, you could write a novel and send it to Amazon or some other places and have it published, including paperbacks, with no money out of your pocket. You just get paid royalties from their sales. I did this. I’ve even had some books translated and now for sale in foreign languages. Again, no fees. The thing is; anyone can do it, so a lot of people do it.

The music business is becoming the same now. I produce music on my laptop from free downloaded software from lots of places. Up until a couple of weeks ago, I had put no money whatsoever in music production and have produced hundreds of tracks and had a thousands of listeners on the free sites. One track, a not very good kid’s song is heading towards 10,000 streams. Go figure. (Then I spent $40 on a great book on electronic music production.) But the overall point is, anyone can do it, so the competition is tougher than ever.

A month or so ago, I decided to start putting my music on the main market. So I signed up with a distributor. (Again, if you choose the right one; free.) But now I am in competition with everyone. All the big, household music names. And my fans from the free sites do not transfer over. They prefer the sites they are on.

So, what do you do if you are just starting out? You have to keep submitting tracks good enough for someone to like and put them on a playlist. With so many new songs, listeners have to really like a song to playlist it. Spotify gets 60,000 songs a month to sort through to put on their playlists. Spotify, and other Playlist curators look at how many fans you have. I can imagine that they are very unlikely to list a song if they see you don’t have many fans. See the problem? You can’t get fans unless you have some. That is where your social media could help you out a little. If Spotify, Pandora, Apple, etc., doesn’t put your song on one of their playlists, then practically no one will hear it to put it on their own personal playlist, so your work floats around in cyberspace never being played. I know it is true. I listen to songs, sometimes great songs, that maybe no one else has ever played, and maybe never will since then.

You could have an amazing track that no one will ever play. Sorry, just telling you the facts. Now, maybe later if someone likes something of yours, they will check out your backlist on your profile and discover it, but there is no guarantee, even then, that it will ever get much traction.

I think I continually improve my music. I am starting to learn how to design wubs, which I like and you hear in a lot of music now (and will really alienate anyone my own age.) So maybe I’ll write another article here how I am doing better.

Either way, I feel that I can’t ever quit. Designing music that I like is too satisfying of a creative outlet for me. Maybe it is/could be, for you too. I am like the person who sits alone playing their musical instrument with no one else listening. The only other thing I have learn is how to deal with rejection and to stop producing music for others. I know this article is not so great when it comes to encouragement, but at least I kept it real and offered a path forward.

As you can tell by now, I’d really appreciate you checking out my music. Play "Lone Rider" in the embedded track above. You can find links to more of my stuff from my Facebook page.