and they both have a ‘black album’

Hani Banna moved from cds into mp3s and started to promote his own music online using very focused email-marketing…and it got his single to number one in the online charts. Before long a record company wanted to put the single on cd, it was picked up a national radio station and played non-stop for about a month.

He realised that putting his content online, promoting it, and having people interact with it had huge potential.

So exactly how did he do it?

“At the time, I used a lot of promotions; I offered free content online.  The content was based on humor and dating and various things that young people would be interested in.  I put together some special reports, I approached forums, I promoted via search engines, as well as putting P.S.s on my e-mails and things like that.  Over the course of a year I’ve compiled a large mailing list, and that was my contact list at the time.  It was a very generic audience, with a young age group.  It wasn’t targeted to a particular category, but it was a young audience so I knew they would be interested in my music.

Whenever I put out a new track, I would contact them and tell them about it.  I’d try to make the e-mail fairly appealing; I used a graphical comical approach, and made the e-mail similar to the track.  I built up a bit of a persona, so I had people listen to my music, and that lead to being number one on the charts, which lead to being picked up by an offline company.”

In Hani’s case building a list of ‘fans’ he could email played a huge part in allowing him to promote his music whenever he needed to. A few hundred subscribers can probably be managed with your normal email account (you can easily set up a new one just for your band or music eg. myrockband@email.com). Once you get beyond a few hundred subscribers you will probably need to use a dedicated email service such as aweber (affiliate link). As you can see from the screenshot of my account they make it easy to ‘broadcast’ a message to your subscribers and keep track of who is coming and going which would be very hard to manage yourself  when interacting with thousands of subscribers.