12 SHORT Ways to BOOST Your Band

I got a question recently from one of my YouTube viewers— love you guys— Jairo Cello, to ask, "What do you know about the music business? Do you have any advice for bands who are trying to make it and don't know how to market themselves?" So, great question, thanks for writing in. Here's what I would say for people who are trying to start a band and trying to make it successful, okay? 3 things. The first one is you gotta practice. You gotta get better. This is a really competitive market you're getting into, okay? People are really, really, really good at not making a big wave or big name for themselves. You have to get better. You've got to treat this like a business. Every day you need to be practicing. This isn't, "Let's come over Thursday night, we'll have a jam session in our garage," okay? I'm talking like if you really want to build a band. You have to be committed to this. If this is your passion, you've got to own this and every day take action and get better. Because most bands right now, you're just not good enough yet. It's not that you can't get there, it's just right now your quality is not good enough. You've got to practice to get better. And this isn't just for bands, this is for anybody who's trying to develop a skill. I look at public speakers, I look at even myself and how I've grown. I look at the videos that I've done. You look at my videos now, you compare them to how I was before, and this is like 1,000 videos later. 1,000 videos! That's crazy! I put in crazy amounts of time preparing for these videos and making them the best video that I think I can make at the moment. You gotta get better. You need to practice. I've been watching a couple videos on rap history, getting into that a little bit, and watching interviews with Lil Wayne, and he says he tries not to sleep because he's just so focused on getting his work out. I watched the West Coast Customs show where they were doing Snoop Dogg's car, and he wanted to have a station, a lab, inside his car so even when he's traveling, he can work. These guys are workers. They're constantly trying to get better, and even though they're at the top of their game, they're still working to practice and get better. That's gotta be your mindset. That has to be your attitude. So you have to produce better stuff and your band has to be on board. If you're the only one who's, "We gotta really get better, guys. We gotta practice," then maybe there's a problem here. Does everybody in your band want this as badly? 'Cause I guarantee you, you look at any of your favorite bands, whatever genre you're in, look at the top bands that you look up to the most, there's a lot of hard work and passion that went into making those songs. They work on their skills every day to get better and that's what you need to do. That's the first thing. That's where a lot of people fall down because if you have great marketing, it's not going to help you if you're not really good at what you're doing. Second thing: expose yourself. Okay, what I want you to do is film yourself on a regular basis. Let people know about you. You're in a very visual medium, right? You have a band going, you have songs you're creating if you're just covering other people or doing your own stuff. Create a YouTube channel and post to it consistently. I'm talking a couple of times per week. That's what I want you creating. And it's maybe, it's maybe songs that you've created, maybe it's a jam session, clips from a jam session, maybe it's just a personal message from you or somebody else in the band. But regular content going to your YouTube channel so you can start getting exposure. What I want you to do is get a following, get people subscribing to you. Right? If the stuff that you're putting out is crap because you haven't practiced enough, nobody's gonna subscribe. So it still depends on you practicing and getting better at what you do. But if you do that and you're producing regular great quality footage and content for your channel, people will start to subscribe. I look at my channel here, a lot of people subscribe, and then every time I launch a new video, people start watching it right away because they're— they've subscribed to it. And so that's what you want to do. You want to start building an audience, a fan base. So that you have some leverage and power when you get to go to hopefully get a major recording deal for yourself. And then the third thing, and this is a, I guess, a creative little marketing technique, I would try to cover popular songs and make it your own style. So I don't know what kind of style you have, but it doesn't really matter. You could take any song and make it your style. So you could take a popular Rihanna song or popular popular Jay-Z song, or popular— even an old school— take a Boyz II Men song, take a Beatles song, anything. And even if it's totally out— like if you're a death metal band, take a Boyz II Men song and make it your own, because people are searching for those covers, and you'll get discovered on YouTube. And they'll say, "Yeah, I love those guys, I love their sound, I love what they did with that song," and they're gonna want to watch all the other stuff that you're doing. And you'll get a new subscriber and you'll build momentum and you'll get people contacting you saying, can you play at our gig? Can you sign this deal? You want to do some kind of endorsement deal with us? But you got to build that momentum. So one, practice every day. Practice, get better. You're not good enough yet. Get better. Two, record everything. Couple times per week, a new video coming to your channel. If it's a new song, a cover, behind the scenes, behind the scenes, a jam session, a message from the band, something. Keep your fans happy. And number 3, start doing covers of popular songs and make them your own style. Make them amazing so you can start building some traction. That's my advice for bands. Good luck and believe. For those of you watching, you like the video, give it a thumbs up. Let me know what you think, leave a comment below. You have a question for me, leave it in the comment section, I'll make a video response just like this one. And subscribe to the channel if you want to see more videos just like this. Thank you so much, and I'll see you soon.