A Digital Marketing Experiment with AI for a Strategic Music Promotion Plan
As a digital marketer, I’ve always found it interesting to see how different industries handle promotion. Now, I’m applying my experience to a new area: music. My goal is to use my digital marketing skills to determine if AI can help create a hit song and effectively plan its promotion. I’m letting AI take the lead on trend analysis, audience understanding, and content generation. I will act as the strategic co-pilot in creating a smart and automated marketing strategy.
Decoding My Audience & Finding the Right Fans
It can be challenging to find the right audience for a song without making guesses. That’s where Sonoteller.ai has been a game-changer. I used Sonoteller to analyze the track’s sound, including its energy, emotional aspects, and rhythm. This detailed analysis helped me identify very specific psychographic segments like “uplifting melodic techno” or “atmospheric progressive house” fans. These are micro-genres and listener communities I wouldn’t have discovered on my own.
This kind of precision is essential for ad targeting. The AI’s insights help me select specific interests to target in my ad campaigns on Google Ads or TikTok. This approach significantly reduces wasted ad spend and ensures my campaigns reach listeners who already enjoy this type of music. It’s a much more effective way to use a small marketing budget.
Creating Content Without the Burnout
Producing fresh and engaging content regularly can be a significant drain on resources. AI has sped up this process for me. I use ChatGPT to brainstorm things like YouTube video descriptions, Shorts titles, and blog snippets while keeping a consistent tone. For instance, I used it to quickly generate five hooks for a YouTube Short, then picked the best one and developed it into a complete video description.
For the main music video and its short clips, I’m using Google’s Veo 3. This AI video generator is excellent for creating a specific artistic style and brand, which is vital for standing out.
Short-form video is crucial for going viral, especially on TikTok. To maximize my video content, I’m using AI to automatically identify compelling moments from my longer videos. Tools like Gemini can analyze a video’s transcript and visual elements to highlight key segments, allowing me to create numerous short teasers from one longer video. This task, which would have taken hours to do manually, is now mostly automated.
My Tactical Promotion Plan as a Digital Marketer
As a digital marketer with a small budget and limited time, my strategy is focused and data-driven, using AI tools to maximize efficiency for my video-based tests.
Primary Promotion Channels: YouTube & TikTok
- YouTube: It’s the top platform for music video consumption and discovery. Its powerful search and recommendation algorithms offer great organic visibility. Additionally, its advertising platform (Google Ads) allows for precise targeting. The content’s longevity on YouTube means the music video can continue to attract viewers long after it launches.
- TikTok: Many songs that go viral today start on TikTok. The platform is designed for short-form, highly engaging content, and its algorithm is effective at introducing music to new audiences. It’s an excellent tool for generating buzz and initial listens. I will focus on directing all traffic back to my YouTube channel and Spotify, using TikTok to enhance viral potential.
Strategy: My main effort will be to direct all traffic back to my YouTube channel to maximize views on the full music video and encourage subscriptions. I will use YouTube Shorts and TikTok for short, engaging clips to drive organic discovery and funnel viewers to the main video. This focused approach on two strong platforms allows for a clean test with reliable data tracking, optimizing my limited resources for the best results.
Exploring Additional Avenues: I will also connect with relevant online music communities and submit the song to independent music blogs that cover AI in music or electronic genres.
Targeting & Creatives: Based on AI insights, I will create custom audiences on Google Ads (for YouTube) and TikTok Ads, targeting interests like specific EDM artists, music festivals, audio software, and related lifestyle brands. I will use the AI-generated visuals from Veo 3 as ad creatives and utilize ChatGPT to A/B test different headlines and calls-to-action to improve engagement.
Budget Allocation & KPIs: With a small budget, I will focus on retargeting engaged viewers and the best-performing audience segments on both platforms. The initial spend will center on discovery campaigns to gather data. Afterward, I’ll shift the budget to the most efficient channels. My key performance indicators (KPIs) will include:
- Video Views & Watch Time (YouTube)
- Engagement Rate (Likes, Comments, Shares on YouTube & TikTok)
- Click-Through Rate (CTR) on Ads
- Video Completion Rate (YouTube Shorts & TikTok)
- New YouTube Subscribers
- Spotify Streams & Saves: My calls-to-action on YouTube will direct viewers to “Stream on Spotify” in video descriptions and pinned comments. For TikTok, I’ll use a link-in-bio tool to provide the Spotify link and other key sites, guiding viewers with a clear call-to-action in the video itself.
AI and My Marketing Expertise
This experiment has shown me how AI can help a skilled digital marketer manage a complex, multi-faceted project. It’s not just about blending human and AI efforts; it’s about how AI’s capabilities enable my strategic insight and speed up my learning in a new field.
Filling in the Gaps: My knowledge of the music industry is mainly academic. I ventured into the “unknown unknowns” of the industry, including specific distribution channels, music production nuances, and artist relationships. AI has helped shine light on these blind spots by offering various viewpoints and retrieving detailed information.
For example, when refining my promotion strategy, I used large language models (LLMs) not for validation, but to simulate critical feedback. I asked questions like, “What issues would a veteran music publicist see in this plan?” or “How would a typical EDM fan react to this framing?” This strategy is practical since I lack direct access to traditional music industry veterans. Of course, I understand this approach has limitations. An LLM’s understanding is based on patterns, not real-life experiences. It cannot replicate the nuanced dynamics that a veteran’s experience would capture. The insights I obtain are simulations, and the real test will come from the market response, which I will monitor closely.
Enhancing Creative Direction: AI serves as a strong assistant, handling much of the heavy lifting and providing me with creative options. This allows me to focus on higher-level direction and explore tasks outside my traditional expertise, such as complex music video production.
From creating detailed visual prompts for advanced video models to refining marketing copy or analyzing big data sets, I’m using my existing marketing skills to guide the AI. This process expands my capabilities, enabling me to lead a multi-faceted launch test that would typically require a larger team. Importantly, AI doesn’t diminish human creativity; it empowers me to direct and refine creative outputs and complex strategies much more effectively than I could do alone.
