 The whole game has been changed by the coronavirus and everything everyone knew about promotion is now off the table. But the principles of what works in promotion haven't changed and for some reason I'm not seeing musicians take advantage of the most powerful forms of promotion. So in this video I'm going to discuss that there's many more ways that you can be promoting yourself aside from live streams. This won't be anything with huge investments of time like starting a podcast or Twitch since that takes tons of time to build up an audience on and I keep seeing other channels talk about ridiculous things that will take longer than this virus is going to last to build. So let's talk about some effective promotions you can do a single day or two. Hi, I'm Jesse Cannon and this is Muse Formation. So what I'm always telling you is the most important type of promotion is doing things that will get fans talking that are eventful and worth telling someone else about. As well as things where you get recommended by influential people are the second most effective. So during this pandemic time where many forms of promotion are off the table there's only so much you can do to make these things come together for powerful and effective promotion. All of the promotions I'm going to discuss here are going to make a Venn diagram of both these recommendations so you are likely to get more out of these promotions than anything else you can do right now. Here's the four C's of pandemic promotion. Corona, collaboration, cosigns and covers dash remixes. I know the R didn't fit. The first C after Corona is collaboration. Collaborations get people's eyes and I think really are the thing that will get the most people's eyes during this time. Start making split releases with other artists. Whether that's somewhat featuring on your track or writing a song together this is crucial since you will introduce each other to one another's audience and it gets the fans of the other acts talking about you and being more curious about everything else you do. As well this bolsters community and fans love seeing that you're a part of a bigger community and gets them talking about both of you more and more and seeing you as a more eventful artist. It's a win-win situation even if you're a little bit bigger or they're a little bit smaller it doesn't matter as long as you're doing cool collaborations it helps bolster what you do. There's nothing more effective for expanding your fan base aside from writing a great song than this during this virus. This doesn't have to be with people with bigger audiences. What matters is that they have an audience and so do you and you are now going to try to get one another's audience to get introduced to one another. But you have to do it right. Make sure to tag collaborative songs and add the features together on streaming sites so that people see you on both artist pages and in YouTube searches. While I'm never one to encourage doing Facebook ads this is one of the only times I encourage it but more about that in the next episode. These collaborations are eventful and worth talking about. I'm already starting to see this happen this week and it's only going to get more popular during this time. Here's some other ideas on how to collaborate. Make a YouTube where you trade guitar solos vocals or another instrument on each other songs that are already out. Let's say you can just mute the guitar solo or the vocal of the bridge and then you can trade features on each other's songs. Simply go into a mix of a song that's already released and delete that part out and have your collaborator do their part on it. This could bring new life to a song you already were promoting before this. If you're stuck now that it's not going as far as you thought it would because of this virus. I mean come on major labels commonly delete what was the bridge and then have a more famous vocalist on it to give the song more life and they call it a remix. You could do this to bring life to your release as well or you could write a new song together and have one of you take the chorus, the other, the verse and collab on the bridge. Now I understand features and collabs can be really corny to some people. I actually have a pretty bad taste about them in my mouth all the time. If you don't like other voices on a song you could write a song together over Zoom and publish it as a collaboration between the two of you and just one of you performs it but use it for the publicity that you wrote it together. It's insane how much you can learn from writing songs with other people so this could be effective also in your artistic growth. Cause let's talk about this. The most important thing is the song has to be good. A forced collaboration sucks. Make sure the collaboration fits the emotion of the song and yes, seed changes can be really cool in songs but it can't be too drastic so keep that in mind that you guys have to fit well together or else it's just gonna be corny and not do you any good. The next thing on the list of our seas is cosigns. They are the next and the most effective types of promotion during this. If you think of it this way when you play a tour with a band and they're on that tour poster or whatever or you get a tweet that says that they like you, that's a cosign. It's effectively saying the band at the top of the bill has endorsed you. There is a way to do this without it being tour posters. Here's a bunch of ideas. The easiest low effort way to do this right now is to sign to Instagram and just talk to another musician by allowing them to be invited into the chat. It requires so little effort but both of your followers will get notified and you will hear about each other. Promote it on your socials and get both of your followers in and build each other up. You can also just trade social media posts about how much you're enjoying one another's music. Another cool thing I've been seeing is doing Zoom Facebook Live performances where you do a round table of the different artists playing at different times. My friends at Cold Recs have been doing this with their friends and bands and it's been really cool as a bunch of their friends have new records out and they're helping them out promoting it. And remember this isn't all about the songs. My buddy Craig Shea from Cold Recs says it's not only about the songs people miss the banter in between things. He says people really miss that about shows and I don't need to tell you that people like personality. They've been doing this really effectively and I know some artists have been even doing synchronized movie watch parties with their fans but this is even better to do with another one of your musician friends from another act as you could bring each other's audiences in and really create some bonds with both of your sets of fans have it be even bigger and really show them who you are and what it's like to hang out with you when you're with a friend. Remember that the bonds you create with fans makes them more likely to support you and buy your merchandise and come out to live shows. Also remember you can do these performances inside Facebook groups if you were both in the same genre and the audience is already there. This can be ideal for bringing your attention to yourself inside a micro genre Facebook group which are amazing for promoting yourself. Keep in mind there's a sweet spot for this too. Toast and Jam Studios did a corn stream festival over two days where they had each artist play at a certain time slot and they all did really cool things. Right now you're watching what my favorite bands Honey did during theirs. And while that Minecraft concert was cool it's a little bit too diverse and I imagine a lot of people tuned in and out while the bands were going whereas with Toast and Jam did I bet you people stuck around a little bit more and discovered new music from these new artists since they were similarly grouped together. You want to make sure you do this with people who are similar enough that there will be an interest in the other person you are co-signing with musically. The next see is covers and remixes. Depending on what type of artist you are you can trade cover songs. This one you don't even need to always do it with another group as nothing gets shared more than a genius recontextualization or cover of a song. As well to tie up a bunch of things I've talked about together this amazing video from two minutes to late night Spirit Adrift, Mutoid Man and the band Witchtane who I just mixed an amazing record for really shows what could happen if you do a sick cover and then all collaborate together and make an incredible video that is getting shared a ton right now. As well, someone else remixing a song can give it a new life and these could easily be done while you're isolated so there are ideal content to make right now. Now you may be thinking that you aren't the remixing type but oftentimes that's who does the best remixes as just hearing another song made into an EDM banger has gotten kind of boring but if you can figure out how to do this in a cool way that meets your vibe it can be extra special. Finding a way to rearrange it add to what someone else did originally in their song is eventful and you will get attention for it if you do it well. And you may be thinking damn my mixing engineer has all my stems. Well, trust me, I'm a record producer. Most of us are a little bit less busy than we normally are so they'll probably be happy to get you stems if you throw them some money right now. You can even do remixes over your own songs. If you always thought that one of your songs didn't come out quite the way it could start reimagining and bring new life to both versions. Lastly, let's talk about syndicating content. If you do something cool on Instagram while going live with somebody make sure you push that to YouTube as well. Have a friend recorded on their phone or recorded on your own using the screen record and then make sure to syndicate it to YouTube. The same goes for if you do something cool on Switch you can make highlights of it for YouTube. Hell, if something really cool happens you can release it on your streaming platforms. I mean, a great song is a great song. Mix it up too. You can go live on both Insta and Facebook at once and get totally different audiences as their users are not the same base. That's it, thanks for watching. That's it, am I missing anything? Is there any way you would have done this? I need to know your questions and what no one else is telling you since I wanna answer them. So leave them in the comments. I hope you liked this video and if you did please like and subscribe and get notified for my future videos since I'm gonna be breaking down the concepts in this video along with tons of others on promoting your music and how to make music you're more happy with. As well, I have a Facebook group that's linked below that has only helpful information. No one tried to sell you anything, Playlist or Con Artist, only helpful information for musicians looking to be better themselves. If you wanna learn more about me make a record with me or check out any of my books, podcasts or anything else I do, head to jessecanon.com or at jessecanon.com on any of the socials. Thanks for watching. One last thing, if you liked this video there's two playlists here with tons more videos that you'll probably enjoy. One's about how you promote your music and the other's about how you make songs you're happy with. Otherwise you can hit the subscribe button here to see the rest of my videos. Thanks so much for watching.