The INDIE BIBLE: A GUIDE
The Indie Bible has been an amazing resource for musicians and artists since it’s inception in 1999. Here we take a deep dive into exactly what this resource offers musicians, and how it can help you bring your music career to the next level.
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The Indie Bible has been a staple for musicians and performing artists for over 20 years, and we at Planetary Group regularly call upon this resource to help our team be as effective as possible in our music promotion efforts.
There is a lot of information available in the Indie Bible collection – YouTube, Spotify, Touring Info, Booking Agent Directories – and what’s even better is that this information is helpful to any band or musician – whether you are just starting or have plenty of tours under your belt.
What kind of musicians does this resource benefit?
With over 1,500 pages we thought it would be beneficial to zero in on how you can use this resource to your benefit and what to expect if you decide to become another “loyal follower” of the Indie Bible. While this information is beneficial to artists in all stages of their career you’ll find yourself needing much different advice once you have a following, vs a musician who just finished recording their first track.
Musicians just starting out have much different needs and resources at their disposal than artists that have already completed some successful tours and have perhaps some better name recognition, or have taken some music promotion efforts in the past.
In addition, your promotion efforts change somewhat drastically depending on what kind of genre you are currently focusing on, as well as where you are geographically. While resources like YouTube and Spotify aren’t as depending on geographic locations, you’ll be hard-pressed to really start a successful career if you are not coupling your digital promotion with old-fashioned in-person performances.
THE ULTIMATE INDIE BIBLE Bundle
The Ultimate Indie Bible Bundle is the mainstay of this pack, and includes the Indie Bible, the Indie Bible Online Database, and the Indie Venue Bible. This resource has thousands of places for you to book interviews, airplay, upload tracks, and get in touch with the people and places that can help you grow your fanbase.
The Indie Bible alone provides:
- 800+ magazines that will review your music
- 4300+ radio stations that will play your music
- 970+ music blogs ready to interview your band
- 700+ labels to help sell your music
- 1000+ promotion, marketing, management, and PR services
- 400+ sites you can submit MP3s to for promotion
- 90+ articles with expert advice for your music career
The amount of information is staggering, but it is broken up into geographic and genre-based sections, so you can immediately start your promotion efforts with a laser focus on the venues, stations, blogs, and magazines that fit your audience best.
In addition to information about, the Indie Bundle features access to a frequently updated online database, as well as a huge collection of local music venues you can reach out to directly and start booking shows.
The best benefit here is just the volume of listings you have. While anyone could lookup 10-20 venues in your town and start to gather the appropriate information, why not save the time and have that all in one place. Sending out a BCCed pitch email to 50+ venues without needing to do the legwork in collecting that information is where you’ll find yourself saving time and still getting even more promotional opportunities.
THE INDIE YOUTUBE BIBLE
Just like Spotify, YouTube is increasingly becoming dependent on playlist curation to get your music in front of listeners, and reaching out to these curators directly instead of running paid YouTube ads can generate an immediate and long-lasting impact on your listener counts.
Finding frequently updated playlists via YouTube search is an incredible time-sink. Even after finding a playlist within your genre, you need to determine if it’s even still active – and after that hope they even take submissions at all.
There’s no “submit video to playlist” button on YouTube – so even after finding a promising playlist you need to track down the curator and then open a line of communication.
The Indie YouTube Bible takes the guesswork out of that process and gives you over 3,400+ YouTube playlists that want to hear from new artists. These are organized by genre and provides you multiple methods of reaching out to the curators to feature your music.
In the time it takes to track down and contact one YouTube curator, you could have easily sent out dozens of emails to curators you already know accept new music in your genre.
THE INDIE YOUTUBE BIBLE
With over 1,500 pages we thought it would be beneficial to zero in on how you can use this resource to your benefit and what to expect if you decide to become another “loyal follower” of the Indie Bible. While this information is beneficial to artists in all stages of their career you’ll find yourself needing much different advice once you have a following, vs a musician who just finished recording their first track.
Musicians just starting out have much different needs and resources at their disposal than artists that have already completed some successful tours and have perhaps some better name recognition, or have taken some music promotion efforts in the past.
In addition, your promotion efforts change somewhat drastically depending on what kind of genre you are currently focusing on, as well as where you are geographically. While resources like YouTube and Spotify aren’t as depending on geographic locations, you’ll be hard-pressed to really start a successful career if you are not coupling your digital promotion with old-fashioned in-person performances.
Where Should I start?
There’s no “right way” to start this process. Above all – you need to make sure your tracks or videos are as polished as you can afford them to be before you are ready for promotion. Make sure you have worthwhile photographs of you or your band, make sure you have promo material ready to send out the instant you head back from a playlist curator or magazine or radio station.
You cannot just depend on one media source to spread your music today – it takes a concerted effort not just across YouTube and Spotify, but through local music blogs, magazines, radio stations, and playing shows at venues. Make an effort to use all of these tools at your disposal, and you’ll soon be able to find out where your music is getting heard the most – and where you are apt to gain the most fans or followers.
Getting your music out there with the least amount of hours on your end should be your goal – and the Indie Bible can easily save you hundreds of hours of research on promotion and outreach and start taking actionable steps to promote your music, instead of dwelling on the minutiae of “getting it all ready”.