How is Music Promoted?

Music promotion is big business. Here is a typical scenario in a recording company:

The recording artist has signed a recording contract with a major record label. The record label makes their album and ships it to a distributor that sells it to stores. The record label then begins the massive promotion of their music. This promotional effort requires a lot of work by a lot of people. Here is a short list of what's involved:

Marketing
The marketing folks create advertising and publicity for the album and tours, create the artwork for the album cover, do promotional videos, in-store displays, get promotional merchandise like t-shirts or hats with the artists name on them, and more.

Promotion
These people are responsible for getting the music played on the radio -- which is essentially the total goal of the programme because if they can get played enough on the radio, they'll sell more records, see more demand for concerts, and everyone makes more money.

Sales
Salespeople are the ones who get the music into the music stores where it can be sold. Remember, unless they're also writing the artists own songs, record sales (along with touring) are they're bread and butter.

Artist Development
Because some artists sell more records after touring and performing their music live, there is a need for "tour support," which is provided by the record label's folks who are responsible for artist development. By definition, "tour support" is the amount of money they lose while touring. In other words, if it costs them $80,000 to go on tour and they make $50,000 doing it, they need $30,000 in tour support. By artist development, we mean running promotions in towns where they will be touring and making sure the local record stores have their music. Most record labels aren't willing to provide tour support unless the artists music falls into the right genre of music for such an expenditure. Some types of music sell more records when the artists go on tour and some don't. In any event, the normal thing these days is that the tour support is recouped from the artists record royalties. This means they're still paying for it themselves.

But, in the world of music promotion, this only scratches the surface.