Top 21 DIY Tools to Grow Your Music Career
If you’re an independent artist, you’ll be wearing a lot of hats as you build your music career. From the creative process to managing the business side of things, it can feel overwhelming to handle all the moving parts that go into growing a sustainable music career. While seasoned professionals have entire teams behind them, when you’re just starting out all the responsibility falls on your shoulders. Luckily, there are many DIY tools that can help you propel your career forward and make the artist journey a little less stressful. Here’s a list of 17 essential DIY tools that every independent artist should know about.
Categories: content creation, streaming & promotion, productivity, research
CONTENT CREATION
Canva is a great DIY tool for branding campaigns throughout your music career. Independent artists can use it to design album artwork, logos, show flyers, merch, brand kits, social media calendars, and even your website. With pre-made templates and tutorials, you don’t have to be a design genius or talented visual artist to make Canva work for you. While digital design is its main service, Canva can also be used to batch social media content, plan a marketing campaign, and automatically schedule and post content. With the content planner feature, you can skip the extra step of using a separate social media scheduler. This helps you save time and stay consistent with putting out content across multiple platforms.
Musixmatch provides licensed lyric features to Google, Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon and Instagram, among other publishers. The app helps artists expand the reach and depth of their music through accurate lyric translation and formatting across platforms. You’ll have full control over your lyrics and the ability to distribute your lyrics across all the major digital streaming services and social networks. Synced lyrics allow fans to connect more deeply with your music and story, and your music becomes more memorable and impactful.
This DIY tool provides stock footage, b-roll and an effects library useful for creating music and lyric videos. Independent artists can create a music video on a budget with access to unlimited royalty-free stock video. No hiring a videographer or crew, or shelling out money for expensive lighting and film equipment. Save yourself thousands of dollars while maintaining creative control.
Maastr puts professional-quality mastering at the fingertips of independent artists or producer. If you don’t have the resources to hire a mastering engineer to put the finishing touches on your music, Maastr is a great DIY tool. Achieve beautiful and professional-sounding mixes in minutes, and edit and refine until your song is perfect. Click HERE to give it a test drive and see how valuable it can be to your recording, mixing, and even demoing workflow!
This one isn’t an app, but a tool to add to your gear kit. The Lume Cube basically acts as an LED panel light like you would have in a photo studio. They can be used as an external flash for photos, or as a continuous light source for video. It’s easy to use with great light quality, and compact enough to bring anywhere. Whether you need to take a Zoom call in the backseat of a van or film content in your dimly lit dressing room, Lume Cube is a great device to have on-hand. It goes with me on tour and is crucial when filming interviews at home and on the go for my podcast The Record Process
STREAMING & PROMOTION
Instead of having a million links in your social media bio, compile all of your resources in one place with Linktree. You can have one smart link that houses your website, merch store, music streaming platforms, social media profiles, upcoming shows, and any other content you wish to share. You can also use it to collect payments or create your own QR code for promotions. Linktree Pro is a subscription-based service that provides additional features, including custom branding, analytics, integrations, and link scheduling—all for only $6.00 a month! With Linktree Pro's customization and analytics features, musicians can create a more engaging and personalized experience for fans, and gain valuable insights into their audience's behavior and preferences. Its integrations with other music industry tools makes it a useful platform for managing and promoting all aspects of a your music career.
DistroKid puts your music into online stores and streaming services like Spotify. It allows you to upload unlimited music at one price and keep all of your earnings. Plus, it’s an easy and legitimate way to distribute cover songs without getting into legal trouble. The platform will handle all of the backend licensing work and red tape involved in releasing a cover song on a streaming platform. Click HERE to use my exclusive vip link to get 30% off your first year's membership!
Drip is an email marketing automation platform designed to help businesses engage with their audience and grow their customer base through targeted and personalized email campaigns. The platform has a user-friendly interface and drag-and-drop campaign builder that makes it easy for anyone to create effective email campaigns. It allows you to automatically send emails and SMS messages based on customer behavior and engagement. Drip also incorporates features like A/B testing, audience segmentation, reporting, and automation workflows so you can make the most of your email marketing and effectively grow your music career.
This is a great DIY tool that allows independent artists to grow streaming numbers with a customized music promo campaign. Finding and reaching out to the right Spotify playlist curators and playlist owners to build a fanbase can feel like a shot in the dark. PlaylistSupply provides an easy way to build your own list of potential playlists to pitch your music. The platform works by scouring Spotify and finding the best playlists for your genre. They also provide contact information so you can contact the curator and request a spot on their playlist. Helpful features show which playlists are currently active and monitor changing followers so you can get an accurate idea of which playlists will actually boost your streams.
For independent artists without the deep pockets of a record label, crowdfunding is one of the best DIY tools to help raise money to record, tour, and produce work, while boosting your band’s online presence. Creating a successful campaign takes planning, strategy, a powerful message, and the right platform to host your project. Kickstarter is one of the best platforms with high success rates, especially in the music category. It’s a great way to interact directly with fans and incentivize them to support your band. This platform is ideal for artists with a specific fundraising goal, an existing fan base, and the time to spend converting fans into donors. But the secret power to using crowd-source platforms like this is that it helps you get clear on your messages and effectively communicates the value your audience receives from supporting your vision. After all, we only invest in the artists we believe will continue to give us incredible experiences in the future! So learning how to convince people you’re a solid bet is part of creating a rock solid brand over time.
PRODUCTIVITY
Byta is a private music sharing service. The platform lets anyone send and receive digital audio in a quick, simple and secure way. It’s helpful for sharing music files during the pre-release process and for collaboration with bandmates, producers, labels, etc. Unlike Dropbox and other file transfer services, Byta is built specifically for music, taking advantage of audio files’ properties including embedded metadata, audio quality and stream ability.
A social media scheduling tool allows you to plan content in advance and free up time to focus on other tasks. You can schedule posts for hours, weeks, and even months ahead. This maintains content flow and encourages consistency. Posting regularly keeps your audience engaged, and with a scheduling app you can stay on top of posts even while you’re busy or just don’t want to be glued to your phone all day. Which platform you choose depends on your goals, the platform you post the most on, and budget. Later has both free and paid options, while Buffer and Hootsuite require subscriptions. All of them link up with Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok. It could be worth signing up for free trials to test them out and decide which you prefer.
From meeting with clients to band rehearsals, Calendly is perfect for scheduling and time management. You can set up the times and days that are convenient for you to take meetings or calls and block off time when you’re not available. It syncs with your Google calendar or iCal so you can stay on top of things and eliminate the hassle of back-and-forth emails.
Trello is a simple task manager app that enables you to organize projects and everything related to them into boards. This makes it easier for your band or management team to keep track of to-do lists and progress toward goals. This DIY tool helps boost your personal productivity, improve time-management, and make prioritization a breeze.
Gigwell is a booking management software that lets you negotiate contracts, manage travel logistics, and collect payments online all in one place. This DIY tool makes the gig-booking and tour management process easier for independent artists, taking your productivity and organization to the next level.
Building good habits is a key component of establishing effective systems that can help us be more productive. The real secret to productivity is not just setting goals, but rather building systems that enable us to achieve those goals consistently over time. By focusing on integrating good habits into a system, we can make progress towards our goals without relying on willpower alone. Loop is a simple-to-use habit tracking app, but you can also do this by writing it in a journal or a weekly calendar. Tracking your habits allows you to analyze your day-to-day behaviors and see how much you’re actually getting done. From there, you create the systems for success and keep yourself accountable and consistent. I HIGHLY recommend Atomic Habits by James Clear, a practical and actionable guide to building better habits through the power of small changes and incremental improvements.
Bandsintown lists every gig, concert and music event that’s happening in your area. But there’s more to the platform than just tour dates and ticket links. The Manager App allows you to promote and manage your own events and publish livestreams to your profile. It syncs up with other social platforms like Facebook and Instagram, saving you the time of creating a new announcement for every show. You can also communicate directly to fans who RSVP, thanking them for their support and building up your relationships. If you're looking for show openers, Bandsintown can also be a great way to discover new local artists across different cities.
RESEARCH
Headed on the road? Roadtrippers is perfect for touring musicians. Simply input your destination and start point, and the app will show you all the hotels, fuel stations, points of interest, venues, and restaurants in the area. It integrates with Google Maps and can make planning a tour easier, whether it's a cross-country adventure or a short weekend trip.
Every Noise at Once is an algorithmically-generated, evolving map of the music genre space. Pulling information from Spotify, it attempts to make the scale of sub genres more accessible. It offers genre feedback and an unbiased “assistant” to help you properly position your music by targeting the best possible artists. Artists can use it to harness the importance of sub genres on DSPs like Spotify. Genre classification is important for music distribution platforms and helps artists connect to new audiences easily while keeping listeners happy (no Disney musical numbers on your punk rock playlist). It’s a useful source for understanding where you fit in and making your music more discoverable.
Chartmetric is one of the only analytics platforms that caters to the music industry. It offers comprehensive streaming, social, and audience data all in one place to help you create a successful music career. When you follow an artist profile on Chartmetric’s platform, you gain access to insightful charts with data from Spotify, Pandora, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and other digital platforms. It shows historical data of followers, streams, listeners, views, and subscribers over different time periods. You can also gain insights into your audience’s demographic and geographic makeup. The Neighboring Artists allows you to compare one artist’s market performance to other artists with similar metrics, which can be a great way to discover opening acts or bands to invite on tour with you. Overall, this is an incredible platform that helps music industry professionals make impactful business decisions to grow their music career.
ChatGPT is a free chatbot that uses AI to generate human-like text responses. Hit a songwriting roadblock? This tool may help unlock your creativity and spark new ideas. Obviously don’t use AI to write all of your lyrics, but it can help to provide new suggestions or prompts when you’re stuck. ChatGPT can also be used to write copy for your artist bio, press release, ads, and generate social media content. While it might not always deliver perfect results, it can save you a lot of time during the brainstorming and research phase.
Keep in mind that whatever ChatGPT produces needs to be edited and fact-checked. DON’T SKIP THIS STEP. Laziness here will kill the genuine vibe and trust you’re attemtping to beuild with your audience and community. You will need to communicate a clear and specific prompt to obtain the information you’re looking for, and then edit the response to fit your purpose. Treat it as a starting point that you can build upon. But eventually, you’ll have to do at least SOME WORK injecting your voice and perspective back into the copy.
It’s NOT a good idea to rely 100% on AI to craft cold emails, pitches, or answer messages
(with obvious larger-scale corporate exceptions of course). AI writing tools sound robotic and generic, and lack the personalization, creativity, and nuance that a human writer can accomplish. Personalization is key to making a connection and building a genuine relationship with promoters, labels, fans, venues, and anyone else you’re communicating your message to. A lot of times it’s going to be that small little extra piece of character or detail about yourself - even if it has little to do with the music - that might just keep you top of mind for an opportunity or cause somebody to take a liking to the project.
Beyond its writing capabilities however, ChatGPT can help musicians book more gigs and organize their tour. For example, it can help with researching venues, festivals, and promoters in different locations. Bands can ask ChatGPT for recommendations based on their genre, location, and budget, and gain insights about the audience size, demographics, and past events at each venue. You can ask the AI tool to create a tour itinerary and use it to guide your scheduling, routing, and budgeting decisions. While bands can use ChatGPT as a tool to enhance booking and logistics, it's not a substitute for human communication and networking skills. You should still prioritize building personal relationships with promoters, venues, and fans.
These are just some of the many DIY tools out there to help independent artists build your skills and develop assets to grow your music career.
If you found this helpful, take a second to download my FREE ARTIST STRATEGY GUIDE here. It’s filled with more thought-provoking concepts and music career growth tips designed to help you evaluate your holistic approach to building a lasting movement with your music.
Looking for one-on-one advice?Schedule a call with me.