How to promote subscriptions to your music fans

Subscriptions allow artists to communicate directly with their fans, offering their own tiered rewards centered around their music.

Once you’ve decided to start selling fan subscriptions, you’ll want to decide on which rewards you’ll offer your fans.

To be sure that your subscription service is successful, you’ll need to get the word out and promote your subscriptions offering. It’s important to reach those true fans who will want to support you with an ongoing monthly fee going right into your pocket.

Here are some of the ways that you can approach promoting subscriptions to your fans to get them excited to sign up:

Promote exclusivity

When you promote your subscription options, you’ll essentially be selling the exclusivity of being a subscriber or fan club member. This is a major difference between passively following you on social media, so be sure fans know what they're getting.

Perks like previously unreleased songs and videos, behind the scenes updates, and private online shows are all things that can make your fans feel like they’re part of an exclusive club.

Promote access

Promote the access that your fans will get by subscribing. This can be early access to new tracks, access to your full discography of music, or to presale tickets.

You’re also selling access to you, the artist. Offering subscriptions is all about regularly releasing new content, and engaging with your biggest fans. Be sure to remind fans that they’ll gain access to come along on your journey as an artist. This is a huge selling point that gives subscriptions a big appeal for your biggest fans.

Have a launch event

Similar to having an album launch show, you can also have a launch event for your subscriptions. Instead of simply announcing that fans can now join your fan club, why not build anticipation that something special is on the way for your fans?

This event can be a free online show with a Q&A. You don’t have to say what you’re going to be announcing at the show; just make it clear that your fans will want to attend to get a first look at something awesome that you’re releasing.

For the launch event, be sure to have some initial exclusive rewards ready to go for those fans that will subscribe immediately. Some ideas to consider: unreleased tracks, new song demos, merch discounts, pre-sale tickets for an upcoming tour, limited edition signed merch, etc.

You can prepare and publish the subscriptions area on your website right before the online show, and then share the link for subscribing several times during the event.

Your website

Your artist website is a key way to build momentum for your career and promote your music online. With Bandzoogle’s Subscriptions feature you can run a fan club directly through your website. In addition to driving fans to your website which you own and control, fans would pay you directly for their subscriptions, without an external platform taking a cut of your sales.

If you decide to run a fan club right on your website, you’ll want to highlight it so that anyone visiting your site knows it's available. Here’s how:

Subscriptions page

Place your subscriptions page in your main menu — the fan club area on your website should be visible to all visitors. With Bandzoogle’s Subscriptions feature, you can dictate where it appears within the menu, and also customize the page name.

Name your subscriptions page something obvious like ''Subscribe'' or ''Fan Club,'' or even names like ''Backstage Pass,'' ''VIP Area,'' or ''Green Room.'' This can help convey that there’s something exclusive on the page.

Include a call to action in your header

As the first thing fans see when landing on your website, use the 'Call-to-Action Header' feature to point fans to your subscriptions page. The idea here is to inspire your website visitors immediately to check out your subscription page and be motivated to sign up.

If you’re going to do a launch event for your fan club, then at first your call to action can be to RSVP to the online event. Then on or after the date, switch it to lead directly to your subscriptions page.

Include info on your Home page

Besides the call-to-action, you should also include some information on your Home page about your fan club. This could be part of a welcome message at the top of the page that has a short bio of who you are and what you do. You can then include a sentence or two about your fan club with a link or button to take visitors to that page.

Place text on your Music and Store pages

Include information about your fan club on your Music and Store pages. If fans are on those pages, they’re likely considering a deep dive into your music, or making a purchase as a real fan. This is a great opportunity to encourage them to check out all of the regular rewards and perks they would receive by joining your fan club, while supporting you on an ongoing basis.

Video

Intro video

One great option to promote subscriptions is to include an intro video on the paywall page of your website. This video should be short, but will help create context for why your fans should subscribe. Let them know that they’ll get exclusive access to specific rewards, and outline how their support will help your career.

Social videos

Create a few short videos intended for the social platforms where you’re most active and have built a following. This typically would be Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok. Mention your subscriptions throughout or at the end of those videos, and describe a few of the perks your fans can expect to receive.

Video blogs

You could also create and release vlogs that specifically show behind-the-scenes details of how you're creating subscriber-only rewards. This will give fans who aren’t yet subscribers a glimpse of some of the exclusive rewards and perks they’ll get by subscribing and supporting you.

Video descriptions

Another way to use video to promote subscriptions is by including info and a link in all of your video descriptions. You can keep this brief: a simple sentence with a call to action asking fans to click the link to check out how they can get access to exclusive rewards.

Live streams

If you go live on Facebook or Instagram, dedicate a few streams to talking about your website subscriptions. Promote what you’ll be offering, and even offer a taste of what subscribing might look like. This could be a quick online lesson, or example.

Email list

When it comes to driving music sales, ticket sales, and in this case, promoting your subscriptions service, email is still your best option. Year after year, email still offers the highest returns for marketers across all industries.

A few ways that you can use your email list to promote subscriptions:

• Send a dedicated email to promote the initial launch for your subscriptions
• Send a follow-up email after the launch when your fan club is live
• Add a call to action on the sidebar or footer of all subsequent newsletters, pointing readers to the fan club page on your website
• If you add any new big rewards or rewards tiers, send a dedicated email letting your fans know about it

The bottom line is that when launching subscriptions, you’ll want to use your email list to help keep it top of mind for your fans.

Use social media

A big part of running subscriptions is engaging with your fans. You’ll want to leverage all of your social profiles to keep fans informed of your subscriptions offering. This can help turn mildly interested followers into engaged fans who actively support you.

If you have a subscriptions launch event, heavily promote it across your socials to drive as many of your fans as possible to attend. Once your fan club has officially launched, do another round of heavy promotion to let fans know they can join.

Once the initial launch of your subscriptions is done, you can regularly post info about exclusive tracks, early access, discounts, ticket pre-sales, and other perks that only your subscribers get.

Some options might be:

• When posting pics or videos about the process of creating new music or videos, mention when they’re for subscribers only
• If you have any online concerts/lives streams that are subscriber-only, you can promote those to all of your fans to encourage them to join and attend
• Post pics of any physical merch that is exclusive to subscribers
• Occasionally remind your followers about the exclusive rewards you’re offering
• Promote any new tiers or rewards that you’ve added for fan club members

Don’t forget to publicly thank your current subscribers regularly, which your other followers will see in your updates.

When it comes to promoting your subscriptions on social media, you’ll want to focus on it, but don’t overdo it. Sprinkle in info about subscriptions, but don’t make it become the sole focus of your social media presence. Not all of your fans will become subscribers, and that’s ok. They can still support your career in plenty of other ways.

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Offering fan subscriptions is a huge but rewarding undertaking. It’s not something you can promote passively and expect to get a good return. To promote your subscriptions and get people interested, leverage all of the promotional tools at your disposal. Then it’s all about regularly engaging with your fans to let them know all of the exclusive rewards and perks that you’re offering.

Setting up fan subscriptions for the first time through your artist website? Check out this articles for more information:

How to sell fan subscriptions on your music website
Creating a Subscriptions Page