If you are wondering what the current marketing trends for music are these days, your answer can be summed up in one word: internet. Today, the internet has taken over the way we learn about music, listen to music, purchase music, and market music. In many ways it has changed the industry just as much as MTV did in the eighties and radio did in the twenties. All of the current marketing trends for music can be found on the internet.
For starters, every single band has its own website. Established and/or tech savvy bands have bought their own domain name and have crafted creative websites that include sound files, video files, press clippings, artists bios, and a way to order CDs and other band related merchandise. If a band is less well-established, it will probably still have a MySpace page. MySpace has really become the place to go for checking out new bands. Since the service is both free and user friendly it seems as though every band is using MySpace for free promotion these days.
Other online current marketing trends for music include online releases. Radiohead, a band that has always been at the forefront of the industry, recently released its new album, In Rainbows, exclusively online for the first month of its release. Only after that was it available in stores. This type of marketing not only gave Radiohead free publicity, but it also enabled their customers to download their music directly to their iTunes rather than purchasing a physical CD and uploading it to iTunes because, let's face it, nobody listens to CDs anymore.
The above fact and so much more are dictating current marketing trends for music.