21 Holiday Marketing Ideas for Musicians

• Save

---

Before we get started if you’d like help creating a custom marketing campaign for the holidays, check out our Holiday Marketing Calendar. It includes all the important holidays for the season, a calendar and to-do journal for important tasks, and a list of marketing ideas you can use now. Click Here to download the free Holiday Marketing Calendar for Musicians.

---

As this year winds down, we gladly welcome the holiday season. Christmas is of course the most popular holiday universally celebrated at this time and can open up some great opportunities for us musicians to engage with our fans and promote our music in ways we can’t normally do throughout the rest of the year. With a little bit of planning and effort, you can take advantage of this fun and festive time to finish the year on a high note (pun intended).

Read on to see our 21 great ideas of how you can use holiday marketing to further your career.

Get More Exposure

1. Release a holiday single

What better way to get into the holiday spirit than to release a holiday song? It can be an original you wrote or a classic holiday cover. If you need ideas, check out these 20 well known Christmas songs you can cover without worrying about copyrights.

2. Record a holiday video

If you’re releasing a holiday single, you might as well make a video for it too. If you’re not  able to record a professional quality single, you can always jump right to the video, which might even be a quicker and easier way to get some holiday music out.

3. Release a holiday EP

If you’re feeling really ambitious and have several holiday songs up your sleeve, then you can record an entire album for the holidays.

4. Collaborate with other artists to create a holiday playlist 

Team up with other artists putting your holiday songs together to create a playlist. Include special artwork and collaborate on promotional efforts. If you’ve all got the time and money, you can even take it a step forward and make it an album.

Sell Your Music/Products

5. Design a holiday basket that includes your products.

You can promote this basket as a gift idea on you website and social media platforms. Make sure you promote the heck out of it!

• Save

6.  Design an ugly Christmas sweater via Printful

Printful is a great resource for creating and selling products without having to sit on inventory. You can use it to design and sell an ugly Christmas sweater with you branding on it. How cool is that?

7. Design holiday-themed face masks via Printful

Because it’s 2020, Printful also allows you to to design your own face masks. Why not design a holiday themed mask with you branding on it too. How many artists can say they have that?

8. Offer special-day discounts on your products

Take advantage of special days like Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday to sell your music/merch at a discount. Believe us, this actually works.

9. Create holiday gift guides (affiliate sales anyone?)

If you don’t have your own products or are just looking to make a little extra money beyond what you can sell, then consider creating a holiday gift guide for your blog and social media pages. For this to work, you have to already be an affiliate partner with the online stores like Amazon, but once you are you can create a gift list and make money from each item someone purchases. 

Engage with your fans

10. Send out Christmas cards to your fans.

Make a personal connection with your fans and send them a Christmas card. Send them a little holiday cheer and let  them how much you appreciate their support.

11. Send out fan gifts

Obviously you can’t do this with all of your fans, but maybe you can send a percentage of them a small piece of merchandise or gift cards, just to show them know how much you appreciate them.

12. Surprise your most loyal supporters

For your most loyal fans, you could do something extra special. Invite them to a private chat or virtual show, or send them a special gift. Make sure they know that this is an exclusive treat they’re getting for being such amazing fans.

+ Related: 7 Holiday Marketing Tips for Musicians If You Don’t Have Christmas Music

13. Decorate your social media platforms with holiday cheer.

Change your profiles and banner with holiday themed images and make your social media pages festive place to come to. 

14. Host a holiday giveaway

Give your followers a reason to stay in engaged. Have them answer a question or do something to qualify and then have a drawing with the winners receiving some nice prizes.

15. Write some holiday-themed posts

Take advantage of holiday-specific observance days to share stories and childhood memories, highlight some of your fans, and gain more traction on social media. You can apply this to your blog as well.

16. Host a live holiday-themed tutorial 

You can host all kinds of how-to workshops via livestream like gift wrapping or mug, wreath, or mask decorating, etc. Definitely sprinkle some of your music in there as well, but the idea is to make them fun holiday-themed community events.

17. Host a holiday party (live streaming)

Virtual parties have become a thing this year as well. You can host a virtual holiday party where you have ice breakers, games, drawings for prizes, and of course some music.

• Save

+ Watch: How to Keep Your Music Fans Engaged When There’s Nothing To Say

Get more Gigs

18. Send out Christmas cards to your prime venues

This is a great way to show your top venues how much you appreciate their support. Not many artists think to this so it can definitely make an impression and help you get more gigs with them in the future.

19. Send out Christmas cards to your dream venues

So you’ve sent love to the venues you currently have relationships with. Now send some to the places you’ve always wanted to play at but have never gotten the chance. Make sure you tell them a little about yourself as a performer and include free download cards or music for them to sample, as well as a way for them to get in touch with you.

20. Create a Holiday Set-List

Doing some shows this year during the holidays? Make sure to put together a holiday set-list. We’ve always found that adding 5 to 10 holiday songs into your sets gives your shows a nice festive feel without going overboard.

21.  Offer a private virtual holiday show for (for a price)

You can put on a virtual show during the holidays this year and charge admission. Makes sure to promote it as a holiday show for added interest.

So as you can see, there are all kinds of things you can do this holiday season to connect with fans and promote your music. Try some of these ideas out and let us know it goes. Got any other great ideas we might of missed? Please share them in the comment section below. We’d love to hear them.

Are you still putting together your holiday wishlist? Check out these 8 COOL MUSICAL GADGETS THAT BREAK MODERN CONVENTION from our friends at Producer Hive.

---

Don’t forget to check out our Holiday Marketing Calendar. It includes all the important holidays for the season, a calendar and to-do journal for important tasks, and a list of marketing ideas you can use now. Click Here to download the free Holiday Marketing Calendar for Musicians.

---

---

If you enjoyed reading this post, join our mailing list! We’ll send weekly tips and tricks you can use to advance your music career without the help of a label. Click here to subscribe.

Write for TCM. If you’re interested in being a contributor on TCM, click here.

Some of the links in this post are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, we will receive an affiliate commission (with no additional cost to you). Regardless, we only recommend products or services we use personally and believe will add value to my readers. Also, if you use our links, you will help keep this website going! Win-Win!!!