When you’re in-between releases with nothing new to promote and not much coming up, you can stay at the forefront of your audience’s minds by re-promoting your older music. You might gain new fans who did not know about your older music, and you’ll continue drawing traffic to your catalogue while you work on new material.
You’re gaining new fans constantly. If you’re promoting adequately, new fans will continue to discover your music at different stages of your career. As a result, your newer fans may be unfamiliar with your older material, but your older material may resonate with those fans just as much as your newer material does. You can present a more complete picture of yourself as an artist because it shows your fans where you came from and where you’re going next. Your fans can track your growth and progression from one release to another and find plenty of music to love along the way; but if you never mention your older music, new fans may never find it. Promoting your old music shows that you have a larger catalogue than is readily apparent and makes it clear that you have been serious and committed to your music for a long time. For instance, I have listeners who had no idea that I had released certain songs years ago until I started actively promoting them on social media; I have a huge back catalogue of my own original music and collaborations with other artists that my listeners did not know about.
Social media algorithms don’t show every new post to every follower. I can’t count the number of times my followers have been surprised that I released a new song or that I started a new collaboration with another artist or filmmaker, even after I’d posted about it numerous times beforehand. I’ve also had followers message me to say that they completely missed a whole week of posts from me just because the Instagram algorithm would not push my posts into their feeds. This means that you have to assume your followers will not see the majority of your posts, and then post accordingly. If you start to feel like you’re annoying your followers by posting too much about one song, you’re halfway there; make some more content and promote some more.
Ultimately, this means that projects that are old news to you might be completely new to many of your followers, even years down the line. Because your older music might get buried in your followers’ feeds, you can make sure your followers know about it by periodically re-promoting it in new, visually-appealing ways. You can post new videos and graphics featuring the music on your social media pages, and vary up the visuals so that it doesn’t look like you’re continually reposting the same content. I recently re-promoted a song that has been out for over a year by making a lyric video for it, then promoted the lyric video with daily snippets on my Instagram and Threads pages for weeks leading up to the video release. In terms of organic reach, it ended up being my highest-performing video to date, and many followers had no idea that it was an older song.
It’s easy, low-effort promotional content. As I mentioned above, I started making simple lyric videos and graphics with CapCut and InShot on my phone earlier this year so that I could have more promotional content readily available, and it has taken about 80% of the effort out of my promotional activities. Once a graphic or a lyric video is complete, it can be minimally edited and repurposed for weeks’ worth of social media content. If you don’t like showing your face on social media, or if writing a script and talking to a camera takes too much effort, you can make simple but professional-looking content with free video-editing apps. You don’t have to be a professional graphic designer or video editor to give your old music new appeal, and it keeps you relevant during periods when there is nothing new to promote.