If you want to maximise your next campaign but want to do it with a minimal budget, the good news is that there is a raft of music blogs to submit to that prove that some things in life do come free. The editors do it for the love of the industry and to help grassroots artists thrive, meaning they will constantly be open to hearing new unestablished artists, unlike the editors at the NME and Rolling Stone.

Whatever the genre, wherever you are, however slim your niche, there will be countless other up-and-coming artists clawing for the same attention. The good news is that there are plenty of ways to improve your chances of getting featured in music blogs.

How to Submit Music to Blogs for Free

1. Create Your Contact List

In addition to scouring Google for blogs to submit for free, get creative with your self-promo campaigns. One of the best ways to make new contacts with music bloggers, editors and journalists is by networking, which can be done online and offline. This effectively transforms a cold pitch into a warm one if you take a friendlier or more personal approach to your request to be featured. Failing that, you can take to a search engine and look for your local music blogs and niche-specific blogs. Once you have sourced suitable blogs, find the right contact info and name and add them to a database, which you will also update with how many times you have contacted them – no one likes spam.

2. Practice Your Pitch

Regardless of what you may think about the industry, no one likes an egotistical artist; being affable in a pitch and showing a little humility can go a drastically long way. So, instead of lauding yourself as a prodigy with heavenly vocals and an equally as celestial songwriting capability in your pitch, let them know what you are really about. Allude to the textural details of your music and introduce your artistic attitude, and remember, no unestablished artist is God’s gift to any music blog. If they are featuring you for free, they are probably writing for free; make it worth their while.

3. Create an EPK

Before you start firing emails and messages to music bloggers, craft an Electronic Press Kit (EPK), or at the very least a press release, which contains all of the info that a blogger will need to write a thorough review, such as the band location, ethos, line-up and details on the release that you want to be featured. In your EPK, be sure to include press-quality photos and all of your relevant streaming and social media links.

4. Put Effort into Your Own Online Presence First

One of the best ways for up-and-coming bands without much of a budget to show that they’re serious about their music is by investing in a social media and online presence. Firstly, you will want to create a professional-looking website which holds all anyone will ever need to know about your band; secondly, sprawl across all social media networks and stay vocal. Think of it from a music blog’s perspective, would you feature an artist that is going to share the feature far and wide, or go with a digitally muted artist that won’t bring their audience, no matter how small, to their website?

5. Get in the Right Mindset

Learning to deal with rejection is as fundamental to the artist’s journey as learning to sing in tune or keep in time. You will experience it. A lot of it. You will come up against armchair critics that want to pick apart every single production element in your track and sound snobbishly petulant while they’re doing it. Or potentially, even more frustratingly, you will hear nothing but radio silence after firing off what seems like an endless series of pitches. The trick is understanding that as personal as it feels, it isn’t.

6. Understand that Timing is Everything

To increase your chances of getting featured by a music blog for free, give them an exclusive preview of your new material, or at the very least, send them your single, EP or album as soon as it has dropped. Music blogs love to be the first to write on new music and run special features such as music video premiers. If a music blog gets the exclusive premiere, that increases the chances of all your current fans flooding to their site to see it!