Branding Advice for New Musicians from a Former Marketing Professional:
Dive into the world of music branding with Branding Beats, the ultimate podcast for emerging musicians looking to amplify their careers. Hosted by Alexander Paul Burton, a seasoned musician and former marketing professional with 12+ years of experience working for prestigious organizations like St. Mark’s Hospital Foundation and Afghanaid, this podcast merges the art of music with the science of branding. Alexander brings his expertise in fundraising marketing, graphic design, press outreach, and event management to offer actionable tips and strategies for musicians to build their unique identity, grow their audience, and thrive in the competitive music industry. Whether you’re navigating social media, designing your first album cover, or curating your Spotify playlists, Branding Beats provides the tools you need to stand out. Tune in for insider advice, inspiring interviews, and creative branding hacks that will help take your music career to the next level.
Episodes
Holidays aren’t always happy. A systematic review of 2.1 million cases across 28 studies shows that while Christmas Eve and Christmas Day are linked to lower suicide risk, New Year’s Day spikes risk by 33% (Yeh et al., 2025, Front Public Health). This pattern is consistent across multiple countries.
For musicians, this matters: creative communities often face isolation, performance pressure, and irregular schedules, making mental...
Navigating Identity, Music Theory, and Mental Health in the Indie Music Scene: An LGBTQ+ Perspective
Adapted from Academia.edu and AI narrated (not my usual narration! - just a test!)
Navigating Identity, Music Theory, and Mental Health in the Indie Music Scene: An LGBTQ+ Perspective
Are you tired of grinding for streams that barely pay the bills? In this episode of Marketing for New Musicians, we dive into the Superfan Strategy—why focusing on a small, highly engaged audience can turn your passion into a sustainable music career.
This episode explains how online hate can actually help new musicians grow. Algorithms don’t understand emotion; they only track data such as clicks, comments, shares, and watch time. When trolls attack your music, they still create engagement. That activity can make platforms test and promote your content to more people.
Trolls often share links to mock you, which increases visibility. Their comments, arguments, and repeat views a...
Welcome back to Marketing for New Musicians. Today, we are going to discuss a challenging but important topic: dealing with people who obsess over your work, criticize you relentlessly, or even try to undermine your presence online. Whether it’s social media attacks, harsh reviews, or constant comparison, many musicians encounter this in their creative journey. The key is learning how to transform these negative experiences into mo...
I record everything and report everything. Your online hate will land you in Jail if you continue. A gentle reminder to get your coffee somewhere else.
Welcome back to Marketing For New Musicians. Today, we're dissecting a huge piece of industry news that fundamentally changes how you should be thinking about content creation. We’re talking about Spotify’s new AI protections.
In a world where creativity meets constant scrutiny, even the most well-intentioned artists and musicians can find their work misinterpreted or maligned. In this episode, Alexander Paul Burton explores the challenges of sharing your art in the face of online hate, offline bias, and false narratives.
Your music career is a space mission. 🚀 In Episode 1 of the Seasonality series on Marketing for New Musicians, I share how I use time management, rest, and data-driven marketing to stay organized and adaptable—just like 3i/ATLAS navigating the unknown
Authenticity isn’t just about “being yourself” in a vague sense. It’s about showing your creative process, your experiments, your successes—and yes, even your failures. Fans these days crave transparency. They want to see behind the scenes—whether that’s messy practice sessions, writing demos that don’t quite work, or exploring completely new art forms alongside your music.
We are at the edge of something extraordinary. Every choice, every word, every act of creation ripples across the universe. In this slow, meditative talk set to cosmic piano, we explore the power of choosing beauty over hatred, love over indifference, and creation over destruction.
The chilling effect is a legal and psychological term, but in the context of being a creator, it’s that feeling of holding back. It’s when you have a great idea for a social media post, a new song, or a bold lyric, but you stop yourself because you’re worried about the backlash. It’s the fear of trolls, malicious reporting, or false accusations that makes you self-censor.
In this two-minute crash course, Alexander cuts through the noise and tells new musicians why throwing money at ads, playlists, and shady promoters won’t grow a career.
Today’s episode is for the artists, musicians, and creative souls who feel stuck. Maybe you’ve been sitting on a half-finished EP, a folder of voice notes, or an idea for a single that never quite leaves your head.
We should all be using AI to make society better. We should be using it, sparingly, to help us be better at what we do.
But we should not abandon reason for baseless, personal attac...
Today, I want to talk about a powerful tool in a new musician’s marketing arsenal: authenticity. When you’re just starting out, it can be tempting to project an image of perfection, to hide the struggle and only show the success. But in a world of polished content, vulnerability is what truly connects you to your audience.
Let’s be honest: creativity doesn’t cost anything. It starts with a rhythm in your chest, a thought while walking, a lyric you whisper into your sleeve before you forget. It’s free. Natural. But in the music world, creativity alone is never enough. It’s not serious unless you paid for it.
This is for the misjudged, the watched, the doubted. In a world obsessed with labels and suspicion, what happens when you’ve done it all—created, performed, built, endured—and it’s still not enough for them?
When I started livestreaming my neoclassical piano improvisations under The Hollow Vale, I was honestly shocked by how few people saw them. Sometimes I’d have zero impressions, or only a handful of views on a beautiful 18-minute piece. It felt like shouting into the void.
In this bite-sized episode, Alexander Paul Burton dives into the creative power of soundfonts for emerging musicians. From classical harpsichord suites to deep house remixes, here's how soundfonts can transform your workflow—without breaking the bank.
Popular Podcasts
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Burden is a documentary series that takes listeners into the hidden places where justice is done (and undone). It dives deep into the lives of heroes and villains. And it focuses a spotlight on those who triumph even when the odds are against them. Season 5 - The Burden: Death & Deceit in Alliance On April Fools Day 1999, 26-year-old Yvonne Layne was found murdered in her Alliance, Ohio home. David Thorne, her ex-boyfriend and father of one of her children, was instantly a suspect. Another young man admitted to the murder, and David breathed a sigh of relief, until the confessed murderer fingered David; “He paid me to do it.” David was sentenced to life without parole. Two decades later, Pulitzer winner and podcast host, Maggie Freleng (Bone Valley Season 3: Graves County, Wrongful Conviction, Suave) launched a “live” investigation into David's conviction alongside Jason Baldwin (himself wrongfully convicted as a member of the West Memphis Three). Maggie had come to believe that the entire investigation of David was botched by the tiny local police department, or worse, covered up the real killer. Was Maggie correct? Was David’s claim of innocence credible? In Death and Deceit in Alliance, Maggie recounts the case that launched her career, and ultimately, “broke” her.” The results will shock the listener and reduce Maggie to tears and self-doubt. This is not your typical wrongful conviction story. In fact, it turns the genre on its head. It asks the question: What if our champions are foolish? Season 4 - The Burden: Get the Money and Run “Trying to murder my father, this was the thing that put me on the path.” That’s Joe Loya and that path was bank robbery. Bank, bank, bank, bank, bank. In season 4 of The Burden: Get the Money and Run, we hear from Joe who was once the most prolific bank robber in Southern California, and beyond. He used disguises, body doubles, proxies. He leaped over counters, grabbed the money and ran. Even as the FBI was closing in. It was a showdown between a daring bank robber, and a patient FBI agent. Joe was no ordinary bank robber. He was bright, articulate, charismatic, and driven by a dark rage that he summoned up at will. In seven episodes, Joe tells all: the what, the how… and the why. Including why he tried to murder his father. Season 3 - The Burden: Avenger Miriam Lewin is one of Argentina’s leading journalists today. At 19 years old, she was kidnapped off the streets of Buenos Aires for her political activism and thrown into a concentration camp. Thousands of her fellow inmates were executed, tossed alive from a cargo plane into the ocean. Miriam, along with a handful of others, will survive the camp. Then as a journalist, she will wage a decades long campaign to bring her tormentors to justice. Avenger is about one woman’s triumphant battle against unbelievable odds to survive torture, claim justice for the crimes done against her and others like her, and change the future of her country. Season 2 - The Burden: Empire on Blood Empire on Blood is set in the Bronx, NY, in the early 90s, when two young drug dealers ruled an intersection known as “The Corner on Blood.” The boss, Calvin Buari, lived large. He and a protege swore they would build an empire on blood. Then the relationship frayed and the protege accused Calvin of a double homicide which he claimed he didn’t do. But did he? Award-winning journalist Steve Fishman spent seven years to answer that question. This is the story of one man’s last chance to overturn his life sentence. He may prevail, but someone’s gotta pay. The Burden: Empire on Blood is the director’s cut of the true crime classic which reached #1 on the charts when it was first released half a dozen years ago. Season 1 - The Burden In the 1990s, Detective Louis N. Scarcella was legendary. In a city overrun by violent crime, he cracked the toughest cases and put away the worst criminals. “The Hulk” was his nickname. Then the story changed. Scarcella ran into a group of convicted murderers who all say they are innocent. They turned themselves into jailhouse-lawyers and in prison founded a lway firm. When they realized Scarcella helped put many of them away, they set their sights on taking him down. And with the help of a NY Times reporter they have a chance. For years, Scarcella insisted he did nothing wrong. But that’s all he’d say. Until we tracked Scarcella to a sauna in a Russian bathhouse, where he started to talk..and talk and talk. “The guilty have gone free,” he whispered. And then agreed to take us into the belly of the beast. Welcome to The Burden.
"SmartLess" with Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, & Will Arnett is a podcast that connects and unites people from all walks of life to learn about shared experiences through thoughtful dialogue and organic hilarity. A nice surprise: in each episode of SmartLess, one of the hosts reveals his mystery guest to the other two. What ensues is a genuinely improvised and authentic conversation filled with laughter and newfound knowledge to feed the SmartLess mind. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of SmartLess ad-free and a whole week early. Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus.
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy, Jess Hilarious, And Charlamagne Tha God!