Music Ally Sandbox Guide: Music Marketing in 2025
Happy new year to all, and to get 2025 underway, i’m excited to share the latest edition of the Sandbox Guide which taps into knowledge offered up by the winners of the inaugural edition of the Music Ally Marketing Awards. In this guide, we take a look at what the coming year has in store for music marketers, in an edition packed full of tips and insights from some of the industry’s most innovative folks.
A huge thank you to all of the contributors for taking the time to share their thoughts on Music Marketing in 2025: Sari Ng at Kreatell, Hari Ashurst-Venn at Sony Music and Edd Blower at RCA Records UK, Fred Stuart at Polydor Records, Seri Kohli and Jorge Garcia from Ministry of Sound Records, Lili Rönkä of Warner Music Nordics, Marina Sans from The Orchard, and Thiago Machado and Roberta Raschkovsky at Ranked Music.
2024 has been a year packed full of music marketing innovation, from bold social strategies to bespoke activations for superfans, experimental streaming campaigns to the development of a plethora of new marketing tools. So, in this special issue of the Sandbox Guide, we wanted to get some tips and hints on which marketing tools, methods and practices we should be keeping a close eye on in 2025.
We’ve invited winners from the Music Ally Marketing Awards to share some of their key learnings, discoveries, and future-facing tips to ensure that music marketing in 2025 will be more creative and impactful than ever before. In this Guide we look at:
- How the traditional digital music marketing playbooks no longer guarantee success, and which new strategies are reshaping the landscape
- Testing, adaptation, and testing again – how to keep up with audiences that are now moving targets
- Why hyper-local fan engagement allows nuanced experiences to connect with audiences around the globe
- How to use platforms that fans are already using differently – to make sign-ups easier, and keep superfans active and engaged
- Why in 2025, you need to ensure that fans continue to be ever-engaged and move the artist’s ambitions more central to release plans
- Fans as co-creators – and how they’ll share what they make
- Actionable takeaways: as ever, we’ve condensed the lessons from this guide into action points – and we’ve brought them right to the start, so you can get started immediately