Let’s be honest about the situation. Most independent Australian musicians don’t have publicists. They don’t have social media managers. They don’t have marketing budgets. What they have is their music, their phone, and maybe a few hours a week between their day job and rehearsals to handle promotion.

AI tools aren’t going to replace a good publicist or a dedicated marketing team. But they’re making several aspects of self-promotion faster and more accessible. Here’s what’s actually working for artists I know.

Social Media Content Generation

The most common use case I’m hearing about is using AI to help with social media content. Not to write posts from scratch — audiences can smell inauthenticity — but to help with the tedious parts.

ChatGPT and similar tools are useful for generating variations of promotional copy. You write one Instagram caption about your upcoming single, then ask the AI for five different versions. Pick the best one, edit it in your voice, and you’ve got a week’s worth of posts in twenty minutes instead of two hours.

Several artists I spoke to use AI image generators to create visual content for stories and posts. One Melbourne-based producer creates abstract artwork for each release using Midjourney, then uses those images across all their social platforms. It gives her a consistent visual identity without hiring a graphic designer.

Video content is trickier. AI can help with caption generation and basic editing suggestions, but the actual performance — playing your song, talking to camera, showing behind-the-scenes footage — still needs to be genuinely you. The algorithms reward authenticity, and AI-generated video content tends to feel hollow.

Email Marketing

For artists who maintain email lists (and if you don’t, you should), AI tools are surprisingly helpful for writing newsletters.

The approach that works: draft your newsletter with the key information (upcoming shows, new release, personal update), then use AI to polish the structure and suggest subject lines. The content should be yours. The formatting help is where AI adds value.

Services like Mailchimp now have built-in AI features for subject line optimization and send-time prediction. A Brisbane-based songwriter told me her open rates improved by about 15% after she started using Mailchimp’s AI suggestions for subject lines.

Playlist Pitching

This is where things get interesting. Several third-party services now use AI to analyse your track and match it with playlist curators who are likely to be interested.

SubmitHub has incorporated AI-driven matching that suggests which curators to pitch based on your track’s sonic characteristics. Groover does something similar. The success rates are still low — getting onto playlists is competitive regardless of how you pitch — but targeted pitching is more effective than blanket submissions.

The key insight from artists who’ve had success: the AI matching gets you to the right curators, but the pitch itself still needs a personal touch. A two-sentence message about why your song fits their playlist works better than a generic template, even if AI helped you find the curator.

Press Release Writing

Writing press releases is one of those tasks that most musicians dread. AI tools have made this substantially easier.

The formula is straightforward: feed the AI your track details, bio, and any relevant context, then ask it to generate a press release. The first draft will be generic and overwritten. Edit it heavily. Remove the superlatives. Add specific details that only you would know. Keep the structure the AI provided but make the voice yours.

I’ve seen press releases that were clearly AI-generated and unedited. Music journalists can spot these immediately, and they go straight in the bin. The AI is a starting point, not a finished product.

Analytics and Audience Insights

Spotify for Artists and Apple Music for Artists provide data, but interpreting it takes time. Several emerging AI tools can analyse your streaming data and provide actionable insights.

Chartmetric and Soundcharts use AI to identify trends in your listening data — which cities your audience is growing in, which playlists are driving streams, which release strategies are working. For independent artists without a manager to do this analysis, these tools provide genuine strategic value.

Firms like AI consultants in Melbourne are also working with music industry clients to build custom analytics dashboards that pull data from multiple platforms into a single view. It’s the kind of thing that used to require a major label’s data team.

What Doesn’t Work

A few things to avoid:

AI-generated lyrics or song concepts posted as your own work. Audiences and critics will notice, and the backlash isn’t worth it. Use AI for business tasks, not creative ones.

Automated DM campaigns on Instagram or Twitter. These feel spammy regardless of how well the AI writes them. Direct engagement should be direct.

Over-reliance on any single tool. The artists who benefit most from AI treat these tools as assistants for specific tasks, not as a complete marketing strategy.

The Realistic Outlook

AI tools are saving independent artists between two and five hours per week on promotional tasks, based on the conversations I’ve had. That’s significant when your total available time for music-related work might be ten hours a week.

They’re not going to make a mediocre artist successful. They’re not going to replace the genuine human connections that drive careers in music. But they’re making the administrative burden of self-promotion more manageable, and for independent artists trying to build sustainable careers, that’s a real difference.

The barrier to using these tools is lower than ever. Most are either free or cost less than a single studio session. If you’re an independent artist doing everything yourself, they’re worth exploring.