In this article, we unveil the SoundCloud promotional game, outline the key players and explain how you can use different tools to boost your play counts and reach a greater audience.
Not all plays and followers are equal
The SoundCloud stream is a valuable real estate, as unlike Facebook and recently Instagram, the news-feed shows all uploads and reposts of the accounts you follow chronologically, without an algorithm filtering the content.
With 1.000 followers, each of them has a window of opportunity to see your latest upload or re-post assuming it’s not snowed under by other content crowding their feed. This is much better than the 10-20% like-to-view ratio that you see on the average non-boosted Facebook post.
SoundCloud promotional channels
These host other artist’s music on their own account and help broadcast the music to their audience, sometimes reaching hundreds of thousands more than if the artists were to upload individually.
These accounts are often dubbed SoundCloud labels and tend to differ from traditional record labels such as Heroic, Monstercat, and Spinnin, in the sense that most don’t distribute music to stores (Spotify, Apple Music, iTunes etc). They’re usually run by young founders, are lenient with how legitimate content needs to be in order to get uploaded (many don’t screen for uncleared samples) and relationships with the artists are maintained through Facebook chat.
Nonetheless, in the similar vein to YouTube promotional channels (such as Mr. Suicide Sheep and Trap Nation), some highly successful channels take their growth and use that to pivot into real record labels, setting up distribution, signing records and monetizing their copyrights.
The concept is simple: for audiovisual blogs, content is the growth driver.
If records perform well, they will get traction and drive traffic back to their accounts. A like-to-download gate on the releases is going to accelerate that process and because all the artists want exposure they’re also going to be reposting the content. The bigger they grow, the easier it’s going to be to acquire that content, so it’s an auto-catalytic process.
SoundCloud promotional channels tend to be genre specific. The first accounts grew hand in hand with the rise of electronic music. Originally “tropical house” (think Kygo) and “future bass” (think San Holo) were the first genres to be widely adopted, fueling their trajectory to mainstream EDM adoption.
Most of them started promoting one genre and then branched out into more as they launched sister accounts and launched promotional networks, where they leverage each account’s individual reach through reposts and gating.
Tracks are usually submitted for upload or re-post via a direct SoundCloud message or by Facebook message to the founders.
Why give away your content?
You may be asking yourself: “why are Budi and Jeff telling me to allow somebody else to host my music? Shouldn’t I feature my music on my page?”
The answer is not so black and white. Assuming you have 10.000 followers and a promotional channel willing to upload has 50.000, you need to factor in the follower-to-play ratio of their account. Many channels dilute their audience by over-re-posting to the point where the listeners just don’t care anymore.
On the other hand, as most channels gate to themselves, the original artists and sister channels, the gate aligns the interests of everyone included. Most promo channels will work their latest uploads hard, using their sister channels and trading reposts (where they re-post other people’s uploads in exchange for them reposting theirs) to get more exposure.
Featured Profiles:
The featured profile tab allows you to cross-promote between your channel and several others. This, which is a tool you can only get through an entity like Repost Network, allows you to feature your friends, labels, collectives, podcast channels, you name it!
Those are just a few tips and tricks. The key thing to note is it is a community out there. So build or join a squad, promote each other’s music, but most of all learn your craft and make the best music you humanly can. After all, good music will promote itself!
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