5 effective music promotion hacks for your music
It’s 3am. You’ve spent a long night putting together the final touches of your best track yet and now you enjoy a final, sleepy headphone playback as you upload your latest creation to SoundCloud.
The next day you’re excited to flip open your laptop – you can’t wait to see the world’s response to your new tune… last night’s beats still ringing in your head. But ouch! Your enthusiasm takes a painfull hit when you count the resulting plays of your latest creation on both hands: hardly anyone listened to your track, liked it, posted a comment or reposted it!
How can that be? How can you get your latest masterpiece the attention it deserves with thousands of plays from real music fans?
Here are five simple but powerful music promotion hacks that can help solve your problem.
#1 – Give your fans and DJs what they want: Pro-level sound
Although you may have recorded your tracks in your bedroom or small recording studio, it’s now easier than ever to get them professionally mixed and mastered. If you want to be noticed by fans, DJs, blogs and other influencers, then you need to invest in your production quality.
Luckily, there is a plethora of online mixing and mastering engineers, and it’s easy to find people who work specifically in your genre. Just run a Google search and you will find a large variety of competitively priced engineers at your fingertips. Many will also offer a sample mix so you can try before you buy.
And if you’re already a capable mixer, check out automated mastering services like Landr or Ampddit to give your track a polished final sheen. Simply upload your final mix and within seconds you can hear a pre and post mastering comparison.
#2 – Help your fans to promote your music for you
The fastest way to gain more listeners is to make it easy for your potential fans to promote your track. Adding fan gates – also called download gates – to your promo strategy is a really effective way of doing just that.
Essentially, fan gates are a tool for exchanging your music in return for social currency. You’re giving potential fans a free download of your track in exchange for relevant social actions such as commenting, sharing, liking or re-posting your music on SoundCloud to boost your audience quickly. Tools such as Hypeddit (shameless plug! 😉 enable artists to grow a strong following on SoundCloud using strategies such as follow, like, comment and repost-to-download.
#3 – Share reposts with like-kind artists
Spend some time researching other SoundCloud artists who produce music that is similar to your style and who also have a following that is relative in size to yours. Once you’ve compiled a good list, reach out to them via a SoundCloud message and propose a repost-for-repost deal along the lines of you offering to share their track to your followers and vice versa. This will gain your new track some fast exposure straight out of the gate.
Let’s say you have roughly 1,000 followers on SoundCloud and managed to arrange a repost-for-repost deal with just two other artists with a similarly sized fan community. You will have just boosted your exposure by a whopping 200% from just 1,000 to 3,000 fans. And if you combine this initial boost with the viral marketing benefits of a fan gate, you will get more reposts and reach even more additional fans – your exposure will be multiplied!
#4 – If possible, give yourself a music promotion budget for each release
A small promotional budget can go a long way towards getting your tracks in the hands of people who can share them to a larger audience. You don’t need much – even if it’s only $10 or $20 for a new release – you will see results if invested smartly.
Repost networks on SoundCloud are a very effective way of leveraging a small promo budget since users of these networks are primarily there to discover music. But even if you’re starting out from scratch and don’t have the numbers to attract a repost trading partner, you can still gain traction by paying for promotion on larger SoundCloud promo channels in your genre.
Even with a small $10 or $20 budget to promote on these channels, the real cream comes when you ‘reinvest’ the boost in your follower numbers in repost-for-repost deals with other artists or share future releases with your newly grown audience.
#5 – Don’t Just Submit To Blogs – Build Relationships With Blog Writers
Rather than just submitting blindly to blogs via their submission page or email address, you can help your chances of getting your track featured by doing a little research about prominent bloggers.
Learn about what makes them tick. Start commenting on their posts and become familiar to them. Share helpful information. Refer to things they care about. It will show that your well-informed and understand the scene they are writing about. If they live in your city don’t be afraid to reach out. Invite them for coffee or drinks, ask for advice, offer any ways you can help them. Review shows, releases or gear for them. Show them that you share the love.
This simple type of relationship building can go a long way quickly and the day will likely come when they ‘return the love’ and give you the much needed exposure and boost for your music and artist profile. Building a career is all about being proactive in your brand building, and making yourself known to an influencer is one of the best ways to speed up that process.
These are just a few of many more simple promotional methods you can use to help get your music out there. Try these out for yourself. Leave us your comments below or tell us about any other ideas that have worked for you.