Get more real plays, fans and followers for your music with these 5 promotion hacks from fellow artists
You spent days finishing, mixing and mastering your latest track… your upload to SoundCloud just hit 100%. It’s done! Your new tune is finally ready for the world!
Now it’s time to show off your music promotion skills. You need to get your track heard by as many real fans as possible.
But how?
We have written a ton about music promotion and covered lots of basics such as our ultimate free music promotion tips and tricks, why your music is not getting the exposure it deserves and how to fix it, how to make your free downloads rise above the rest, and more…
But that’s just scratching the surface. How else can you promote your music? Or more importantly:
What do other artists do that’s working for them?
We reached out to our community of creators and just asked. Here are some of the top music promotion and marketing hacks artists use – directly from the source.
Together we create! And together we promote!
#1: Instagram promotion hack (submitted by Gattix)
“Instagram is an extremely powerful promotional tool, and I’ve found an effective way to promote tracks and quickly build a genuine fanbase on social media without spending any money. The great thing about this method, is that your track’s plays and Instagram following will continue to grow as long as you continue to do the work.
It’s a very straight forward method that connects with like-minded music fans, and uses Instagram videos to efficiently promote your tracks to these fans. As a prerequisite, it’s definitely recommended to have an Instagram set up with at least *some* content,
including a profile picture and professional username. But that’s all you need.
Let me outline the steps in as much detail as I can:
Step 1: Create content
This is the easy step. Create a 1-minute long video for Instagram featuring the best part of your track, using the album cover as the background. This is very simple and can be done in any free video editing software iMovie or Windows Movie Maker. If your able to do more advanced video editing (visualizers), then even better, but it’s not at all necessary.
Step 2: Post content
Post the video on your Instagram, making sure the thumbnail shows the album art. For your “website” in your Instagram bio, link to your track and make sure to direct people to the link in your bio at some point in the description of your video. The goal here is to make discovering and finding your track as easy as possible. When people open your Instagram profile (which I’ll get to later), you want them to see your latest post as a video with an album art, open the video and hear the best part of the song, and be able to click the link in your bio to get to the rest of the song if they like it.
It’s also useful to post relevant hashtags on a comment on your video. Don’t post these on the description as to remain as clean and professional as possible. If you post the hashtags in a comment underneath five dashed lines as shown below, the comment will be hidden by default. (You can create this template in your phone notes and copy it into the comment) Example:
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#dubstep #rave #edm #bass #headbang #remix #etc #etc
Step 3: Connect
This is where the work comes in. The goal here is to discover people on Instagram who like music similar to the track you are promoting and the video you created. There are a few ways to do this.
– Browse hashtags
– People who follow similar artists
– People who like similar videos/songs/artist’s posts
When you find these people, go into their profile and connect with them personally. Like their latest picture, post a unique comment, and give them a follow. When you do this, there is a high chance that they will notice and at least click on your profile to see what you’re about. When they do this, they will see you are an artist and they’ll be able to easily listen to your new track on your latest post. If they like the song, they’ll click the link in your bio and access your track.
If you’re going through a list of followers, or posts under a hashtag, this process does not take much time. You can easily connect with at least two people every minute. It’s surprising how high of a turnover you can get by establishing a quick personal connection and creating easy access to your song on your page.
Example:
I’ll run through a quick personal example that actually worked for me:
I created a remix of a track by Kayzo. I followed the first step and made a 60-second clip featuring my favorite part of the remix, and made sure the background showed an album art that was a variation of the original track’s art.
I posted this video on Instagram, and I also posted in my bio about “my new Kayzo remix” and included a link to the track. At first glance at my profile, it was very clear that I had made a Kayzo remix and you could quickly listen to it on my latest post. In the comments of my video, I posted a number of hashtags relating to the genre, Kayzo, and even Kayzo’s latest shows and festivals he performed at.
See post here: https://www.instagram.com/p/BaSZkWhgPJs/?taken-by=gattixmusic
I began browsing the #Kayzo hashtag and opened every picture or video that people posted at his shows. I liked the post, made a genuine and unique comment related to the post, and followed the user. I also went through Kayzo’s followers and did the same thing.
NOTE: This example is in the case of a remix. If the track is an original, just repeat the same process using similar artists to yourself.
Results:
This track was one of my first releases, and I began this promotion with virtually no followers. I connected with Kayzo’s fans using this method for an hour or less a day. After two weeks, I had grown my Instagram from ~0 to ~600 followers and my track had gotten over 2,000 plays.
This method is an excellent way for new producers to kick start their debut tracks and build a genuine social media following. As long as you continue to do the process, then you WILL see organic growth in your track, as well as your Instagram following. The best part is that it doesn’t involve bots, scams, money, or fake fans. This is by far one of the most efficient ways
to place your track in front of potential fans and establish a relationship with them in the process, especially when you are starting out and don’t yet have the network to promote your track any other way.”
This promotion hack, tip or trick was submitted by Gattix. You can follow and support Gattix here:
SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/gattixmusic
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gattixmusic/
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/gattixmusic
#2: Related plays promotion hacks for SoundCloud (submitted by Black Smoke Inc.)
“We use playlists and reposts to get ‘related plays’. It’s really two separate tricks.
Trick 1:
Put your song posted on SoundCloud in a SoundCloud playlist with the title of a popular song and artist. This will bring in lots of traffic because if I can make a playlist with the same name as Rich The Kid’s new tape then I’m gonna be getting some of his traffic on my tracks from SoundCloud Search.
Trick 2:
Not everyone knows that reposting other people’s music can actually give you plays as well and not just them. Here is how:
I repost my song to another SoundCloud channel I own and use for reposts. Then I repost a popular Billboard song right afterwards. Now I will be getting ‘related plays’ off of the popular song because the first track to hit the feed of my followers is the Billboard song and then my song will be second. If the followers keep listening through the Billboard song, my song will start playing automatically right afterwards, giving me ‘related plays’.
It’s been 4 months and I don’t spend $. I use my brain. I already got thousands of plays from posting correctly, reposting when people drop songs, making playlists when labels drop tapes, just making it easier to get related plays through SoundCloud’s Search or through listening. Your song will come up way more with this trick.
The more you do this, the bigger the results. If you just repost once or create one playlist, you may get little results. But keep doing it and results will grow.”
This promotion hack, tip or trick was submitted by Black Smoke Inc. You can follow and support Black Smoke Inc. here:
SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/blacksmokex
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/blacksmokeinc/
#3: Funny dance video hack (submitted by DJ N3ff)
“My trick is to layer your new song on a funny dance video, shuffle video or a video which attracts attention.
Check out this example: https://www.instagram.com/p/BhElOc5h5wk/?taken-by=n.3.f.f
Dance videos can be bought for $5 on fiverr or similar platforms.
I use a video editor like Premiere Pro to layer my songs on those videos.
A good way to get reposts and likes on this video is to write a caption like “Your squad when your favorite song plays”
This promotion hack, tip or trick was submitted by DJ N3ff. You can follow and support DJ N3ff here:
SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/djn3ff
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/n.3.f.f/
YouTube: https://www.facebook.com/DJN3FFOfficial
#4: Grow your email list hack (submitted by Disco Motte)
“With an e-mail-pool of 25k people I simply send out newsletters for the announcements of new tracks. Emailing fans with info on your new track is not a secret music promotion hack – it’s pretty basic music marketing – but what’s important is how you can hack your way to such a big email list:
#1: Have a newsletter sign-in box on your website
#2: Have a newsletter sign-in link on Facebook and any other social platform you use
#3: Collect contact info from your LinkedIn network
#4: If you are registered for any music events such as IMS, ADE, or WMC, work with their list of attendees
#5: Use a download gate to get fan email addresses for each download (such as Hypeddit 😉
Email is a great way to stay connected with fans since you fully own the contact and not some other social platform that may go away in the future.”
This promotion hack, tip or trick was submitted by Disco Motte. You can follow and support Disco Motte here:
SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/discomotte
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mottedj/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/iammotte
#5: Subreddit promo hack (submitted by Dani Rosenoer)
“Post your creation to Reddit, with an engaging descriptive title, on a *relevant* subreddit page.
Important: Make sure to engage with the site’s rules and alternate the sources you share from (not just your main channel that corresponds with your brand name). It’s best not to share repeatedly from the same YouTube account and just ‘shamelessly’ self-promote all the time.
Some of the content you post should be interesting material with variety and some pages will not tolerate repeated self-plugging so be careful and check the rules of each subreddit you post in.
Example: I’m a pianist so I usually post on the piano subreddit. When I covered a Muse song, I shared it on the Muse subreddit: https://redd.it/855jnm
The audience enjoyed it, so I got a few thousand views from just one post.”
This promotion hack, tip or trick was submitted by Dani Rosenoer. You can follow and support Dani Rosenoer here:
SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/danirosenoer
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/DaniRosenoer
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/danirosenoer
Now over to you: What is your ultimate music promo hack?
Post it in the comments below and let’s keep this list growing as a resource for artists around the world. Thank you all for joining!