With the music sharing space being as crowded as it is, generating followers has become a challenging task to say the least, but it is doable. Here an artist shares the best methods for getting genuine human beings to play you tracks.
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Guest Post by Floyd on Nodusk
If you’re wondering How to get SoundCloud followers organically, I’ll share the methods that actually worked for me and will most likely still work next year as well.
Let’s say you’ve created music for a while, and feel ready to get out there and make a name for yourself, but how?
Well I’ve tried many methods this year and included in this post are only the ones worth mentioning.
I’ve gotten over 100k Plays in the past year.
I will now show you how I did it.
Being a producer myself, it took some time to learn how to approach marketing myself. Now, I have techniques which allowed me to have over 100,000 plays in the past year on SoundCloud. It also has gotten me featured on various YouTube channels.
One of the key lessons I learned is the following:
Actual fan engagement holds a lot more value than plays, plays are meaningless if they do not convert into actions, such as: following you, paying for your content or attending your events.
I will only focus on getting your content heard and growing your listening base. Music should be where most of your time goes, so the focus will be on targeted marketing.
1. Find Active Youtube Channels
What you’re going to do now is start to gather contact information with a creative trick. Genres are a great area to start this! Say you make Future Bassmusic. Do the following on Youtube.
- Go on Youtube and type in “Future Bass Remix” in the search bar.
- After searching, Filter Results by Upload Date.
- You Now have a List of Active Promotional Channels on Youtube.
You could obviously repeat this process for any genre such as Trap, Electro House, Hybrid Trap, etc. Search your target genre and if the channel is worth submitting to, you’re most likely going to find their most recent video upload in the search results.
2. Create a list of Music Contacts
Make sure to spend enough time to check these sources. Go through blog posts and find out whether their interests align with your content. If they do, find out how to contact them. If you can bypass the generic demo submission e-mail and directly talk to a content creator, your odds of success will increase ten-fold.
How to Get their Contact?
Typically you can visit the ‘Contact Us’ page and somewhere on the page you will see their email above. About 80% they will also list their email with a contact form. Grab the email.
When you have the contact information, add it into a list which allows you to quickly see what kind of channel you are dealing with. Google Sheets / Excel is a great tool to do this:
As seen in the image above, there is a list showing the channel name, contact information (in the example it is an e-mail, but this could also be a Facebook page/username), interests and any other information that might be of importance.
3. Send Out Targeted Emails
Yes, we’re going to send lots of emails. Also this is not spamming. We are only going to be sending emails to channels and people who have openly provided their email for contact relating to song submissions or music related business. So they have given you their permission to email them, we’re just going to avoid using the contact form that everyone else will use.
An example
With all these combined, here is what your e-mail could look like:
Key Points:
• Recipient is addressed by first name.
• Quickly explain what you are emailing about, don’t give your life story.
• Follow up with a link to your related work (track url).
• Ask a question that prompts a reply from the person you’re emailing.
Finally, the signature includes all the necessary contact information: your website, social media. You could also include your phone number for more local contacts.
Track your message with SideKick
It is possible that your message will not be seen, which leaves you guessing if they liked what you sent or not. Fortunately, tracking apps such as SideKick or the tracking feature in Microsoft Outlook help. With these apps you can see whether your message is read.
This way, you can follow-up accordingly. SideKick is free and in use by many sales professionals. They use this to measure the effectiveness of their mailing efforts, and so can you.
The more people that know about you and your genuine value proposition, the better.
You can spend as many hours on this as you like, and it should be a priority if you are looking to grow. Make it a habit to spend a certain amount of minutes per day to keep yourself consistent and on the grind daily.
That being said, try to avoid using mass mailing template messages. Templates will be recognized by readers and get dismissed quickly. You are competing with plenty people for their attention. Spamming them will not increase your odds.
4. Check the Results
So you’ve sent at least 25 emails I’m sure right? Now what?
If you’ve followed the steps above, you can see if your e-mail is read and work from there.
If someone keeps opening your email that means they might be interested. A well timed follow up email might be just what it takes to have them feature you as they’re sorting through all the other submissions they got that week.
In the unfortunate situation that your track gets rejected, be grateful they listened in the first place. In many cases people will be taken back by your sincere gratitude and maybe even keep you in mind for another release in the future. If this happens, you could always ask for feedback to learn more about your contact. This is knowledge you could use for future productions.
Worst case scenario, if you send 150 emails and not a single person is interested, then maybe you need to practice more or change your style up. If you don’t innovate, you’ll never get anywhere.
Now you should be able to find, approach and build relationships with people. Additionally, you now have a few ways in which you can use their responses to help you grow further as a musician.
Hopefully this information helps you. If you have any questions or feedback, let me know!
Thank you for reading,
Floyd (aka) GUARD1AN