Exactly why give away your content Big promotional SoundCloud?
You may be asking yourself: "why are Budi and Jeff telling me to allow somebody else to host my music? Shouldn't We feature my music on my page? inches
The particular answer is not so black and white. In case you have 10. 000 followers and a promotional channel prepared to upload has 55. 000, you need to factor in the follower-to-play ratio of these account. Many programs dilute their audience by over-reposting to the point where the listeners just don't care anymore.
However, as most channels gate to themselves, the original artists and sister stations, the gate aligns the interests of everyone included. Many promo channels will work their latest uploads hard, using their sister stations and trading reposts (where they repost other people's uploads in exchange for them reposting theirs) to get more exposure.
Turning into networks
Big promotional channels branch out by creating sister channels that can repost their releases and can be employed in repost-trades.
The accounts are generally grown by download gate introduction and can subsequently upload records and include the first accounts into those individual gates. The result is an interdependent network that benefits when any of its assets gets more exposure, reposting each other peoples releases endlessly.
Let's take deep house/melodic house channel Aux London for example. Click on their "about me" section and we can easily see a whole lot of linked channels, but what does that all suggest social babie?
You observe a set of stations under "Aux Family" and then another set of "Aux Approved". In between we see "Resident DJs", we'll ignore that for the moment.
Just about all of the "Aux Family" channels are all controlled by the singular owner of the Aux London, uk network with Aux London, uk and Aux Deep being the two main property of the network. A glance at the various Aux Family channels show that the remaining four range from 15 to 40K followers. While these may host tracks or combines, their primary use is for reposting tracks that the Aux London system is supporting.
Further down we see "Aux Approved". These channels don't fall under the Aux network tend to be partner channels that Aux may be loosely affiliated with. These partner channels tend to be repost partners that business among each other.
Thus why should you try and get Aux London to upload one of your tracks? Because a good promotional channel will be incentivized to setup effort to promote the record, because it's going to help grow their accounts.
In addition, large networks often use freelance or on-retainer publicists to help promote their material. The good network might bring double the promotion and save you hundreds of money in PR, assuming they have a publicist working with them. Read more about Music PR and what publicists do here.
Getting featured
It can be hard to get positioned on a strong SoundCloud promotional label. Some obtain countless submissions a month and upload no more than 1-2 tracks for the reason that timeframe.
Promo channels are increasingly popular and are your same over-supply of material that websites (especially those indexed on Media hype Machine) have in the past years.
The "do's and don't's" of harrassing to SoundCloud repost and promotional labels follow the same guidelines that we outlined in our article how to pitch to bloggers. As always, act as be-friend SoundCloud channel owners rather than relying on basic submission emails.
One way to do this is via Facebook via the "Find friends" search tool. Suppose you're looking to reach a member of the "Future House Music" SoundCloud label. One way to do this is to input "Future Residence Music" under the "Employer" section of "find friends". Following that you can take his name and head on to a more public forum, such as Twitter, to try and reach out.
We've mentioned before that Facebook pitch may be regarded awkwardly as it's a medium for more personal associations, however as most channel operators are young, it's actually their primary medium. Do not afraid to shoot them a message introducing yourself, complimenting a recent upload and segueing to a pitch.
Repost trading
Repost trading is the bread and butter of SoundCloud promotion and we're going to teach you how to make use of it to increase your reach.
A repost trade is a shared agreement between you and another SoundCloud account proprietor, typically of a similar size, to repost each other's uploads to find them exposure.
Not all reposts are considered equal, as performers tend to have a much better play to follower ratio than marketing channels and networks. There is a correlation between the frequency with which a free account reposts and the share of their audience that actually listens to those reposts, which might make clear why artists (who usually repost less than promo channels) have a higher ratio. Their reposts are thus more valuable.
Trades are made by channels of roughly the same size, which are split in so called divisions. Where a 1 . 1000 follower account might not exactly want to trade with a 250 follower account, a 25. 000 account will likely want to industry with one with 20. 000 followers. The absolute difference matters less as follower counts increase.
This effect is especially clear with channels above 50. 000 followers, whom industry up to as high as 80. 000 supporters. Above the 10. 1000, 25. 000, 50. 1000 and 100. 000 follower thresholds, trading becomes easier, because there's fewer people to trade with.
Anything to realize here is that some networks may declare to be able to repost to 100. 1000 followers, by aggregating the follower counts of their different channels. But since the sister channels of the major account are often developed through gate inclusion, there are a major audience overlap.
Another tactic is that in the process of trading, two accounts might include one another in their most recent release, committing to reposting the other artists release for say one repost for seven times straight.
