How To Get Followers On Soundcloud
Promote and improve your stats – SoundCloud Help Center
To make your profile stand out two things need to happen: master your talent and put in the effort to gain visibility on your sounds. Work smarter with these tips.
A picture is worth a 1000 plays
First impressions stick, design an attractive avatar and profile header that’s easy to recognize. For easy recognition, consider emphasizing your profile name in the artwork. Remember your avatar appears on followers’ Streams as a smaller version, simplicity translates nicely into different sizes; make it simple and eye catching. An easily memorable and recognizable artwork will help you get noticed.
Amplification
Sharing your SoundCloud profile to all your social networks online will further expand your fan base. One good turn deserves another, so make sure to do the same on your social networks, make your SoundCloud profile stand out on your blog, Facebook, and Twitter. Take advantage of your profile and track descriptions to give an introduction about you and your work, tell a story, and ask people to click the repost button if they like your content. Encouraging people to share your music will result in more shares than not telling them to do so, and this will lead to more followers.
Google search optimization
Google likes space. Instead of User123 make it User 123. Google also likes repetition. Repeating your Display Name in your Profile URL and linking to your other social networks will help you climb up the ladder on Google search results.
Plan your next move with Insights
Creator Insights provide you with top plays by city making your next tour a no brainer. Take a look at your top cities, Rio ranking high? Grab your mic and sunhat. A like minded fan could be your next collaborator, check out who is checking up on you with plays by SoundCloud profile. With Plays by App know where your fanbase is spreading by identifying the 3rd party apps supplementing your plays. Last but not least, did you become an overnight celebrity with a sudden surge of plays? Find out what blog picked up your track with plays by website.
Build a network
Networking and collaboration is a two way street. The best way to gain meaningful followers is to be one yourself. Use the Search and Charts to find and follow like minded creators, listen carefully and give honest feedback often. Think quality over quantity, tailor your suggestions, constructive criticism, or praise according to each track and profile. Fellow creators will value your genuine contribution and will do the same for you.
Power of consistency
Even the best of profiles will go silent without dedication to consistency. Consistently being online and uploading fresh sounds often creates accountability, establishes a reputation, and will make you more discoverable.
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9 Ways to Actually Get Heard On SoundCloud – LANDR Blog
SoundCloud is the largest and most important online music community. They’ve disrupted the way we understand online music distribution. They give independent artists the space they need for DIY music promotion.
But they offer tons of other useful tools as well. Using them effectively will amplify your project and get SoundCloud plays from the SoundCloud followers that matter.
Here’s our 9 SoundCloud promotion tips to get your music heard:
Tag for success
Add a “Buy” link
Tell a story with your waveform
Get your album art right
Share tracks privately before your release
Publish your best
Change the audio without losing comments, likes, and plays
Share with care
Link to your SoundCloud
There’s a lot of them. This simple guide will get you educated on the most useful ones for growing your following.
Hot Tip: Read our Music Promotion Guide for more tips on self promotion and getting your music heard.
1. Tag for success
How can new fans find your music? Well, one of the best ways is to tag your music.
Tagging makes you discoverable when a listener is searching SoundCloud.
The better your tags, the easier you are to find.
The best way to tag is to be honest. If you made a drum & bass track, then set the main genre to Drum & Bass. Add moods and a location to your tags as well. It all helps.
Stick to one main genre to keep things clear. Adding a bunch of genres won’t make your track any more findable.
The more concise and accurate your tags are, the more easily your music will get discovered by the listeners that wanna hear it most.
Hot Tip: Tag and link to your collaborators SoundCloud in the track description. Use an ‘@’ before their SoundCloud name to link their profile. It’s great for cross-promotion and telling the story of your process.
2. Add a ‘Buy’ Link
Getting listens and likes is nice. But likes and listens won’t buy you that new mic you’ve been eyeing.
Luckily SoundCloud lets you add a ‘Buy’ link to your track upload. Just click on the ‘Metadata’ tab when you’re uploading.
Add the right links: Buy on iTunes, Beatport, Juno, Bandcamp or whatever else you use to sell your music online.
Hot Tip: If you have a pro account you can change the button text to anything you want.
Change it to Stream on Spotify and link to get some extra streaming juice. Or write ‘Donate’ and link to a Patreon or a PayPal. You’ll be surprised how many super-fans out there will support your music.
3. Tell A Story With Your Waveform
SoundCloud allows fans to comment on your waveform. But y’know who else should be commenting on the waveform? YOU!
Use the waveform comments to tell your fans and community about your process. Be transparent about how you made your track. Ask for feedback and mention specific sections.
For example: If you’re not sure about a section of your track, comment on the waveform where the part starts.
Something like: “Not sure about the bass here. Let me know what you think” is the perfect play for getting feedback from your community.
You don’t have to be completely done a track to publish it either. Publish drafts, get feedback, and make your music better.
4. Get your album art right
Album art matters. Especially on SoundCloud.
If your track gets embedded on a blog your artwork will be there. If you share your track to Facebook your album art goes there too.
Your album art or track artwork represents your music no matter where it goes. So it’s mega important.
Before anyone hits play the artwork attached to your track has to stand out. So make it count and choose something that represents your music and you.
Your album art or track artwork represents your music no matter where it goes.
For best results always use a JPG or a PNG that’s at least 800 x 800 pixels.
Hot Tip: Album art is a perfect reason to invest a bit of money into your project. If you can’t make the image you want yourself, then hire a designer or photographer that fits your budget.
5. Share tracks privately before your release
SoundCloud lets you share private links to your tracks.
It’s great for sharing unfinished tracks with collaborators, sending demos to labels or blogs, or contacting other outlets like radio stations with exclusives.
Sharing a private link gives your music the personal touch and a sense of exclusivity that is great for reaching out to tastemakers.
Sharing a private link gives your music the personal touch and a sense of exclusivity that is great for reaching out to tastemakers.
It’s super easy to do. Just upload a track and set it to private. Save it and go to your profile. Click the track you want to share privately and hit the ‘share’ button below the waveform.
you’ll see a private share URL that is unique to your track! You can even make a whole playlist private if you wanna share your entire new album.
Plus, you can reset the the private link at any time to make your private links time sensitive.
6. Publish your best
Your track is finally done. You worked long and hard on it. You’re finally happy with how it sounds and you think it’s ready for the world.
So you click share and sit back waiting for those plays. It’s a hit! The track gets some nice buzz and people seem to be liking it!
But a couple days later you realize that your song needs a minor tweak…
Maybe someone you admire commented and told you a hot tip on how to boost the bass.
Or maybe you mastered it and you want the mastered version on your SoundCloud. But if you take it down, you’ll lose all those plays, likes and important feedback…
7. Change the audio without losing Comments, likes and plays
Don’t fret. With a Pro subscription on SoundCloud you can swap out the audio on any SoundCloud upload at any time.
And the best part? You don’t lose all those plays, likes and comments from your fans.
It’s perfect for sharing unfinished songs to get feedback. Tweak your track based on the critiques and re-upload any time.
Hitting share doesn’t have to be final. Swap the audio and make sharing part of your production process.
8. Share with care
Don’t just post your own music. Re-post artists that you’re excited about or songs and mixes that you can’t stop listening to.
Sharing other artists and helping your audience discover new music builds trust and authority and is a really humble move. If you hear something, say something!
If you hear something, say something!
You SoundCloud is a community. So support it by sharing other artists in your feed. If you share other artist’s music there’s a better chance they’ll share yours!
Reposting another artist’s music is a great first step to starting a relationship as well. Relationships that lead to gigs, collaborations and helpful partnerships. All that good community stuff. So build the community you want to be a part of.
So build the community you want to be a part of.
9. Link to your SoundCloud
Sharing your new tracks to your SoundCloud community is great. But why stop there? Put your tracks out into the world!
Put your tracks out into the world!
Share them to all your promotion platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
Once you upload a track share it to all your platforms under the ‘Share’ tab.
You can also auto-post your tracks to all your social platforms automatically by linking your accounts. Just head over to your Account Settings to manage your Connections.
Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook and Google+ are all connectable for auto-posting. Connect your accounts and get your tracks into all those ears!
Maintain Your Motion
SoundCloud is a tool. You have to use it right to make it work.
These tips will help you get the most out of your SoundCloud and make it work for you wherever you’re sharing your music.
So share lots, share often and share smart.
SoundCloud – How To Get Your Music Noticed | Bandvista.com
In the 1990s I worked as a talent scout and band manager. I loved scouting for labels. I was lucky enough to work with a number of small independents and a major label. I would spend my nights visiting rehearsal studios and live music venues.
During the day I would work for the bands I managed. I would spend hours phoning labels and making new contacts. I would spend a small fortune duplicating demos, stuffing them into mailers and taking them to my local post office.
Now the game has changed. In one way it is a lot easier to get your music seen by the right people. In another way, it is a lot harder for artists to get noticed.
With thousands of hours, of new music, added daily, SoundCloud is an ocean of new music. It is also one of the number one tools used by talent scouts, though artists continue to make the same mistakes when using this service.
Here are some things to consider if you want to get noticed on SoundCloud.
Only The Best
Many artists use SoundCloud as a showcase for their music catalog, by uploading everything from demos to live performances. This is a mistake if you want to get signed.
Your Soundcloud page should be for the best, the very best. You should treat your SoundCloud page as a showcase. When I was stuffing cassette tapes into an envelope in the early 90s, I would only have three tracks on a tape. The very best three tracks. Artists are much more fortunate now. They can showcase entire albums, but they should be selective.
If the music on your page sounds old and not up to your current standards, remove it. If songs are badly mixed and edited, remove them. If badly mixed tracks from live performances are there, remove them.
Get Plays
Getting plays on SoundCloud is fairly easy with little effort. SoundCloud is a community that rewards interaction, so the best way to get thousands of plays and look popular is to find other SoundCloud users with similar music and tastes to your own.
Interact with them, like their music. If you like their music, they will come looking for your music. Keep interacting, make new friends. This is a music platform, and we all love talking about music.
Get friends and family to play and like your music and get them to comment. I would set up a SoundCloud account for my granny if got me a few plays and a nice comment. They all count.
The final thing you can do is spend $5 and buy 1000 plays of a specialist company. A quick Google search will throw up lots of companies who provide this service. I know some people frown on this. Personally, I don’t.
If a SoundCloud page has nothing but paid for plays, it is easy to spot. As the play count will be high and there will be no comments or interactions. If a page has lots of interactions and a block of paid plays somewhere in the middle, nobody will ever know. Music scouts look for talent and popularity above all other things. Play the game a little. Major record labels buy plays all the time (cough, allegedly). So why can’t you? Just do it in a smart way, just like they do.
If you use SoundCloud in a clever way, you can have thousands of plays and followers in a very short period of time.
Create Your Image
You want your page to look popular and professional. It is not hard to create a good image for yourself and look professional. Design a logo. You can do this yourself with free software or a pencil and paper. There are a million and one ways to create a good logo.
If you can’t do it yourself, grab a graphic designer of a website like Fiverr for $5, and they will make it for you. It is so easy to look good, and it does not have to cost the earth.
Write an interesting biography, don’t be boring, Be creative. Give your listeners something to read while they listen to your music. If they are engaged and interested in your page, they will stay there for a longer time.
You can then use your logo and bio across the rest of your social media. This will create a unified image and make you look professional and like you mean business. Use the same logo on everything. Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and Band Camp.
Music fans love this; talent scouts also love it. You will love it as you will feel professional. If you use SoundCloud effectively, you will gain followers who genuinely like your music. You will also have a brand and a page that looks attractive to talent scouts.
Frequently Asked Questions about how to get followers on soundcloud
How do you get popular on SoundCloud?
Here’s our 9 SoundCloud promotion tips to get your music heard:Tag for success.Add a “Buy” link.Tell a story with your waveform.Get your album art right.Share tracks privately before your release.Publish your best.Change the audio without losing comments, likes, and plays.Share with care.More items…
Is it hard to get noticed on SoundCloud?
In another way, it is a lot harder for artists to get noticed. With thousands of hours, of new music, added daily, SoundCloud is an ocean of new music. It is also one of the number one tools used by talent scouts, though artists continue to make the same mistakes when using this service.
How do I get my song noticed on SoundCloud?
How to Promote Your Music with SoundCloudShare your music publicly- … Make it easy for bloggers to access your tunes- … Share your works-in-progress privately- … Give away free tracks. … Stay engaged: check your comments, and comment on others’ waveforms. … Join “Groups” … Host a remix contest. … Follow, follow, follow.More items…•Aug 2, 2012
