Repost Channels On Soundcloud
SoundCloud Marketing, Repost Trading & Promo Channels
The first two articles in our outbound marketing series covered the main vessel of the “PR Game”, the music blog. While blogs will always remain an important part of the music PR industry for both consumers and artists alike, musicians have recently started looking away from blogs and focusing on the key metric by which most people analyze music: play counts.
Features on certain blogs certainly contribute to play counts, however if your sheer focus is getting more exposure, you might consider shifting your focus from blogs to SoundCloud Promotion instead.
Every week on our main Heroic SoundCloud channel we receive dozens of SoundCloud messages asking us to consider reviewing demos or for SoundCloud reposts. Such requests may already be part of your regular SoundCloud marketing arsenal, however we’ve thrown in some tips on how you can improve your pitching.
In this article we unveil the SoundCloud promotional game, outline the key players and explain how you can use different tools to boost your play counts and reach a greater audience.
Contents1 Not all plays and followers are equal2 SoundCloud promotional channels3 Like to download gates4 Why give away your content? 5 Becoming networks6 Getting featured7 Repost trading8 Paid Promotion9 What’s next?
Not all plays and followers are equal
The SoundCloud stream is valuable real estate, as unlike Facebook and recently Instagram, the news-feed shows all uploads and reposts of the accounts you follow chronologically, without an algorithm filtering the content.
With 1. 000 followers, each of them have a window of opportunity to see your latest upload or repost, assuming it’s not snowed under by other content crowding their feed. This is much better than the 10-20% like-to-view ratio that you see on the average non-boosted Facebook post.
The comparative value of a follower on the more audiocentric platforms (SoundCloud, YouTube, Spotify) is also higher than on socials such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Users are already there to consume music and are more predisposed to liking your material than if it pops up in their feed whilst they’re trying to read the latest news or stalk their ex-girlfriends.
In our article on getting more fans on social media, we discuss how the audio centric social platforms are at the top of the fan funnel, leading the acquisition of potential fans. The other socials are tools that create the conversion to fandom and eventual superfan-dom.
The follower-funnel is the ultimate goal of increasing your reach.
It’s no wonder that artists today are doing anything in their power to get more traction on SoundCloud.
There is a whole arsenal of strategies you can employ in order to get more traction on SoundCloud ranging from repost trades, to working with repost networks, music promotional channels and using like-to-download gates.
SoundCloud promotional channels
These host other artist’s music on their own account and help broadcast the music to their audience, sometimes reaching hundreds of thousands more than if the artists were to upload individually.
These accounts are often dubbed SoundCloud labels and tend to differ from traditional record labels such as Heroic, Monstercat and Spinnin, in the sense that most don’t distribute music to stores (Spotify, Apple Music, iTunes etc). They’re usually run by young founders, are lenient with how legitimate content needs to be in order to get uploaded (many don’t screen for uncleared samples) and relationships with the artists are maintained through Facebook chat.
Nonetheless, in similar vein to YouTube promotional channels (such as Mr Suicide Sheep and Trap Nation), some highly successful channels take their growth and use that to pivot into real record labels, setting up distribution, signing records and monetizing their copyrights.
The concept is simple: for audiovisual blogs, content is the growth driver.
If records perform well, they will get traction and drive traffic back to their accounts. A like-to-download gate on the releases is going to accelerate that process and because all the artists want exposure they’re also going to be reposting the content. The bigger they grow, the easier it’s going to be to acquire that content, so it’s an auto-catalytic process.
SoundCloud promotional channels tend to be genre specific. The first accounts grew hand in hand with the rise of electronic music. Originally “tropical house” (think Kygo) and “future bass” (think San Holo) were the first genres to be widely adopted, fueling their trajectory to mainstream EDM adoption.
Most of them started promoting one genre and then branched out into more as they launched sister accounts and launched promotional networks, where they leverage each account’s individual reach through reposts and gating.
Tracks are usually submitted for upload or repost via a direct SoundCloud message or by Facebook message to the founders.
Check out our list of top 10 SoundCloud promotional networks here covering electronic music sub-genres from future trap to tropical house and more.
Like to download gates
We need to segue to like-to-download gates for you to fully understand this process.
Like to download gates facilitate the exchange of content for social actions.
In other words, you can give away an MP3 of a track in exchange for a SoundCloud follow, repost, Facebook like, Twitter followers, Spotify follower and so forth. New gating destinations are being added constantly as social platforms rise to relevancy and introduce new features.
When you upload a track to SoundCloud or YouTube, you can customize the buy button to say ‘Free Download’ and link it to the gate for that particular release, or add it to the video description. In turn, a portion of the listeners are going to want to download the record, but before they can do so, they have to perform the required social interactions.
This phenomenon has changed how music is promoted as most gates allow multiple users to be included in exchange for one download. In other words, for this one MP3, you may have to follow the original artist, a promotional channel and a record label.
This has aligned the interests of the parties involved and means that if there’s an upload of a release on either of those party’s channels, all the other parties included in the gate are incentivized to promote it. After all, more exposure leads to more people clicking the gate, leads to more followers for everyone. When you factor in the repost gating feature on SoundCloud, the effects compound quick.
Services that facilitate like-to-downloading include Artist Union, Hive, and ToneDen. We’re going to be dedicating a full article on download gates soon.
Learn how to set up a Follow-To-Download Gate and get more fans!
Why give away your content?
You may be asking yourself: “why are Budi and Jeff telling me to allow somebody else to host my music? Shouldn’t I feature my music on my page? ”
The answer is not so black and white. Assuming you have 10. 000 followers and a promotional channel willing to upload has 50. 000, you need to factor in the follower-to-play ratio of their account. Many channels dilute their audience by over-reposting to the point where the listeners just don’t care anymore.
On the other hand, as most channels gate to themselves, the original artists and sister channels, the gate aligns the interests of everyone included. Most promo channels will work their latest uploads hard, using their sister channels and trading reposts (where they repost other people’s uploads in exchange for them reposting theirs) to get more exposure.
Becoming networks
Big promotional channels branch out by creating sister channels that can repost their releases and can be used in repost-trades.
The accounts are typically grown by download gate inclusion and can in turn upload records and include the original accounts into those respective gates. The result is an interdependent network that benefits when any of its assets gets more exposure, reposting each other’s releases endlessly.
Let’s take deep house/melodic house channel Aux London for example. Click on their “about me” section and we can see a whole bunch of linked channels, but what does that all mean?
Getting a premiere on a SoundCloud channel like Aux London can expose your music to tens of thousands more people.
We can see a list of channels under “Aux Family” and then another list of “Aux Approved”. In between we see “Resident DJs”, we’ll ignore that for now.
All of the “Aux Family” channels are all operated by the singular owner of the Aux London network with Aux London and Aux Deep being the two main assets of the network. A glance at the different Aux Family channels show that the remaining four range from 15 to 40K followers. While these may host tracks or mixes, their primary use is for reposting tracks that the Aux London network is supporting.
Further down we see “Aux Approved”. These channels don’t fall under the Aux network but are partner channels that Aux may be loosely affiliated with. These partner channels are often repost partners that trade amongst each other.
So why should you try and get Aux London to upload one of your tracks? Because a good promotional channel will be incentivized to put in effort to promote the record, because it’s going to help grow their accounts.
Plus, large networks often use freelance or on-retainer publicists to help promote their material. A good network might bring double the promotion and save you hundreds of dollars 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 placed on a strong SoundCloud promotional label. Some receive hundreds of submissions a month and upload no more than 1-2 tracks in that timeframe.
Promo channels are increasingly popular and are experiencing the same over-supply of material that blogs (especially those indexed on Hype Machine) have in the past years.
The “do’s and don’t’s” of pitching to SoundCloud repost and promotional labels follow the same guidelines that we outlined in our article on how to pitch to bloggers. As always, try to befriend SoundCloud channel owners rather than relying on general 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 House 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 pitches may be regarded awkwardly as it’s a medium for more personal relationships, however as most channel operators are young, it’s actually their primary medium. Don’t be 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 use it to expand your reach.
A repost trade is a mutual agreement between you and another SoundCloud account owner, typically of a similar size, to repost each other’s uploads to get them exposure.
Not all reposts are considered equal, as artists tend to have a better play to follower ratio than promotional channels and networks. There is a correlation between the frequency with which an account reposts and the share of their audience that actually listens to those reposts, which might explain 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 equal size, which are divided in so called tiers. Where a 1. 000 follower account may not want to trade with a 250 follower account, a 25. 000 account will likely want to trade with one with 20. 000 followers. The absolute difference matters less as follower counts increase.
This effect is especially obvious with channels above 50. 000 followers, whom trade up to as high as 80. Above the 10. 000, 25. 000, 50. 000 and 100. 000 follower thresholds, trading becomes easier, because there’s fewer people to trade with.
Something to realize here is that some networks may claim to be able to repost to 100. 000 followers, by aggregating the follower counts of their different channels. But as the sister channels of a primary account are often grown through gate inclusion, there’s 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’s release for say one repost for seven days straight.
Things to keep in mind when considering pitching for a repost trade:
Do they repost at all? This one is a big one for artists. Some artists do not repost at all on their SoundCloud pages, others only repost for friends signed to the same record label or collective.
Labels often restrict reposts to their label artists and both tend to be pickier about what they support than the average promotional channel.
Are they genre specific? The fastest way to dilute an audience is to confront them with music they are not predisposed to liking. Before you pitch, check whether the artist or channel is curating a specific sound or is more lenient.
How often do they repost? Most networks and labels stick to regimented schedules and a part of basic research is finding out what times a day they repost at and with what frequency.
Paid Promotion
If you haven’t had any luck finding a strong promotional channel to upload your release, or have opted to release it on your own account, you may want to increase your exposure by reaching for the wallet.
Paid SoundCloud promotion usually happens in the following forms:
The first way would be directly to pay large SoundCloud channels directly to repost your track. Pricing varies across channels. You could bundle reposts of individual channels at $20 a pop or pay a larger channel say $100 for promotion across their total network.
Alternatively you could hire a publicist or promotional network to run a SoundCloud repost PR campaign for you. They then utilize their own channels to repost, but also use those for trading, in order to get your asset exposure. Pricing varies on the reach of the reposts, so they might charge you for a collective exposure to 500. 000 followers.
Because the promo channels cannot guarantee that their reposts will bring in a fixed number of plays, they are incentivized to focus the pricing around the volume of exposure, rather than the actual plays received. It’s tricky because it means you’re paying for the process rather than for the result.
We have yet to experiment with paid SoundCloud promotion but have heard mixed stories. This is an area that we’re curious about – curious enough to bring in an outside statistician to crunch some numbers on SoundCloud reposts, read about what we found here.
With regards to paid promotion, it’s risky to become reliant on others to help get you exposure and may be considered unethical, but can also contribute to getting your music to traction earlier.
What’s next?
For most artists, operating within the SoundCloud realm will come more naturally than in the blogosphere or Spotify game. We hope that this guide will help you maximize SoundCloud marketing efforts on the platform and if you’re interested more in the Spotify game check out our guide to that here.
For more strategies like these, stay tuned for the Third Edition of the SoundCloud Bible, which will be coming out shortly.
Be sure to also check out our free list of 10 SoundCloud promotional networks below and good luck!
Yours,
Budi & Jeff
Any free soundcloud/youtube repost/promotion channels with …
medium following as in(1k-5k plays on each track they promote)Log in or sign up to leave a comment
level 1 · 5y you find one or two channels that fit your needs, look at their related videos/tracks, or featured profiles/channels and see what other promos are similar or working with them. You can also look up a track on YouTube and scroll until you find an upload of “medium size” as you described, then check out their channel. Places like Strobe Network are great places to startlevel 1Massive followings are always fake, they are complete scams. How can a channel have or a person have 200k fans and no plays, or 2k fans and 350k plays. Look for generic comments (even on bigger artists pages) nice!!, this is great!, omg that drop! (song doesnt have a drop) a lot of bs on 2I see where your coming from, i know the signs for real when i look on soundcloud, i have got ripped off from one marketing promo outlet called boostmyplays, all i got was fake plays, comments, no followers. Followers were fake as fuck. So i know who to deal with. Now with channels on soundcloud such as are legit, but they cost around $200 – $500 for an 1you shouldnt have to pay for promotion, hit up xKito and people like herlevel 2I know of her and others, however your missing the people only post songs with artists that have a huge following, im more of a small guy when it comes to a following. I made good music, but i get no plays. I literally see bad songs that get promoted because the artist have a huge following, and the uploader think they can make a good roi if they upload a big track that suckslevel 1it depends on what type of music you are looking for. also 1k-5k plays isn’t very much at all. if you mean 1k-5k plays from a single repost, thats A LOT of plays, so you’d need a network with 50k – 200k followers. I believe you will average plays equal to 3% of the number of total followers on a channel, but that drops significantly if they repost 1 · 5yHey! Have a nice day! If your music is good then there are a million, just search things like “free repost in soundcloud” and then search for tracks you like, often smaller channels upload them too, go through them and send them demos.
The Truth About SoundCloud Reposts (and Paid Promotion …
Ever wondered what a repost is worth? The repost feature changed SoundCloud forever. By getting others to ‘repost’ your track, it’s published to the streams of all their followers. Technically, a repost by an influential account could lead to significant exposure.
You may have seen the ads on SoundCloud before: “$50 for a repost, will blast to 150K followers”. It’s an increasingly common phenomenon, and an appealing offer for most smaller artists.
Yet if you’ve secured reposts with large SoundCloud channels, either by trading (exchanging reposts with equally sized accounts) or via paid promotion, you’ve probably noticed that the resulting plays don’t match the expectations.
You’d expect a channel with 10 times more followers than you to reach 10 times as many people with a repost. Reality however, paints us a different picture.
We set out to investigate this issue and paired up with a reader, Tim (Moomimurr), to look at the data. The goal was to establish the value of a repost, by analyzing the play-to-follower (how many followers actually listen to a repost) ratios of different channels and defining the variables that affect this ratio.
Contents1 The repost bubble2 Methodology3 Results4 The secret behiind strong reposts5 Improving your channel’s engagement
The repost bubble
SoundCloud has become a thriving ecosystem that hosts not just artists, but also record labels, artist collectives, promotional channels and networks. We covered these in our SoundCloud marketing & repost trading guide.
For beginning artists, the SoundCloud scene and ‘repost trading game’ may be hard to penetrate. Big channels prefer trading with big channels. At the same time, the offering of paid promotion is increasing, making it easy for artists to resort to paying for their reposts.
It’s a trend we’re seeing with record labels too. As the importance of SoundCloud expands beyond electronic music, labels of all sizes are catching on to the importance of having their SoundCloud plays on point. Their marketing efforts are now also directed to SoundCloud, including repost trading and sometimes paid campaigns.
While the research methodology of this article was initially intended to address just paid repost marketing, the findings apply to reposting in general. We were shocked by the results, even as they affirmed the belief that we had already formed by intuition — that the value of reposts was being diluted.
It turns out that followers are not the best indicator for how many plays you can expect to get from a repost.
The value of a repost is directly linked to the nature and behavior of the reposting SoundCloud channel. How often they upload, repost and who their audience comprises of are all impacting factors.
As the SoundCloud trading atmosphere is like the Wild West, these findings can help you better choose your repost partners, as well as better estimate the value of a paid promotional offer.
Methodology
For this research, we paired up with someone with experience in statistics and coding, as we needed to mine data from the SoundCloud API.
Enter Tim.
By day Tim works for a notable management consulting firm, where he crunches data to find where businesses can improve efficiency and save money. By night, he’s something that you can likely relate to: a music producer.
Tim reached out to us following a statement by Budi, who said that there isn’t a reason to pay for reposts as the market is “completely non-transparent” and that reposts can be acquired by networking with influencers. Tim took it upon himself to analyze the data and to estimate the real efficiency of paid SoundCloud promotion.
The research question that Tim set out to answer is one that many SoundClouders may have asked themselves at some point: “How efficient is paid SoundCloud promotion? ”. The answer to this question would also have implications for traditional (non-paid) reposts, as the mechanics are identical in nature.
To answer this question, we had to pull a huge amount of data on individual tracks. Not just total plays and hearts, but detailed information such as plays gained from reposts, who reposted what tracks, and how many followers those channels had.
We were able to extract this from SoundCloud’s API, which is short for Application Programming Interface. This is what applications and websites such as Hype Machine and Artist Union use to access upload information and incorporate embeds from.
Tim wrote a script that crunched the numbers on 8. 000 tracks reposted by a selection of SoundCloud (promotional) channels; stats like who reposted what track, how many followers the reposted channels had, how often the channel reposted, while also collecting the stated prices for reposts to include into his analysis.
To avoid outliers messing up the data, such as a #1 Hype Machine charting position or a track with several strong YouTube uploads (that would draw traffic back to the SoundCloud upload), we picked tracks with minimal outside exposure. We limited the age to less than two months old, as we assumed that after that period, the track would be at the end of its promotional cycle and any additional plays would be unlikely to result from active repost promotion.
The average price charged for a repost was about $0, 30 per thousand followers. For example, a 50K follower channel might charge $15 for a repost. This is a realistic market price from what we’ve seen offered.
How we established the contribution of a repost by a specific SoundCloud channel to an upload, is best explained as follows. Let’s say channel X reposts one of your tracks, netting you 50 plays. Then, channels X and Y repost another track, leading to 150 plays and another track reposted by channels X and Z earned 250 plays. With some simple algebra you can find each channel’s direct contribution.
Results
The findings are shocking.
The average repost only generates plays equal to 3-4% of that channel’s following.
In other words, if a 100. 000 follower channel reposted your track, it would probably only generate 3. 000 – 4. 000 plays. You, like us, had likely expected this number to be much higher.
At the 100. 000 follower scale, 3-4% is not that bad, but in realizing that the majority of SoundCloud users have less than 1. 000 followers, it becomes questionable whether all that time spent repost-trading is actually put to good use.
The bulk of channels had scarily low play-to-follower ratios, between 1-5%. Some were even as low as 1%, whereas a small portion of channels ranged between 10-18%.
Most of the low-ratio accounts were the repost channels, who reposted frequently throughout the day and had few original uploads on their account. By contrast, the high-ratio accounts were the labels and artists, who reposted significantly less and uploaded more often.
These varying play-to-follower ratios support our initial fear; that the value of reposts is diminishing.
A repost by a highly engaged 50. 000 follower channel may do more for you than one from a poorly engaged 100. 000 channel. The difference is significant, and reinforces the notion that you need to be careful in who you team up with.
The secret behiind strong reposts
So why do labels and artists have higher engagement ratios?
Labels and artists tend to curate more when it comes to reposts and uploads, favouring quality over quantity, allowing them to develop dedicated superfans. The opposite is true of promotional channels, who prioritize quantity over quality in a pursuit for more followers and scaling their networks.
The trend on SoundCloud, particularly with promotional channels, is to pair consistent reposts with like-to-download gate inclusion in order to accelerate follower growth. A channel might incorporate another channel in the download gate of their track, which then gives them an incentive to consistently repost that upload. That other channel might then do the same, and receive consistent uploads as well.
The result is a perpetuating cycle, where the increase in followers leads to more exposure (but not per se more plays). Also it creates an overlap of followers, which is common with SoundCloud networks that grow through daily repost and mutual gate-inclusion.
From a fan’s perspective the lack of engagement makes sense. If multiple channels repost the same song each day, you’re unlikely to click it. Eventually they end up ignoring the channels, or unfollowing them.
That’s not to say that all repost networks have poor engagement rates. The outliers are the ones that repost less frequently and upload more, acting more like labels.
The highest ratios are found with artist channels, who not only repost less often and upload more than promotional channels, but also exhume a personality that fans can connect with. It’s easier to love an artist than a repost channel or label, as there’s little personality you can connect with there.
The more a channel reposted per day, the less engaged their audience. Repost frequency had the strongest correlation to a channel’s play-to-follower ratio.
The graph illustrates it beautifully. Most channels that reposted fewer than 4 times maintained play-to-follower ratios as high as 15%. Audience engagement falls significantly at 5 daily reposts and beyond, with the bulk of the analyzed channels reposting between 6 and 17 times a day.
One can argue that artists are most cautious about what they repost, as they want to make sure they only repost material that resonates with their audience and is as good (or better) than what they’d make and upload themselves. They see the value in saving their audience and are rewarded by out-of-the-ordinary response whenever they do upload or repost something.
Improving your channel’s engagement
The biggest take-away is that you need to be careful not to exhaust your audience.
Both the frequency with which you repost (and upload), the quality of the material you repost and the degree with which it aligns with your audience’s tastes, impact your audience’s engagement.
There’s a significant tipping point in engagement with reposts exceeding four a day, which everyone should take to heart as their daily limit.
Reposting more often to overcompensate for the lack of plays is actually counter-productive and decreases engagement further. There’s a lot more to be said for reposting 4 times a day consistently and optimizing for ideal repost (or upload) times, leaving ample time in between each repost.
One way to do this is by using SoundCloud repost scheduling tools, which we cover in-depth in the new edition of The SoundCloud Bible.
In respect to the paid-promotion market on SoundCloud, the average price charged by promotional channels isn’t far off from the results you can expect to get from their poorly engaged audiences.
As mentioned, the average price charged for a repost was $0, 30 per thousand followers, whereas we found that the average cost per play was $0, 013 USD.
An average repost channel with 50. 000 followers might thus charge $15 USD for a repost, which at a 3% engagement ratio would lead to 1. 500 plays. The average value of those plays is $19, 50, meaning that you’d technically get more than you paid for.
The trick then, in maximizing results from paid promotion, is analyzing which channels have higher play-to-follower ratios, by looking at the frequency with which they repost and the quality of that music. Another optimization strategy could be to demand your paid repost is scheduled at that channel’s optimum engagement time, which is usually when the bulk of their audience has arrived at the office or school. For most electronic music promoters, the lion’s share of their audience is in the West Coast of the USA, for whom 10:00 AM PST would be perfect.
Now, truthfully, we have yet to experiment with paid SoundCloud promotion over at Heroic. We may attempt it at some point, just to see whether we could get a positive ROI, but as of now, we’re blessed to be working with a network of influential partners.
If you’re an artist with money to spend, it may be worth considering as a way to get your tracks early traction. Just make sure you scan your partners as carefully as you now (having read this article) will do for repost trades.
And don’t believe in the buy-in fallacy. Paying to getting your music heard is not required to succeed in today’s industry.
Want to learn more about SoundCloud? Check out The SoundCloud Bible. The Third Edition has just come out and includes over 400 pages on growing your audience, SoundCloud trading, copyright and monetizing your music on SoundCloud, YouTube and elsewhere.
Download the full 25+ page about the music industry
Frequently Asked Questions about repost channels on soundcloud
Can I repost tracks on SoundCloud?
Click the repost button below any track or playlist to add it to the top of your profile, and share it to the Streams of your followers. … To remove a reposted item from your profile, click on its ‘repost’ button again. You cannot repost your own track, or add reposts to your Spotlight.
How do I find my repost channel on SoundCloud?
Repost by SoundCloud allows you to monetize and distribute your sound recordings which does not conflict.
What does repost by SoundCloud do?
How and when do I get paid by Repost by SoundCloud? You will receive your payments via the PayPal account that you link to your Repost by SoundCloud account. Your balance is updated at the end of each month and payments auto-deposit once your earnings meet or exceed $5 US.
