Soundcloud Promoted Tracks
Promote on SoundCloud
Use the self-serve tool Promote on SoundCloud to surface your music to new fans and drive up your plays at a budget that works for you.
Promote a track
Reach exactly who you want
Choose targeting options (age, gender, location, device or genre) to get your music in front of the audience you want on their Stream and mobile homepage.
Get more plays that count
With the power of promotion in your hands, you can build buzz around new releases for fans of your genre, or market your music to the places you want to tour.
See long-term success
More fans engaging with your tracks means your music is more likely to be picked up by industry tastemakers or labels.
Promote unlimited tracks
With SoundCloud Pro Unlimited, you get unlimited uploads, access to full stats and more tools to grow your career. At no additional cost, you can also sign up for our distribution and marketing engine Repost by SoundCloud to send your music to Spotify, Apple Music, Instagram and more while keeping 80% of your revenue.
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I Spent $25 On Real SoundCloud Promotion And This Happened
What up Smart Rapper Gang, I’m Rob Level AKA the best rapper you know who tells you what other rappers don’t want you to know. I’ll be discussing every single tactic used to build an impressive SoundCloud profile for FREE. By the end of this article, you’ll be able to reach unbelievable numbers in just one month.
Just to make sure that this was the real deal, I recorded over a dozen videos showing my progress and exactly what I did to make it happen. Check them out on the Smart Rapper YouTube channel.
If I could do it from scratch, you can too. Here are the results I got in one month from a profile that had 0 followers and 0 streams. Remember, I did this without me promoting any SoundCloud promotion to my fan base. It is all organic growth combined with using strategies that’ll shortly be revealed.
If you want to see all of those videos, I’ll be providing them in a Real Soundcloud promotion course you can get your hands on. The link is also located below this article.
This Is What $25 Did For Me:
Around day 20 into my exploration of real SoundCloud marketing, I spent $25 on credits on a site called Repost Exchange. This resulted in me getting 2, 500 credits to use on reposts from other music artists sharing my music to their fans on SoundCloud. This is real SoundCloud marketing at it’s finest. You’re getting your music heard by fan bases people (in the same genre as you) already built for themselves.
After day 20, I bought an extra $25 credits and then set up a campaign in order to spend them. Once I used them up, my SoundCloud promotion resulted into this:
Gained 5, 087 streams, 740 reposts, 375 comments. All in 20 days.
This was as easy as getting the credits. All it took was 30 seconds and hitting go.
Normally, buying SoundCloud promotion from a lot of sites–well really, most so-called real SoundCloud promotion sites–are all super fake. A lot of pages will tell you to buy so-called real SoundCloud promotion–reposts, likes, and shares–for dirt cheap. Later, they mark up prices by like 5-10 times and pretend it’s real SoundCloud promotion. In reality, it’s all nonsense.
In this circumstance, you can see your music getting reposted and commented on by real people. Your streams gradually go up instead of spiking straight up, because the process is actually REAL. I tested it. If it was fake, I would have had 50, 000-100, 000 streams at the end of the month and only 5, 000 followers. But that’s unrealistic.
To be able to do what I did over the course of one month is simultaneously beautiful and mind boggling. I did this to prove to what you can do. If you make good music and start using the real SoundCloud promotion methods I’m showing you, you can succeed.
Gain EVEN MORE For $25 Through Smart Rapper
After knowing Repost Exchange wasn’t a scam, I talked to their CEO about getting a discount for Smart Rapper. He agreed to give 100% free promotion credits to anyone who uses my link to sign up. Yes, you can even use them at the free level. Get bonus credits you can use to gain more fans without having to pay a single penny.
Again, I did this from NOTHING. If I didn’t rely on my fans for the success of this new profile, then why can’t you do the same?
Also, to prove it is all real, I documented every step of the entire process when using Repost Exchange. I put it all together into a course you can get your hands on 100% free. All you have to do is sign up to my e-mail list below.
When you sign up to that email list, we’ll let you know when my music marketing masterclass launches. It is the best marketing course in the history of the music industry guaranteed. Also, I’m giving anyone on this e-mail list 50% off when I launch it. You will be able to become part of the special beta testers who’ll make sure it is the absolute best.
Sign up below to get the proof it is real as well as get 50% off the super course.
– @Rob Level
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How To Get More Plays on SoundCloud: 5 Legit Strategies …
As an artist, you are responsible for promoting your own music. So how do you promote yourself to get more plays on SoundCloud?
Here are 5 rock-solid SoundCloud promotion strategies that are relevant for the music industry in 2021. Here’s a snapshot of what you’ll learn:
The truth about SoundCloud and promotionOne thing you need to get right before you start promoting yourselfHow to leverage existing audiences to maximize your plays
By following these strategies, you can increase the number of plays you’ll get on SoundCloud, as well as followers and likes. Let’s go!
Check out our FREE eBook – 10 Tips For Promoting Your Music on a Budget. Nail your social media strategy Give your music the best chance of success Find your ideal audience online
A Brief Note
SoundCloud has made changes within the last few years where the home page is no longer your stream. This means that people who follow you aren’t always going to be finding your music when it comes out.
Spotify is a much more popular option these days for listening to music, and it allows you to reach a wider audience.
Including key services like Spotify and Apple Music in 2021 is crucial in unlocking the full power of promotion and marketing.
Apart from that, here are 5 strategies that will get you more plays on Soundcloud:
Make great music firstLeverage existing audiences on the platformUse email for networking and promotionGet into repost chainsMake your music discoverable
Strategy 1: Make (Actually) Great Music
While it is possible to promote crap music, it never survives the ultimate test: the opinion of the audience.
No matter how much PR or marketing you give a track, if it’s really average, then nobody wants to listen, and you won’t get plays.
Never forget this golden rule of music promotion – your music is the marketing. You don’t just market music, it’s inherently linked to the promotion process.
One of my earlier tracks, ‘Carpark Anxiety’, has only gotten 900 plays in 3 years, even though I sent it to a lot of people. Why? Nobody wanted to share it, because it’s very average.
People don’t buy a vacuum cleaner if they don’t want one, so people won’t listen to music if they don’t like it. This is especially true on Soundcloud, where the barrier of entry is so low that a lot of horrible music gets uploaded, meaning listeners have more to sift through.
I’ve found over time that artists and producers (especially those who want a career) tend to overestimate the quality of their music. I did in the early days, and you can go and listen to my really old music and hear the improvement over time.
One of my newer drum & bass tracks, a bootleg of Porter Robinson’s Get Your Wish, got a lot of plays and was shared a lot more, because this track is much higher quality than my old stuff.
But this begs the question – should I upload my music if it’s not 100% there yet? This is arguable, but on a platform like SoundCloud, the stakes are much lower, with removing tracks being just a click away.
Plus, you’re likely to get valuable feedback from the public if you ask for it, allowing you to gauge what will and won’t work.
So while promoting music online is important, getting feedback and taking that into the studio will prove to be a much more valuable use of time.
So how do I make my music ‘better’? That’s another topic entirely, and that’s also why we have courses like EDM Foundations and Songwriting for Producers.
But a few pointers:
Make sure your core musical ideas are solid – production, mixing and mastering won’t matter otherwiseGet feedback from listeners, tastemakers and other artistsBe patient and keep making a large volume of music
Strategy 2: Leverage Existing Audiences
This might be confusing to say, but it’s true.
There are people who are always going to be better at marketing music than you. So don’t reinvent the wheel, use these people to your advantage.
People dedicate their lives to finding and sharing music to audiences that love it, so you.
Find channels on Soundcloud that can share your music to larger numbers of people than you ever could. This could come in the form of
Repost channelsOther artists with bigger followingsPromotional channelsLabels/collectivesPlaylisters
Don’t ignore offsite audiences as well. Just because they don’t have larger audiences on SoundCloud, doesn’t mean a blog or YouTube channel can’t send lots of plays your way.
Make sure to utilize:
BlogsHype MachineYouTube ChannelsSpotify PlaylistsInfluencers (e. g. vloggers, Instagram accounts)Radio stations (some play directly off SoundCloud! )
The key here is to find channels that are a good fit for your music. Don’t go messaging someone just because they have a lot of followers. They are already looking for very specific kinds of music for their tastes.
So play a few of their previous uploads/shares and make a decision. Don’t be too scared if your music isn’t exactly the same as what’s already there, but if it’s too different, it’ll likely get a pass.
Once you know who to send music to, then you need to figure out how.
Strategy 3: Email is still King
How do you send a message:
that you know the recipient will getthat goes to a place they check very oftenthat is simple and clearusing something everyone hasthat doesn’t rely on a platform that could be gone soon
The answer? Email. It’s old, but it’s still the best. How does this relate back to SoundCloud you might ask?
Email for Networking
Everyone has an email. Artists. Labels. Promo channels. Repost channels. Avid music fans. And you can communicate with them through this channel, no matter if they have Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or not.
I got my biggest play numbers out of email networking, including a top placement on one of Majestic Casual’s weekly playlists on Soundcloud. In this case, it was a form that sends them an email, but the point still stands.
Here’s an example of me emailing my track to someone for a YouTube upload, and look at the difference in response time.
The first email I sent.
The response time.
I got a response in less than 24 hours!
Granted, this won’t usually be the case for huge names in the industry, but email networking works.
Not to say that you can’t use avenues like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Those channels are great but always try email first. And use the Hubspot extension to track email opens, you’ll thank me later.
To make this easier, you’ll want to be making a list of emails of relevant people you can send your music to. Just use Google Sheets or Excel.
I personally use a software called Notion (has database functionality) to track YouTube channels, Soundcloud pages, labels and more. I’ve blanked out the emails for privacy.
A few tips & tricks about sending emails:
Be concise – the recipient is likely already time-poor, so get to the them a SoundCloud link – it’s the easiest to listen to, and you can make it conversational – don’t just send a link, actually treat the person on the other end like a human, and you’ll get treated like one rsonalise messages – CC’ing a large list never works, and it often annoys people, especially if people ‘Reply All’. Send one message at a time and once again, treat them like a up – not everybody is in a position to do something the first time around. Follow up in a week or two (depending on the person) if they haven’t replied.
If you want more promo email etiquette tips, check out this list from an industry professional.
Building a List
With the decline of plays on SoundCloud (due to the lower visibility of the ‘Stream’), it’s important your core audience still gets to hear your music when it’s released, and what better way to this than email marketing?
ToneDen offers free download gates that you can use to gather emails.
If you’re familiar with download gates like ToneDen and The Artist Union, perhaps start using them to gather people’s email addresses. If you’re a Bandcamp user, you can grab email addresses on checkout too. That way, you can build a list to send your music to next time you have something to release!
Once you’ve got a list, you need to find a email marketing service. Symphonic Distribution compiled a list of the best email marketing platforms for musicians, so make sure to give that a read.
Strategy 4: Repost Chains
This is one of the most useful tools on SoundCloud and is an effective way to garner the force of multiple accounts in a simple, automated way.
You can tell when the repost chain kicked in on my latest track.
In essence, a repost chain is simply a group of people who automatically repost a track, each at a timed interval, to maximise exposure. A service like SCPlanner allows you to do this effortlessly.
Just get a few music buddies in a chain and one person submits new tracks to the chain. As each of you gains followers, you multiply the reach each time.
There are a few ways you can join or create a repost chain:
Producer friends – get your inner circle together and signup to a repost chain. That way you get a guaranteed baseline of exposure every time you upload a chains – a lot of people on Facebook groups etc. are looking for accounts to join repost chains, because the bigger it gets, the more valuable. The only caveat is usually you need at least a certain number of followers to join these (e. 5000+ followers only)Random chains – if you just need exposure, try Googling ‘repost chain’ and you’ll see a bunch of results for submissions to certain chains. Some of these require payment, be wary. Also, these aren’t necessarily an effective way to gain promotion, as you could get a lot of plays that don’t mean much. So be selective.
Sounds good, right? Hold up, there are a few things to consider before joining a chain.
Firstly, make sure you’re okay with reposting the music in that chain. Does it fit with your brand, or will it annoy your followers? Even though the numbers can be appealing, hold off if you think it’ll damage your brand.
Also, some people have a problem with repost chains because it ‘abuses the repost feature’, so have a think if this works for you or not. Personally, I think it’s fine as long as you repost music you like.
Strategy 5: Make Your Music Discoverable
Now that the ‘Discover’ tab exists on Soundcloud, the aim is to get your music featured on this new avenue of discovery.
The best way to do that is metadata. Tell Soundcloud what your music is, and give it the best chance on the platform.
There are a few key ways to do this:
Correct Genre tagsRelevant track tagsName your track appropriatelyUtilize the descriptionGet other engagement (likes, comments etc. )
You might be wondering why I’ve bolded ‘Correct Genre tags’, and that’s because it’s probably one of the most important factors in SoundCloud deciding where your music will be placed.
You can see one of San Holo’s latest tracks is tagged as ‘Electronic’, which is one of the default options when creating your track. Soundcloud likes this because it knows who to show the track to.
Beyond that, the more metadata SoundCloud has, the more opportunities it can give that track on the platform, not only with ‘Discover’ but also with the ‘Charts’ feature, especially when it gets more plays.
Relevant metadata goes beyond the platform into other services like Google, meaning your music will come up in search results too.
Why?
Because Google reads text, not your mind, and if it can see who you are and what your music’s called, it’ll help your chances of showing up. Pretty neat.
Bonus Tip: Don’t Buy Plays
Everyone wants to take the easy road, right? But oftentimes it’s simply not worth it.
For a few thousand extra plays in the short term, you can damage your career, risk your account getting shut down, or simply lose the trust of your true fans. Plus, it’s against SoundCloud’s Terms of Use.
I had to mention this here because it’s often something people consider when they’re looking to up their Soundcloud game. The same can be said for likes and followers, and other platforms too. These stats are fake and don’t provide organic growth.
The Bigger Picture
Like I already said, marketing and promoting your music should go beyond SoundCloud.
Plays aren’t the only thing to consider either.
Yet it’s hard to promote your music well without a lot of money.
That’s why we made our guide about promoting your music on a budget. You can grab it free below:
If you have questions about marketing and promoting your music, let me know at [email protected] – I’d be happy to answer.
Want more promotion and marketing tips? Check out 15 more here.
Frequently Asked Questions about soundcloud promoted tracks
Is promote SoundCloud real?
Normally, buying SoundCloud promotion from a lot of sites–well really, most so-called real SoundCloud promotion sites–are all super fake. A lot of pages will tell you to buy so-called real SoundCloud promotion–reposts, likes, and shares–for dirt cheap.
How much does promote on SoundCloud cost?
For example, a $20 CPM means for every 2000 impressions, or views, you pay $20. Promote on SoundCloud offers two pricing options based on which targeting level you choose: Simple (lower CPM) or Advanced (higher CPM). There is also a minimum spend per promotion of $25.
How do I promote my SoundCloud?
Setting up a promotion is easy:Name your promotion.Select one of your public, monetizing tracks.Decide if you want to use Simple or Advanced targeting.Pick a budget for how much you’d like to spend.Select your start and end date for the promotion.Choose the audience you want to reach.More items…
