Over 123,715 Organic Music Plays In 30 Days For My Latest Single: Here’s How I Did It

There are dozens of places people can hear your music. However, some of these music streaming platforms pay you while others don’t. Facebook video is becoming more and more popular each day, and while the Facebook algorithm is more sharer friendly for Facebook video than it is for YouTube video, it still doesn’t pay anything (directly) if I get 100,000 streams on there.

So I decided to focus my attention on SoundCloud, YouTube, Spotify, & My Own Site.

Some of these outperformed the others.

With SoundCloud rolling out monetization recently I decided to focus most of my efforts on here. It is one of (if not the most) sharer friendly platforms for indie releases.

The repost function is KEY!

One of my biggest problems with YouTube is that it’s not sharer friendly within it’s own platform! E.g. you can’t ‘repost’ someone else’s videos to your existing YouTube subscribers. You can share it on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media, but it’s just not as effective as sharing it within it’s own platform.

However, when you have a blog network on SoundCloud that can repost your latest single, it makes a HUGE difference.

Over the years I’ve built up a healthy amount of followers on SoundCloud. Since I have a good amount of followers, I can trade music promotion with other medium-to-large sized blogs.

Getting your friends to share your music is one thing, but when you get a handful of larger blogs to share it helps immensely.

It’s important to find artists/blogs who have a similar amount of followers as you to trade with. My range is probably 10K-80K for channels who will trade with me. If someone has more than that I might have to pay the big blogs for promo.

I utilized a few paid promotions I probably wouldn’t have had to otherwise if I had more open slots to trade on SoundCloud.

So what did I do during this process? Created more blog channels! Since I already know how to grow my SoundCloud followers, it made sense to create more channels for two reasons.

1. So I could expand my brand(s)
2. So I could keep up with the demand for my popular promotion service while doing promo for my own songs

So while I was able to trade a good bit, I didn’t want to flood my SoundCloud with 30 reposts a day from trading promo with everybody (on top of all the promo I do for other artists).

YouTube is still effective in the organic search department. I titled my video with a search friendly term and used some paid traffic to give the rankings a boost.

Also, I made the song available for free download on SoundCloud with a gateway. In exchange for the free download a people will automatically follow my account and like/repost the song.

But this time I put the SoundCloud download link in the YouTube description of the song.

Whenever someone hit free download on SoundCloud, it took them to the YouTube video with the download link it that description.

So you can think of that as killing two birds with one stone.

This is the most slept on method from artists! Either musicians ignore email or they don’t do it right! You can’t treat email like you do other social media.

An email with the subject line, ‘New Single Released Today,’ just doesn’t excite the listener. Maybe something like, ‘Omari, I Spent 72 Hours Making This Song, Let Me Know What You Think!”

Now the link is still going to be to your single in the email, but the subject line is wayyyy better.

I have a pretty large email list (about 50K+), so this was a big help too.

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Last but not least, here’s how I plan on incorporating Facebook and Twitter video in my next release.

These social platforms seems to do best with video when it’s sharer friendly. If you’re trying to get your new music video to go viral, it won’t get as many shares if it doesn’t have a sharer friendly title.

I find videos with the title WITHIN the top and bottom border of the video do best on Facebook and Twitter.

Consider adding those to your music video with a catchy headline when you upload it on those social media.

Get your network to share it on their Facebook and Twitter pages just like with Soundcloud.