Music Think Tank - MTT Open

List of Tips/tricks from the video.

Before going through the lists, we must agree that you need great content and frequent releases. If you are doing music a good rate could be 2 songs per month. If you reach certain rate, don’t stop for too long or your followers might lose attention in your work.

TIP. Best day/time of the week to release songs. Sundays 5PM GMT. Why? most SC users have daily jobs during the week, so many of them find time to work on their music on the weekends. They might start something on saturday and have something to show by Sunday. As soon as the release while they wait for feedback they go through the timeline listening to others users music during the next days. I have to say that this is just an hypothesis, is just an explanation for a behaviour I was able to observe from my numbers.
TIP. Subscribe to 75 related-to-your-new-release groups and share. Before releasing new material, ask yourself what are the concepts or tags surrounding my sounds. For instance, if we were releasing “Tonight” (one of our songs), the tags could be this list: disco, dance, rock, guitar, melodic, alternative, indie, bass, electric, logic, producer, happy, chill, sexy, on-man-band, pop, 80s, george michael, sade, red hot chilli peppers,…and so on. You can add all the tools and plugins, pedal fxs etc you used as well. And then you start searching for groups in SC related to each one of the tags in your list. Once you have subscribed to at least 75 groups and your material is live, you hit the share on group and start sharing it. It will tell you that you have to stop once you reach 75 groups, the maximum. Save this list of tags and select the most relevant ones for your song to use them to tag your song itself as well.
TIP. Listen each others music, put attention and give honest real feedback as often as possible. SC is about sharing passion for sound and music. If you want to be heard and considered, you must spend a lot of time listening other people stuff. You have to check hopefully in a daily basis the incoming tracks section of the SC dashboard. Listen to all new tracks, focus on details, emotions and the technical side, try to enjoy and be open minded. Consider everything a draft and if something is really great let yourself feel inspired. All the honest and real things that came to your heart and mind are of huge value for those producers. Share it by drooping intelligent comments. You can do different kind of comments: helpful, constructive, critics, suggestions, like, “don’t like this part but I still think is great because”, emotions, things that happened to you with the song, reminds me of, evolution of the artist, etc. Be friendly. You shouldn’t ever repeat comments, that will easily turn AGAINST you. Why? because SC is a very transparent social network, you can almost check everything in a users profile. People will tell that you are spamming by checking your latest comments, and number of likes during the last hours. Also SC is applying strong rules against that so focus yourself on these tips instead and you’ll see how things go better for your stuff.
TIP. Facebook groups. I guess I don’t need to convince you about the relevance and impact of Facebook as a social network. Even though the high number of bots and duplicated accounts, it’s still a great place to promote your new tracks. Use all the tags you created on TIP2 and search for groups related, subscribe them all and post your track. In this case avoid the paste and forget, don’t do that. That will make your track getting ignored and even deleted. Before using a new group on Facebook people should get to know you so after subscribing spend some days giving feedback to other people, participate on conversation, contribute with ideas, etc. This will multiply the response by 10 when you submit something new. When it comes the time to paste the SC link, add a note to it. Two or three lines maximum, say something that contains the more relevant tags from TIP2 + something related to the group you are about to submit. This last thing is very important to avoid to be seen as a spammer (and to be a spammer). The more lazy you are in this sense, the less response you’ll get.
TIP. Repost your track daily the first 3 days. If you go to the track settings after one day this is live when you set your track to private and back to public again (waiting 2 minutes in between) you make your track appear as a new track on other people incoming tracks section. Pushing your track to the top of the list gives it again chances to get heard. Don’t overuse this trick unless you want your followers to unfollow you. Don’t be exaggerated.
TIP. Say your track is a new song and free download. This is something that really worked for me. I found that in SC there’s so many people looking for great fresh free music to download easily. When you clearly specify that at the end of your songname that increases the chances that one your track get attention from one of those users. Obviously if your track is not free download, you don’t want to lie to your followers…In my case, I use the buy link/label from song settings section to point to my website so they can also download, but from my server, that could also work for you. The new song in the song name is very useful specially when you when you have been using TIP5 with old tracks occasionally so they can say “ok now is not a repost, is a new one so let’s listen it”.
TIP. Put your band/project’s name on your artwork. Let’s say your music and content is absolutely fantastic and one of your followers is following hundreds of users. One day this person get to listen one of your tracks liking it a lot. After a while you come with your next release. The same person which is still following you finds your track in a list of 50 tracks to listen. He/she wants to pick some of them to start. At this point the track that will gain more attention will be one with a great artwork…maybe one with an interesting tag. Who knows…but if this person recognise a producer or band that already liked before, that’s a WIN for that producer. How do you manage to be such producer? first, you need them to like your track, but you also need them to remember you so when you have a new track you make them want to come for more. One way to do such thing is to emphasise the project name in the artwork. You might be asking yourself now, but why is this needed…my band name is already there. Your are right, is already there…but in small fonts below the songname…you have to be very lucky that they are putting attention on the band name when they are at the same time, commenting, listening, watching the picture, playing a game, speaking to a colleague, reading comments, etc. Make it easier for the listener and it would only take 2 minutes. You can use the add text feature on this online tool LunaPic.
TIP. Suggested use of Spotlight. Spotlight is a tab that will come in paid subscriptions of SC and allows you to easily feature tracks or sets on a landing page of your profile. I’ve seen people using it in many different ways. There’s a fact about this the first track on the list will be the one getting most of the plays of people not currently following you, people evaluating the possibility of start following you if they like such track. Most of them won’t ever consider your second track if they didn’t like the first…you’ll be lucky if those ones even finish listening the first one. So pick your best track on place it as the first one. Which one? the one that has more plays, favs, etc. You can also consider your best track the one that has a best plays/favs relation (if you have a track with 3,000 plays and 2 favs and one track with 1,000 plays but with 300 favs from my point of view the second one wins). As a second track for the spotlight list place your newest track and consider TIP6 to help them know which one is your latest work.
TIP. Check your best listeners tracks frequently. SC offers great stat features, use them. Go to one of your tracks and hit the view more in the stats section. In the list of listeners, hit the view more so you get the full window with the list. That list is ordered by number of times each user listened your track. Now you can start from the biggest fan checking what are they doing. Listen to many of their tracks, put attention and again, give honest feedback. You might not like their music, technique, skills, sound, mastering….but there’s always something good about it. Open your mind and heart and it will easily come. When it’s there, share it! This is a nice thing to do and is a way to say thanks. They will appreciate that.
TIP. Real life people likes. This is something that happens very often to me. Let’s say someone you know come to you saying “hey dude I really liked your new song, is great”. Then your realise that even though this person has a SC and Facebook, didn’t do anything. This is because most people just don’t use the like/fav button. You need sometimes to tell them “hey that’s cool thanks for that…do you think you can hit the fav?…that would really help a lot man”. You won’t believe me how many likes you were wasting there just because you leave them pass. EXTRA: when you share your song in your facebook timeline, let’s assume you have your friends and family there…so don’t be shy to say “Family and friends, this is my new song…is about {put what is about} and it would really help a lot if you can hit the share button, the like or comment anything here!”. People like, comment and share at least 3 more times when they are asked to do so.
TIP. You have 3 days to get to SC global listings. I didn’t know this when I started with SC. One day, actually just after releasing “Crackstone” I went to “explore tracks” section as usual to see what’s new and found my track was there in position number 3. I remember that was awesome because Muse’s song “Survival” was only in position number 5. Indeed I was getting much more plays than I usually got and that was the reason. I was so intrigued because I didn’t know that there was actually a chance that I could appear there. But there is, but there are some rules that you need to consider to get a chance to be listed. To appear in the hottest listings you need to get many plays, favs, comments in a short time. It will also help the buzz from Facebook, Twitter and Google+. In SC listings there are only tracks with less than 4 days of life. This means that you have a few hours to get as many plays and feedback as you can to appear in the first page of any of the important tags in those listings. I think that 300 plays and 40 favs could do the work depending on other people tracks that are also new. Once you appear on the listings this grows exponentially. You’ll get many plays from people not currently following you making your track move towards the top, specially if they comment, repost or fav your track. The sooner you get your track on that list the more plays it will get. Once your track is 4 days old it gets removed automatically from the list. You won’t see the play count increasing a t such speed again unless you are Skrillex…

I hope you find this list useful…and see you in a gig with 4 CiTieS hopefully before 2013!!!

I’m Mariano Latorre producer from 4 CiTieS band from London, UK. You can check my blog and music at http://4cities.co.uk

Original article link: http://www.4cities.co.uk/how-to-get-morenew-soundcloud-followerslikesplaysfavsfans/

Thanks for reading!