SoundCloud is quickly becoming a go to tool for independent artists, finally providing a useful social network for artist’s to share their work and gain new fans.
For years, various sites have been attempting to become the “standard” music-based social media network, and it looks like at least for now SoundCloud is in the lead. At the end of last year, the site’s co-founder announced that the site now reaches 180 million users a month. Additionally, users upload more than 10 hours of music to the site every minute.
Many people have played tracks from the site without even realizing it because the songs are easy to embed on other sites but there are tons of ways you can leverage the SoundCloud site itself for use, as well.
Creating a profile is easy, and can happen in just a few minutes by following a few simple instructions on the site. But just like any social media platform, engaging other users is the key to a successful and interactive profile on SoundCloud. Simply posting your songs is not enough.
You need to build a user base. One of the features that’s making the site so successful is the ability of users to not only comment on a posted song, but they can post “Timed comments,” which provides feedback at a specific point of a song.
One of the keys to success with SoundCloud is to attract users both from the site itself as well as other websites. You can promote your page on other sites like Facebook and Twitter, but the aforementioned ease of embedding tracks on other sites is a great way to attract users from all over the web.
While there are artists that make digital downloads of all their songs free to web users and make money from other sources, this is far from the norm. But that’s not to say that it’s not a great idea to give your fans a freebie every now and again.
While the majority of songs on SoundCloud are streamed, you can make them available for download, as well. This can be like a reward of sorts for those users that follow you, and it’s a good way to encourage your followers to keep coming back to your page.
This is best used by artists that have already been on the site for a while and built up a successful follower base. Upgrading to a pro account, which has a monthly charge, allows you to see stats about your page and your audience, including play counts, download counts, location information of listeners and who your listeners are.
This information can be used to see who you are reaching with your music and who you need to reach out to, and can be a great tool to increase an already sizable audience.
Certainly it’s hard to say if SoundCloud will remain the go to music social network of choice it would seem that MySpace certainly plans to give it a run for its money but as of now can be a great tool for many independent artists.
