How do we promote your content on streaming platforms to get more plays/fans/followers?

Streaming promotion is a tough area. But is an area that if conquered can greatly assist the artist in gaining exposure, fans and positive PR on the internet. Sometimes streaming promotions can even be accomplished for some artists in a cost-effective manner that results in either a break-even, slight acceptable loss, or slight gain over the cost of promotion.

Platforms are also a big factor in streaming promotions. YouTube and Soundcloud are important platforms to promote your music on. However, they pay so little they can rarely be done at a profit.

Paid platforms like Spotify, Google Music, Apple Music, Tidal pay more and can sometimes be promoted to in a cost-effective manner – losing an acceptable amount of money, breaking even, or making even a slight gain.

There is no one way to generate plays or to generate plays in a cost-effective manner on streaming platforms. Each artist’s situation has to be approached by an individual analysis. Some artists we cannot even take on as their music is not in a genre we can promote effectively, or it just may be that we can’t find a promoter who likes their music enough to take it on.

Just like with radio, or dance club DJs, or InStore promotions we use a variety of professional promoters (not the bots and fakes you get on Fiverr, etc.). These professional promoters use different methods and the first step is to hear your music and look at your presence on the internet and select a promotion that we feel would do the best and be the most cost-effective for you.

Some of the promoters we use, use the following techniques:

Pop-Unders – (pop-unders are those annoying things that are the result of visiting certain websites and they open in a new window under your current browser. You usually see them later on when you close your browser, but in our case, they are set to auto play your music so that people hear your music right away. They will do one of two things: Close the pop-under instantly screaming “what’s that noise” or like what they hear and let the music continue to play for long enough (usually 30 seconds are required to count as a play). We have found pop-unders (used on the right type of sites and audiences) to be quite effective and we usually raise play rates of 20% to 45% depending on the music. Often pop-under campaigns can be run cost-effectively or even make a slight profit.

Networks – Gaming/free stuff “give aways”. Many of our promoters have networks where people join to get a free software or free stuff or get to play a game for free. The catch is you have to watch 3 or 5 or 10 ads first in order to get entrance to the free site. Our promoters simply place an ad for your music on the networks they are associated with. We have found and only use networks where people are not required to “watch” an ad. Networks where they must watch 3 ads to gain entrance, but they are not required to watch any certain ad, we find more productive in regard to obtaining fans. The participants can choose which 3 ads they watch.

Playlists – Many of our promoters have relationships with playlists and get our artists on playlists – either official playlists (created by the streaming platform) or user playlists with large followings.

Social Media Promotions – many of our promoters create traffic from huge social media networks where they maintain music channels / fan pages / blogs / posts, etc. Posts are made containing your music, and traffic is generated by people who see your posts and click on a link to your music.

SEO – “Search Engine Optimization” – finally we have promoters who treat Spotify/Soundcloud/ Apple Music/ Google Music etc. like a search engine and use a variety of the above techniques to get your music played. For example, pop-unders may be used to get you a certain amount of random plays that would qualify you for inclusion on one of Soundcloud’s charts. You won’t get many fans from the pop-unders since it is random traffic, but once you get on one of Soundcloud’s charts, you will get targeted traffic that comes there to discover new music in that specific genre. So now you start picking up more plays, likes and fans. In this case we have used “traffic” to optimize your ability to be seen by a targeted group on Soundcloud.

The above is just a general explanation of the various methods that may be used to generate streaming traffic, followers and fans. Sometimes we may use one or the other or a combination of techniques depending on the evaluation of the artist’s music and the best way to generate traffic for an artist.

If you are interested contact us for a free evaluation of your music and what we may be able to do for you.