Get More Followers on Soundcloud

Hi there.

I thought I’d take a moment to share some of my experience of Soundcloud and to share some of the things I’ve learned about putting my music up online. 

First of all, I should explain this. My name is Jof, but I share music online under the name The Always Unprofessional. You can find me on Soundcloud. 

Over the past six months I have written, recorded and released about 70 tracks. That’s about two and a half songs a week. That’s quite a lot of songs. That means I have quite a lot of data to play with.

Now I should give you a quick health warning. The data I’m working with was not generated scientifically. I’ve been banging away on my laptop, strumming away on my geetar and releasing songs all higgledy piggledy on random days, at random times, and I have been promoting them in random ways. So don’t take anything that follows as gospel. 

To test some theories I have about Soundcloud I pulled together a load of data. Soundcloud has a lovely stats page and, as I pay for my account there, I have lots of nice number to look at. I also looked at other places I have my music to see how many people interacted with my songs. 

So lets dig into the facts:

First up: does the number of plays a song has mean that people like it? erm..... no. 

Check this out: 

These are four songs I recorded around the same time. Look at the song called ‘Josephene’. It’s had three times the number of plays the others have but the same amount of comments, likes and downloads. 

Josephene had a storming opening night (the night I released it). 800 people played it that night. But when Soundcloud records a play it could be 10 seconds or the whole song. All the number of plays tells me is that 1,245 people checked the song out. 

The number of comments is also mis-leading. Sometimes a conversation starts on a track creating a load of comments, and of course it could also be 27 people saying “This song sucks ass man! Take it the fuck down”. 

Nope all we can really say is that 20 folk liked it enough to download it. That’s twenty people who want to listen to it again and again. Twenty true Jospehene lovers. What nice people. I should send them all a hamper. 

Okay. So why did Josephene get so many plays? Lets talk about Opening Nights.

Opening Nights are all important to the success of failure of a song. Jospehene was uploaded on a Monday. It got a whopping 65% of all the plays it’s ever had right there and then. 

I put it on Reddit and Reddit went mad for it.  It got 46 Upvotes and 55 comments on Reddit. For me, that’s a lot. All those plays on day one were probably those Redditors. God bless them I should buy them a Hamper. 

Maybe it was because opening night was Monday night? A night when Redditors and the denizens of Soundcloud are bored shitless and more open to sad, distorted, ballads? I checked the data:

In number terms opening nights matter a lot. Monday is the best day by far. On average tracks I have released on a Monday have had 415 plays on opening night. Compare this with a Friday when the average is 102. That’s a big difference.

This trend translates to the days people listen online in general. If you compensate for the effect of Opening Nights Monday is still the busiest day of the week. It seams Mondays are so shit people stop working and listen to music for a bit.

So why does opening night matter so much? 

Weeeeelll, despite what I said about plays not being the be all and end all, more plays do mean more opportunities to find the people that will like a song. Check this out...

I’ve chosen ‘One Snowy Night’ as an example here. It’s not a great track, but it does beautifully illustrate my point: 

On average my tracks receive one third of their plays on the opening night. That’s all the people who see it crop up on various social networks or on the Soundcloud stream and giving it a play. 

The following week that track will get a further 25% of its plays. This represents those people who don’t live and breath internet music spotting the new song later and giving it a play. It also represents those people who have seen their friends commenting on the track or have had it recommended popping in for a listen. 

The other 42% of plays come over the the long tail. This represents people finding the track in soundcloud groups, by its tags or coming back for another listen coz they liked the song. 

Like Movies, if the opening night sucks then my little song is going to bomb.  

How do I pump opening night?

Its all about going where the eyes are and, more importantly, where the right eyes are. 

I put widgets from soundcloud on a bunch of sites which range from the great (Reddit and Facebook) to the shit (Digg and Twitter).

Bare in mind I have large Facebook and Twitter ‘Followings‘ - in fact over 3,000 people follow me on Twitter. However, they are 3,000 people who don’t care a jot for unsigned music, so telling them about a new song is almost pointless. 

Facebook is populated by my friends and, while they might not like my music, they do like me, so they tend to be supportive. 

Reddit has some awesome ‘Sub-Reddits‘ for musicians and so, when I post there I know I’m talking to tens of thousands of like minded soles. Digg is the opposite, as yet I haven’t found a spot on Digg where posting my songs gets any response at all.  

I know there are others... but I ain’t got round to them yet. 

Either way, on opening night, I fly paper the internet with my new song, stick it on all the relevant groups and then sit back to see what happens. If people comment or ask questions, I respond. I try to be open, grateful and appreciative of what they say. After all I want them to come back!

Talking of giving the audience what they want...

I record a mixture of up-beat lo-fi and downbeat ballads. Nothing unusual there. The downbeat stuff is probably a little more unique, but not much. 

It is easy to be swayed by a big reaction to one song or another into thinking I should record more songs like that. For instance, a while ago I released a track called “Clatter and Bash” that did rather well, so for the next couple of weeks I was taken by the idea that I should do more songs in the same style.

Then as if to prove me wrong, “Lullaby” a track that is possibly the antithesis of Clatter and Bash also got a storming response. 

If I classify my top twenty songs into “Up” and “Down” the results look like this...

Lullaby	Down
Josephene	Down
Clatter and Bash	Up
One Last Song Marie	Down
Heroins	down
Stay Right There	up
It's a Long Walk Home From Here	Down
Yesterday Again, Almost	Up
Up	Up
Blues For Lee	Down
Tonight Tonight	Up
That Feel	up
Come Round Mine	Up
Blackground	Down
I'm Falling Asleep	Down
Tarmac Fades	Down
You're Beautiful	Up
Charlie and That	Up
My Prayers Don't Work	Down
Lock Up Tight	Up

Ten Downers, Ten Uppers and no clear preference. The thing is, a good song is a good song up, down, left, right....doesn’t matter. 

What is for certain is that soundcloud is skewed away from the old style ‘live band’ set up towards those that produce and remix. Just look at the popular tags...

This means the majority of those floating around the cloud will be skewed away from my music. 

That said there is more than enough people listening to the tags that I fit under to double / treble... hell to Centuple the number of listens I get. 

On that note...

Given the clear effect of Opening Night and the number of people who listen to my music from other websites, does the number of actual followers I have on Soundcloud matter. 

Turns out the answer is yes. I gain about 3 or followers a day on average. Many of these are actually ‘Follow-me-backs”. These are people that follow me in the vein hope that I will, for some reason, start listening to their music.... NO HAMPER FOR YOU FOLLOW ME BACKS. 

That said, the other followers are people that actively play my music, like it, comment on it and download it. I like to think of them as *whisper it*..... fans.

Hamper for you fans. 

They provide a foundation of activity that builds slowly, but exponentially over time. Look at my total plays. 

Its hard to see the trend, but back in October I was getting an average of 20 plays a day. Now that average has risen to nearly 100. Thats five times the plays in six months. If that continued (which I’m not sure it will, I’ll explain why in a moment) I would be looking at 500 plays a day by September. 

Here’s a conclusion for you...

Promoting music online directly mirrors all the standard tasks involved in marketing a product:

1. You need to know who your audience is and what they want
2. You need to know where they are and how to get your message across to them
3. You need to know what they are willing to give in exchange for what you are looking to ‘Sell Them’

I hope my audience want my songs. I know they are out there on Reddit, Soundcloud and to a lesser extent Facebook. I’m asking them to give roughly ten minutes of their time, each week, to listening to one of my songs. 

Ten Minutes is a lot of time online. 

I know that I will quickly exhaust the group of people on the sites I post my songs that will want to listen. All marketing campaigns eventually show what I guess they call an ‘S-Curve’. Put simply, after a while you have won all the hearts and minds you can in one place and you have to move on. It’s what they call ‘Maximum Penetration’. 

However, until then I’ll enjoy every minute of the journey. By the way. If you have listened to all of this.... Free Hamper for you.  

Thanks for your time and KEEP WATCHING THE SKIS