SoundCloud has surged in recent years. There are thousands and thousands of aspiring artists trying to use the platform to make a name for themselves. As a result, it has become quite difficult for brand new artists with no followers to gain traction. To boost their visibility and establish social proof, many of these new artists will buy plays. Popular artists also buy plays to ensure they stay on top of the charts and ahead of their competition.

Of course, it really isn’t as easy as making a purchase with your credit card. There are many other things you need to do in order to make your paid plays actually work. If you simply load up a track with 25,000 fake plays and do nothing after the fact, don't set your expectations for this track too high. However, with the right knowledge, you can use those plays to your advantage and start reeling in organic traffic and legitimate followers that can become true fans.

Consistent content strategy

If you really want to build a following on SoundCloud, you’re going to need to upload content on a consistent basis. The content also needs to be good. Don’t just upload random projects that are still in progress, or ones that you aren’t satisfied with. Uploading too frequently can turn users off, but large gaps between uploads will cause people to unfollow. Ideally, you’d like to get one content piece uploaded per month, which shouldn’t be too difficult.

Make sure you let your followers know when they can expect new content, and remind them to help promote it as well. When they see it blowing up with thousands of plays, they’ll be more excited to promote it – regardless if the plays are real or fake. Being able to upload high-quality content on a regular basis with a steady stream of paid views will put you on a path to SoundCloud fame!

Audience interaction: social media, SoundCloud groups

Getting your audience to share your music is really important, and you can use things like SoundCloud groups and other social media platforms like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook to coordinate promotional posts for new tracks. By using social media marketing services, you can actually boost your posts on each platform to reach the biggest audience. Having a variety of social media posts loaded with social proof gives a legitimacy to the following you’ve created.

SoundCloud groups are a great way to take advantage of bought plays. It’s a good idea to join groups related to your genre anyways, but when people see your tracks getting thousands of plays they’ll be more inclined to listen themselves. Since groups are usually very specific, this allows you to reach highly targeted traffic to show off your new track.

In addition to all of this, you should also be talking with your audience and other artists. Don’t just make promotional posts — actually interact and converse with your listeners. Respond to the people who compliment your tracks and let them know how much you appreciate the support. Try to reach out to your listeners so you can start building a real following instead of relying solely on fake plays and followers.

Further marketing and SEO

After you’ve got some great content with a lot of plays and you’ve promoted it on as many social platforms as you can, you can still do more to increase exposure. Uploading music videos is something artists have done for a long time, and it has become easier to do with today’s technology. A simple lyric video with a nice visual animation in the background can be made without much effort, and could bring in a great deal of extra traffic. Music videos also help you build a following on YouTube, which will translate to SoundCloud and vice versa.

Using the right tags, keywords, and having an interesting description can go quite a long way as well. Tags are really powerful on SoundCloud because they can be used in so many different ways. People use tags of the specific instrument models they used, effects, samples, and of course genre. Try to get creative with your tags to reach a bigger audience.

Playing shows is another vital part of building a following on SoundCloud and getting the most out of your plays. By having a face-to-face meeting, you’ve got a much better chance of them actually checking out your profile and potentially following. Once they get to your page and see you’ve actually got a decent amount of plays on your tracks, they’ll be even more inclined to follow. If you’re already playing shows, make sure you aren’t missing out on opportunities to make a plug for your SoundCloud account and other social media profiles.

The whole package

One of the most important things you can do when buying SoundCloud plays is to get an appropriate amount of comments, shares, and followers as well. Plays alone will not get you very far because people will see that the other metrics don't make sense. If you look at any popular SoundCloud artist, you can see they don’t have a 1000:1 ratio of plays to favorites – so make sure you don’t, either. Take the metrics (plays, comments, shares, followers) from these popular artists and divide them each by the same number to get the total in your price range.

What next?

Everything won’t go as planned the first time you buy plays. The important thing is to take note of what went wrong and tweak your strategy for the next campaign. So long as you stick to the guidelines we’ve share today you should be fine. Just keep adjusting your marketing campaigns until you start seeing the results you want!

Date: April 8, 2016 / Categories: Marketing, / Author: Viv