by Francesca | Apr 11, 2024 | Music Marketing
Having trouble getting your music playlisted? This is an issue many independent artists face, but it can be particularly frustrating not knowing exactly why your efforts aren’t paying off. That being said, some of the biggest reasons why you aren’t getting playlisted are easily fixable! From not providing enough marketing drivers to not enough lead time, here are 5 things that may be holding you back…
5 Reasons Why Your Music Isn’t Getting Playlisted
Not Submitting Early Enough
Submitting your music for playlist consideration requires time for the curators to review and potentially add your songs. To ensure you’re giving them ample lead time, we recommend submitting around 4 to 6 weeks before the release date.
This allows playlist editors to evaluate your music properly and consider it for inclusion in their playlists. Rushing submissions at the last minute may result in your music being pushed to the side and not given adequate consideration.
Marketing Drivers
The underlying forces that compel you to buy or pay for certain products and services are called marketing drivers. As an artist, these are the key details you want to be shared with DSP’s like Spotify, Apple Music, TIDAL, YouTube, Soundcloud, Pandora, etc. to help you stand out. When it comes to playlisting, your marketing drivers can help playlist curators better understand your music and its potential appeal to their audience. Not providing enough information here may actually hinder the chances of your song being chosen.
It’s also important to be as honest as possible when providing marketing drivers. Ensure that if you say you have a consistent and active social media plan, you better actually be posting on socials when they check. If you claim your music fits a certain genre, be sure it truly does. The more accurate info you provide, the easier it is for your song to be placed on the best playlist for it.
Your Music Doesn’t Fit The Playlist
If you’re targeting third-party playlists, the best thing you can do is listen to the playlist first, and only pitch songs (if any) that truly fit the vibe. All too often, artists will send a link to their Spotify profile expecting the curator to sit there and go through all their songs to find something to feature. With hundreds, sometimes thousands, of submissions a day, they don’t have time for that. It’s up to you to offer something that’s worth featuring. At the end of the day, they’re doing YOU a favor.
With editorial playlists, all you can do is make sure you’re providing accurate marketing drivers that properly set the vibe of the track so it can be pitched accordingly by our team. The more detailed information you provide, the easier it is for our team to match it with the appropriate playlists.
You’re Not Promoting Your Music Online
It truly surprises me how many artists in this day and age still refuse to improve their online presence. I understand the artistic yearning to be mysterious… but effective promotion is VITAL for driving audience engagement with your music on DSPs. It’s just a part of the game, and ignoring this crucial fact can break your chances of success in so many ways, even aside from just playlisting.
This means actively promoting your music across various channels like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, press releases, targeted ad campaigns, and whatever else you can manage. As long as you are engaging with your audience, creating compelling content, and leveraging different promotional strategies, you can significantly increase the visibility of your music. Showing that you are actively working to drive traffic to DSPs, (like Spotify, Apple Music, etc.) greatly increases your likelihood of playlist placements.
You Don’t Have a Consistent Release Plan
Keep in mind… a playlist is not a marketing plan. Consistently releasing music and having a well-defined release plan are two key factors in building momentum as an artist and in turn, attracting playlist curators to your music.
Staying active on socials, having a great website, offering merch on your website and updating it often, interacting with your fans online and in person, posting music videos to go along with your releases, etc., all of this helps to grow your fanbase and spread your music as far as it can go.
Marketing yourself as an artist is just as important as creating the music itself, and many factors go into fostering a strong presence in this insane industry. There are thousands of other artists looking to make it out here, which means you need to go above and beyond to stand out in any way you can.
by Francesca | Feb 29, 2024 | Music Marketing
So you’ve finished creating your next big release, but maybe you’re not entirely sure how you want to spread the word… We’ve compiled a few suggestions to get those creative juices flowing in order to make your next release a great success.
How to Advertise Your Latest Release Online
Know Your Audience and Where They Are
You may think you know your fans more than anyone, but there are some great free tools available to you that may enlighten you a bit on some key locations and targeting options you might have overlooked. Facebook and Instagram insights are two of these valuable tools that can help you reign in on your most-active audience demographics, from age to location to time of engagement and more.
Another valuable tool is Spotify similar artists, located on your artist profile. These similar artists are suggested based on what fans of your music are also listening to on the platform. Utilize this data to help you grow your audience from similar artists. Lastly, focus the majority of your budget on your most-active audience, you’ll find that loyal fans will do a lot of advertising for you when provided the right information, the share button is only a click away.
Be Creative
Many advertising platforms require more than just your latest video or song in order to create an advertisement, it’s best to be creative when creating these assets. Think like your fans, how would they like to be told about your latest release or shown your latest video? Society has shifted to an instant gratification biome where you need to grab their attention in as little as 3 seconds before you’ve lost it. Always make sure you’re putting your strongest asset forward to get the best results from your investment.
Creativity doesn’t end with the assets, you can also be creative with the type of ads you use to present your message. An example is utilizing Facebook’s event response ads to create an ‘event’ for your new release date where you can drive traffic to this event page and provide them with information about your release, set up a watch/listening party, or even perform a Q&A.
Don’t Get Too Big for Your Britches
Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Many artists tend to think they need to cover all the advertising platforms and make sure their message is absolutely everywhere, regardless of having only a few hundred bucks to make that possible. Find your top 3 (socials & dsps) and streamline your focus there. You want to make sure you’re advertising in the locations where the bulk of your fans are, not everywhere and anywhere your fans might be (unless you have the budget to do so). If you’re rolling in cash, however, unleash the beast!
Watch it Like a Hawk
Advertising isn’t like the Ronco Rotisserie, you can’t just set it and forget it. You want to make sure once your ads go live, you keep an eye on the spending, adjust your ad scheduling, add/remove targeting from your audience, etc. – all to help improve your results. The last thing you want to do is spend your full budget only to realize after the fact that it was a wasted effort because you didn’t effectively optimize your ads accordingly throughout the life of the campaign.
Build Upon Your Foundation
Once you’ve got a few campaigns under your belt, don’t let that data go to waste. Utilize the converting users in new audiences for future ads, create re-marketing lists from engagements and share new information in past event pages.
We know this all can be overwhelming, but once you get a hang of it, you’ll wonder why you haven’t been doing this sooner. Remember, we have a dedicated team here at Streaming Promotions to help you out if you ever hit a wall or feel you’ve bitten off more than you can chew.
Good luck!
by Francesca | Feb 8, 2024 | Music Marketing
It’s undeniable that TikTok has given many up and coming artists a chance at major exposure with its algorithm. As long as your music is on TikTok for you (and other creators) to use, you have the chance to promote yourself through challenges, trends and so much more. If you’re ready to promote your music on TikTok, here’s everything you need to know.
How To Use TikTok To Promote Your Music
First things first…
Before you can start anything, you have to upload your music to TikTok.
Back in 2019, we announced our partnership with TikTok which allows our clients to deliver their tracks onto TikTok for its millions of creators to use in their videos. This offers an amazing opportunity for our clients to spread their music through one of the most popular apps in the world, with us to guide them along.
In the meantime, think about what part of your track has the most potential for going viral. — That means 15 seconds of catchy, groovy greatness that you can imagine people singing or dancing along to. Don’t be afraid to dig into your back catalog to find songs that truly fit the bill. Oftentimes when one song goes viral, it may bring some of your other songs right up with it.
Hop On TikTok Trends
Every week, something new is trending on TikTok. Hell, it seems like something new has taken the platform by storm almost every day. Even if a trending challenge doesn’t necessary align with your brand, it’s still useful to get involved. If an unrelated video of yours goes viral, it may bring your other posts along for the ride.
Hopping on the latest trend is a great way to get seen by more people and blow up the engagement on your present and past posts. Whether you’re on the hunt for audio, effect or hashtag trends, there are tons of ways to find what’s popping off on TikTok. // To help you out, we wrote a whole post that gives you all the sneaky tips and tricks we know about how to find what’s trending.
Post Music Video Sneak Peeks
While you’re working on that new music video, take behind-the-scenes clips during the process. Even better, you can tease final cuts of the video by posting them as a Reel before the launch date. You can do this by using captions like, “Coming Soon… 👀” with the launch date worked in. You can even link to Spotify for presaves, YouTube premieres, or wherever else they can find your music once it comes out.
Create Your Own Challenges & Trends
If you want to go viral on TikTok, you’re going to have to get creative. The most popular challenges and trends on TikTok are lip syncing, dance routines and comedy type videos. That’s why it’s important to have songs on TikTok that are catchy enough to support these type of challenges.
Need some ideas?
- If you hate dancing, you can tell your fans to create their own dances to your song and tag you on TikTok.
- If you have a song with amazing lyrics, do a VoiceOver of you lip syncing along with the lyrics on screen.
- Want fan engagement? Tell your audience to do covers of your song and repost them when they do.
- Want to collaborate with others? Try the Duet, Stitch and Collaboration features.
Just how tagging other creatives can double your video’s reach, so can collaborations. Finding your niche is important in anything you do, as it helps engage a more loyal audience and helps you secure yourself in a more manageable, less saturated space. — Be sure to comment, like, share, duet, other artist’s work and encourage your followers/viewers to do the same.
Try Covers Of Your Song in Different Styles
One of my favorite trends that musicians like to do on TikTok is when they give new life to an existing song by creating new versions of it you would have never expected. For example, those videos captioned: “If my song, [blank] was a metal song” or “If my song, [song here] was an EDM banger”. As an artist, you have many strengths you can leverage when creating content. If you’re low-key really good at making beats, show off that talent with a cover. If you aren’t so good at another genre, you can ask your audience to do their own version.
Use The Right Hashtags
Hashtags are important on pretty much every platform. With the right hashtag strategy, you can increase the reach, engagement and visibility of your posts on TikTok in no time. Luckily, figuring out which hashtags will work best is fairly simple.
- First, go ahead and open the app, tap on the “Discover” tab on the bottom of your screen and scroll through the previews of all the trending hashtags.
- Now, let’s dive a little deeper. In the search bar at the top, go ahead and search whatever hashtags are relevant to you. Once you hit search, you’ll be able to see related hashtags and view counts for each of them.
- With a quick Google search, you’ll see that the most popular hashtags for musicians are: #music, #singer, #artist, #songwriter, #livemusic, #newmusic, and the list goes on and on.
However, these are just the most popular, overall hashtags. If you’re looking for more interactive engagement with a more segmented fanbase, we recommend looking into artists like you on the platform and checking out the hashtags that are popular in their circles. Then, you can make a solid list of these and keep them in mind for your own efforts.
Try TikTok’s Promote Feature
With Promote, you can turn any organic TikTok video into an ad, right from the app. You can start reaching new audiences, build a following, and drive traffic to your business website. Once you run a Promote campaign, you also get insights into your audience and how your videos are performing to help you improve your efforts moving forward.
We wrote a whole post that breaks down exactly how to do this; you can check that out right here.
Utilize TikTok Analytics
Driven by machine learning and a technical algorithm, TikTok thrives on data and metrics. If you want to improve your content’s performance, understanding your profile’s detailed analytics is the first step to improving your efforts. With it, your data-filled dashboard is separated into three main categories: Overview, Content and Followers.
By clicking through each tab, you’ll be able to see videos views, profile views, follower count, and follow demographics in terms of gender and geography. With this information, you can see which videos are working and which aren’t. Then, you can adapt your strategy as you go to improve in the future.
Not sure how to find them? Check out, “Where to Find Detailed Analytics for TikTok” to learn all the different ways to access these analytics.
In Conclusion…
Aside from being an addicting past time for most of us, TikTok is also a wonderful tool for your promotional efforts as an artist. If you work with the algorithm and all the features the platform has to offer, you’ll see your content start to thrive.
On that note… As you reach a wider audience on TikTok, you can funnel those users over to your socials and streaming platforms in the process. By taking steps like adding links to other platforms in your bio, cross promoting content on your feed and following the tips mentioned above, you can grow your audience everywhere in no time.
Good luck!
by Francesca | Jan 25, 2024 | Sync Licensing
We’ve talked about sync licensing and royalties many times on this blog. One thing we haven’t talked about is micro-sync. In this post, we’ll dive into what it is and why it’s important. Here’s everything you need to know.
What is Micro-Sync Licensing?
Let’s break it down…
Sync licensing refers to the synchronization of a song with any form of visual media. Any time your song is featured in a TV show, movie, commercial, etc., that’s called a “sync placement”. That being said, sync and micro-sync are essentially the same thing, but with one major difference.
Scale.
Sync vs. Micro-Sync Licensing
Just as an artist would be paid licensing fees and royalties for a placement in a TV show or film, they would also be owed “micro-sync” fees and royalties for smaller features.
Some examples of the types of common micro sync licensing placements include:
- User generated content, i.e. YouTube
- Social media posts
- Internal company videos
- Video presentations at events and conferences
- Professional wedding videos
- Podcasts
- Video Fitness Classes
- Twitch Livestreams
- Apps
- Mobile Games
Typically, sync licenses are negotiated between the production and content owners for thousands of dollars per license. However, this process can be very time consuming and requires a lot of paperwork.
On the other hand, micro sync licensing is on a much smaller scale, so the business model is quite different. Content owners looking to get into micro sync need to operate in a marketplace that facilitates quick and easy licensing so they can achieve a high volume of small placements. This adds up!
How does this benefit you?
It would be nearly impossible for you to find thousands of people who are willing to pay you a few bucks each to use your music in their video project. However, the demand is out there. If you play your cards right, you could have steady income coming in from all over the world.
- The best way to achieve this is to work with a platform like Musicbed, Songtradr, or Artlist. These prominent platforms aggregate music, attract content creators, and make the licensing process a much simpler, streamlined experience.
In Conclusion…
Micro-sync opens up a lot of opportunities for small content creators to harness the music of real artists. With micro-sync platforms, artists have a whole new way to spread the love and collaborate with ease.
Good luck!
by Francesca | Jan 4, 2024 | Music Marketing
Your fans are everything. Without them, you likely wouldn’t be where you are today! (Or where you are hoping to be.) Fans are a community, and in order to strengthen it, you need to treat it as such. Below are a few ways to make your community of fans stronger than ever.
Here are five simple, but unique, ways to strengthen your fan base.
Create a name
Try to think of a large artist off the top of your head. Then, think of their fans. They likely have their own name right? For example, Ariana Grande has “Arianators.” Selena Gomez has “Selenators.” Lady Gaga has “Little Monsters.” The list goes on. The point is: recognize that your fans are an entity of their own, and they’re bound to grow.
Start a Facebook group
Once you create a name for your fans, it’s time to take it to the next level. Create a private Facebook group for you and your fans to interact on a personal level. Offer exclusive giveaways, information about upcoming releases, Q+As and more. Start by inviting friends and family and then reach out to your general fans. As long as you stay active, it should grow.
Stream on Twitch
Streaming on Twitch is a fun way to interact with your fans and make them feel more involved. You could stream live DJ sets, studio sessions, behind-the-scenes or even go into a realm like gaming. Make sure to promote your streams and shout out fans, so they know they are recognized.
Do meet-and-greets
Meet and greets are one of the best ways to interact with your fans. These in-person hangouts can be done before (or after) shows. You can have these backstage, at a pizza spot near the venue, or just in the crowd. Talking to your fans in person is one of the best ways to get to know them!
Offer giveaways
Giveaways are the best way to give back to your fans. Thank them for their appreciation and support by offering merch giveaways, free downloads and more. The possibilities are endless!
There are a ton of ways to strengthen your fan base, but we hope one of these works for you! Make sure to show as much love to your fans as they show to you!
