In a recent report, SoundCloud just reached 170 million users. These are great news right? Mostly for the platform itself, but for you, as an artist, this place just got more crowded than before and the trend doesn’t look too good either. If you have an account and you just released your music (uploaded), the next step is to promote it right? One of the ways is to submit your song to a promotional network, that can offer you exposure. Now, just imagine that there are lots of promotional networks out there, who are ready to take your money and repost your track. So you will pay them, because you want plays and exposure. 75% from the promotional SoundCloud channels are filled with fake accounts and bots. So, when you will see a SoundCloud reposting channel with 3-4 uploads and 50k fans, something is fishy, right? I’m the label manager of Ensis Records too, so i tried to use these platforms to boost my releases too. And guess what? Lots of money spent and what I got in return were plays. But these plays were from Russia and Ukraine, like 90% from the total of plays. So I started to check them out and what I found shocked me: they had lots of fake accounts as followers (most of them actually). From that point I stopped using them obviously and chose to use instead only the old SoundCloud promotional channels, the ones that are really big and have a good reputation. If you see a SoundCloud promo channel that you never heard off with more than 50k fans, don’t use it!

The sad part comes here. Even by using these old and professional SoundCloud networks, the results were disappointing and I asked myself why? When SoundCloud decided to hide the repost button I realized why: because the SoundCloud Stream is so damn busy with reposts and uploads, that it became very hard for the real fans out there to SEE your song. In a matter of 1 minute, I saw on my Stream Feed at least 50 reposts. And that’s huge…

Just imagine that the actual SoundCloud stream/feed was and is like a big room. When SoundCloud started, there were only 4 people in that room, so you could chat with them, see them, interact with them. Now, that room is so full with people, that you can’t even move. Can you hear each other? No, because everybody is talking… The bottom line is that, despite those 170 millions users, promotion on SoundCloud has become less and less effective.

With these sad updates in mind, I had to re-think my promotional strategies for my label releases. So I started to focus on Facebook pages. You see, growing a SoundCloud promotional channel is damn easy and cheap (especially if you buy fake followers), but growing a Facebook page is hard and expensive. On top of that, you can check even more easily the engagement of the song posted by that Facebook page. You can see the reactions, you can check more easily the user profiles and so on. And guess what, it worked for me! Then it became more clear that to promote a release, the best way for me is to use Facebook, Twitter and blogs. By far the best way to promote a release is to send your music to huge YouTube channels (at least 500k subscribers), but this is very hard, unless you have either a massive tune or a powerful connections/management team.

That is why, I decided to introduce for EDM Nations promotional offers, the Facebook video with your music. Uploading a video on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram brings you the highest organic reach possible. If your track has a funny video too, the organic reach will increase even more (who doesn’t love a cat who dances or a hot girl shuffling?). And the results are great, to be honest. We had promotional videos of your tracks with even 100k views on Facebook. As you can see for yourself here , the average numbers of views for a promotional video are 500 and the highest just got more than 500k views. That means those 30 seconds of your music were heard by at least 500 real Facebook fans. What they choose to do next, it really depends on your track (how good it is). They can click on the SoundCloud link attached to your video, download the track, follow you, search for you on socials. But the main goal is to make them HEAR your music.

Starting this month, we will make a mini clip for your music for offers 2,3 and 4 which will be posted on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. That will be much more effective than the overcrowded SoundCloud. Also, if you have at least two releases/month and you want to promote them with us, you can benefit for a discount up to 50% if you pay in advance. If you are interested, send us an email at office@edmnations.com to talk about it.

I wrote all this wall text above just to share with you my own experience and my winning choices regarding promotion, because I will always try to find the most efficient way for my label’s releases. So if it works for me, they should work for your music too. If you want to test out my promo recipe, submit your track to EDM Nations and make your own opinion. If you are not satisfied, you can choose to NOT use EDM Nations anymore.

All the best guys!

Alex Cristian

Label Manager Ensis Records!