Learn more about best practices for creating a social media ecosystem to grow your SoundCloud presence and promote your music.
Welcome to Sound Advice, the weekly interview series spotlighting artists’ creative process and their SoundCloud journey. We’ll get the inside knowledge straight from the source on how musicians, producers and creatives are leaning into everything Next Pro offers to elevate their sound, reach the right audience and catapult their careers.
A decade after dropping his first single in 2014, this week, SoundCloud Ascending artist Shaboozey achieved his first No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 with “A Bar Song (Tipsy).” Additionally, the rapper-singer made history by becoming the second Black artist to top both the Billboard Hot 100 and Hot Country Songs charts, following Beyoncé who achieved the history-making feat with “Texas Hold ‘Em” earlier this year. Appearing on the Virginia artist’s third studio album, ‘Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going,’ “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” was first released on April 12, 2024 and has since experienced explosive growth.
Following the track’s debut, this once-underground artist has been experiencing a new level of breakout success and viral attention that has been years in the making. How? By using social media in his favor, from leveraging TikTok as a central part of his social media ecosystem to actively sharing his music across other platforms. The hit song’s chorus “Someone pour me out a double shot of whiskey / They know me and Jack Daniel’s have a history” has become the backdrop for countless TikTok videos across the world, expanding his fanbase globally and growing his presence online.
Speaking on the pivotal role SoundCloud has played throughout his career, Shaboozey reflected, “I think SoundCloud was the original DSP. [It] was the original way for us to share our stories and upload things we made the night before and just get it up to fans as quick as possible without any of the crazy backend stuff. All that stuff, you don’t get that on other platforms.”
In today’s music industry especially, social media has unlocked a world of limitless possibilities for artists to get their music heard. With self-promotion a crucial part of building a successful music career, social media tools and platforms provide myriad opportunities for musicians to share their story, experiment with content ideas and try out different strategies for connecting with others. While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to promoting music on social media, understanding how to effectively use digital spaces — and the content creation tools or features available depending on the platform — can create inroads to increasing visibility, engaging with audiences directly and differentiating oneself from others in the industry.
As exemplified by Shaboozey’s success story and growth as an artist, using SoundCloud in tandem with other forms of social media further underscores how you never know what can happen when you reach the right audiences. With a vibrant and robust artist-forward community globally, SoundCloud is uniquely designed and positioned to support artists looking to build their careers, promote their music and connect directly with fans, other artists and future collaborators.
This week on Sound Advice, we’re highlighting five different ways to promote your SoundCloud and create an ecosystem that strengthens your online presence. Let’s get into it.
Complete Your SoundCloud Profile
First and foremost, before you promote your SoundCloud and share your page, it’s important to make sure your profile has been completed and features up-to-date, easy-to-find information. On SoundCloud, you can add a display name, picture, banner, bio, location, links to your website and social network profiles, and more. Having a completed profile serves a dual purpose: empowering you to express yourself authentically while making it easier for people to learn more about you when first discovering your music.
With a Next Pro subscription, which gives you access to a customized SoundCloud for Artists experience, you can take your profile to the next level by spotlighting your best tracks and playlists and pinning them at the top of your page. The Spotlight feature allows you to put up to 5 items (either tracks or playlists) and those can be swapped or changed to reflect what you would like listeners to see first. After the Spotlight selection, your profile will show your most recent tracks and playlists in reverse-chronological order.
Learn more about the Spotlight feature, available with Next Pro.
Grow Your Followers By Link Sharing
After you’ve completed your profile and began uploading your music, one of the best practices to growing your followers is to direct others to where they can discover and listen to what you’ve been working on. With 30 million shares happening on SoundCloud’s mobile platform each month, social sharing is a powerful gateway to foster more onsite connections. When you direct someone to your SoundCloud page through a shared link, they’ll be prompted to follow you if they haven’t already.
Link sharing is at the center of building a social media ecosystem, and directing others back to your SoundCloud plays an integral role in optimizing your experience as an artist. You can share your favorite tracks, profiles, albums or playlists to Instagram and Facebook Stories, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, messaging services like Whatsapp and more, directly from the SoundCloud app and on web.
Learn more about link sharing and embedding on SoundCloud.
Share Audio Snippets From SoundCloud to Instagram Stories
You can now easily share audio snippets of your music via Instagram Stories directly from the SoundCloud app. Make sure your SoundCloud app is updated to the latest version and then find the track you want to share. If the track is allowed for Audio Snippets, a speaker badge will appear and you can then tap the Instagram Stories icon. Next, you can adjust or customize your story on Instagram using their creator tools, and then simply hit publish to share it with your fans, followers or friends.
Learn more about sharing music from SoundCloud on social media.
Distribute Your Music Directly to TikTok, YouTube and More With Next Pro
A Next Pro subscription unlocks the full SoundCloud for Artists experience, including unlimited distribution. With Next Pro, you can distribute your tracks everywhere, including social platforms like TikTok and YouTube — and without any required upsells to use YouTube Content ID or customize releases with things like a custom label name. When your music is distributed to TikTok, it will be added to the platform’s library as an original sound and from there, creators will be able to create video content with your music. Digital distribution allows you to manage the rights to your music and ensure you’re getting credited for streams it generates. Many artists turn to TikTok to share their music and behind-the-scenes insights into how they’ve made it, with artists like Kinneret, Alfie Jukes, Estrada and more finding creative ways to link back to their SoundCloud from TikTok.
Learn more about Distribution on SoundCloud.
Get Creative With Next Pro’s Unlimited Uploads Feature
With Next Pro, artists have no limitations regarding the amount of original content that can be uploaded to SoundCloud. Having access to unlimited uploads is a feature that artists like Estrada, Alfie Jukes and lilbubblegum have all integrated into their regular workflows, from uploading demos and teasers on SoundCloud and sharing on social media to creating different versions of songs and even uploading behind-the-scenes content walking listeners through their creative process. When you share a demo or teaser on SoundCloud and decide to release a full version of a song, with Next Pro, you can also seamlessly replace the track’s audio file without losing any comments or play counts. Additionally, as a Next Pro subscriber, you can unlock your exclusive Feature.fm benefit to access free tools to create smart links, pre-save links and more. Whether you’re linking to a demo you’re working on to gather feedback or running a pre-save campaign to promote an upcoming release, link sharing different kinds of content is a simple and effective way to promote your SoundCloud. This, paired with the creative freedom offered by unlimited uploads, there’s no shortage of possibilities to explore and experiment with.
Learn more about Unlimited Uploads and Next Pro benefits here.
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