Learning Generosity Through Inexperience: My Soundcloud Promotion Experience

Overcoming Setbacks

After my song One of Us came out, I knew I needed to do some more promotion.

My blog outreach for the song didn’t land as well as I hoped. Apart from a few friendly rejections, I did not hear back from anybody.

That’s OK - blogs take time. When facing a promotional problem, I turned to my most reliable weapon: Soundcloud. The tactic in this case was messaging other users and asking them if they want a repost trade.

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"Hey [username], how is it going? Are you available for a 48 hour repost trade, aka I post your song for 48 hours and you do for me too?

After my first 2.3k followers I have learned that this is a good way to boost listens / reach more people in an organic way. If you are down, I'd doing my new track One of Us - indie/electronic left-of-center stuff

here's the track, you down?”

—

I sent a few hundred messages similar to the above, using slight variations in wording to avoid triggering the spam filter.

Some people said yes, most didn’t reply, a few responded emphatically with a “I hate repost trading!” sort of NO.

Is Repost Trading Bad?

When a few users responded referring to this activity as “repost trading,” I blew it off at first. It’s just an offer to do a short repost trade so we can both reach a few more listeners… what is the harm, I figured?

Of course it was not long before my mind started drawing parallels to Steemit… I have posted many angry comments against “follow for follow” and “upvote for upvote” here.

Is “repost for repost” any different? It seems clear that it is not.

I found myself in the shoes of a newbie making a basic mistake. The same kind of mistake that I often get annoyed about over here.

Soundcloud vs. Steemit - What I Learned

Here’s how I approach Steemit: Create good posts every day, respond to the comments, engage with the community and get involved, plus stay informed about new features.

On Soundcloud, I’ve put in a lot of time, yet get much worse results. I realize now it is because I was using all the wrong tactics: Repost-for-Repost, trying to garner attention for my own posts, not listening to other people’s content, etc.

In other words I wasn’t being nearly generous enough on Soundcloud. I plan to spend a lot more time listening to other users’ songs and commenting on them, not asking for anything in return, stuff like that.

If I treat Soundcloud like Steemit - a community to engage in - I think there are great results to be had.

No More Cold Calls?

Does this mean “cold calling” is dead? No more reaching out to people I don’t know yet?

I do not think so. Instead, it means I only reach out to people if I really listen and enjoy their music.

A message like “hey [user] do you want to repost?” is no good… but something like “hey [user] I listened to [your song] and liked [this part] - we have compatible styles, do you want to try to work together somehow? I’m down for promotional or musical collaboration, whatever…”

That kind of thing is more personal, it shows I actually listened, and is much more likely to get some result or at least a pleasant response.

I will be experimenting more with this kind of outreach… we’ll see how it goes. So far I got one great repost from somebody with nearly 5k followers, it netted me more than 100 new listens… so far so good with that.

What About You?

Do you use Soundcloud? Have you had any luck connecting with other users or communities there? how?