How I built a large following on SoundCloud

brodel34

Banned
I have three accounts total that I use. My main account is my musician account branded with the name, obviously. On this account I only follow the people that I want to… specifically for branding. I include links to my social media.

Popular SC Tracks

I make a list of all of the most popular songs that are similar to my music on soundcloud. The people who like these tracks are the same people who would like my account. I look for these tracks specifically.

Popular SC Users

In addition to the list of popular tracks... I make a list of the most popular users on SoundCloud that i'm trying to market similar to.

Promo Accounts

I have two accounts that I use strictly for promo. They are not branded or associated in any way to my main account. Both of these accounts follow the popular users from the list. I repost the popular tracks from the list on each of these accounts… each account with different tracks so they don't look the same. I try to find the absolute best avatar and header that i can possibly find for these. Look at popular photographers on instagram or photos on tumblr for help with this. I dump a few thousand fake followers on each of these promo accounts (the site that i use to pad my social media stats is 'deleted as possible spam' because i believe that they are the safest)... i'll tell you why i do this in a second. So both of these promo accounts now have a very nice avatar/header and nothing but the most popular music on their timeline.

Once I have the accounts looking pretty... (by biding by soundclouds rules) I start to follow the followers of the high profile users with the popular tracks that are posted on my page. I avoid following users with no username and no profiles. Because your account is filled with nothing but music that you know they will like, you have targeted avatar and header artwork, and you have thousands of followers... 90% of the people will follow you back. The max you can follow is 2000 so this is why i like to order a few thousand so that the following to follower ratio looks legit. This is key because you are building an account based on hype. All the best profile artwork, all the best tracks, and lots of followers. Then after a few days you can unfollow every single one of these people and most of them wont even notice and will continue to follow you. Then you repeat the whole process again and again until you have thousands and thousands of targeted followers for each of your promo accounts. It takes time but it won't take long before you see it working.

Over time you will build up thousands and thousands of extremely targeted followers. When you post a new track on your main account, you can repost this track to your promo accounts and this will build you targeted organic followers, likes, and comments on your main account. A little tip to really drive likes/comments/reposts into overdrive is to switch hit on your promo accounts. Repost it once a day on both accounts. When you repost it will place the track at the top of your promo account's timeline each and every time. Watch your followers and engagement go up!

Another thing.... to make it look like your promo accounts are unbiased, I like to repost at least one of the popular tracks in between each of my main account posts. I don't want my tracks to appear consecutively on the promo accounts.

Bandcamp

My main account is a premium account that i pay the $5 or whatever each month. Each time that I upload a new track on soundcloud, I also upload this track on bandcamp as well. I include a link for the bandcamp track in the soundcloud track using the custom text "FREE DOWNLOAD" as the download text in the soundcloud track. On bandcamp... I make it so that users can only download the track when they enter their email address. Bandcamp collects these email addresses for you and you can save them as a csv file. Whenever I have a new track out, I always send these users a bcc email blast and they all get an email notification to go to soundcloud to listen to the track. This is great to get early engagement in addition to the promo accounts tactic.

If you do this every day you start to build a real asset in your soundcloud account. I've done this 4 to 5 times with different artists and every time we build a targeted following and we drive lots and lots of engagement.
 
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well this is more about building the soundcloud following.
but lets just say that i do pretty good. :thumbs up:

What good is a following if it doesn't equal money? I know "likes" feed egos, but they're mostly meaningless. How "pretty good" do you do? Do you do "pretty good" enough to not have a day job and make your entire living from soundcloud "fans"? Is it just a little extra side money? Or are you a promotion expert that makes money off of desperate poor actual musicians? Do you make money from your own music, or do you make money off of others? I'm genuinely asking.
 
What Greg says^^^ SC followers/listeners are other musicians. They just want you to 'follow' them back. Offering free downloads on bandcamp to people who have already downloaded free from you doesn't get you any money. And you're paying for fake 'followers', too?
I get messages from 'followers' who are just "promotion experts" all the time.
 
hello? i said i do pretty well. you would've thought i said i'm begging for food.

what makes you turn that into me not making any money? i sell plenty of music.

did you know: Most succesful artists give away their music in exchange for sales? It's called a single and it has been done since the beginning of time.
 
hello? i said i do pretty well. you would've thought i said i'm begging for food.

what makes you turn that into me not making any money? i sell plenty of music.

did you know: Most succesful artists give away their music in exchange for sales? It's called a single and it has been done since the beginning of time.

You misread or misunderstood my questions. Try again.
 
hello? i said i do pretty well. you would've thought i said i'm begging for food.

what makes you turn that into me not making any money? i sell plenty of music.

did you know: Most succesful artists give away their music in exchange for sales? It's called a single and it has been done since the beginning of time.

I think Greg was just basically asking a simple question, which is: Are you able to support yourself solely from your music, or is it just a supplemental income?
 
Or possibly, "Seeing is believing." You didn't even include a link to any of your soundcloud pages...for people to see how "large" a following you have.

AFA "Pretty well" that's a fairly subjective thing. I would think $250 a month would be pretty well. Some may think $10 a year would be pretty well. Others might think you need to do a couple grand a week to make it "pretty well."

Some of your ideas are solid. Thanks for the information, but the vagueness of your words just doesn't cut it for me.
 
Perhaps I am a little on the cynical side, but I am left with the feeling that you either work for followersgrow or since you mentioned that you did this for 4 or 5 times for various artists, you are trying to generate leads for the service you offer.
 
Welcome to the new world of media where people clamor for and get paid in views, likes, and followers. And by get paid I mean get their egos stroked but don't actual make a living wage.

Just as the Twitter account that follows 500,000 other Twitter accounts has 500,000 followers of their own. Does any of it really matter? Is anyone really even paying attention?

At the end of the day, who really cares? It is all meaningless.
 
So this is this person's first post. Registered on January of this year so within the last couple days. And tries pointing people to followersgrow.com. So I take it you are the person that runs that site and are trying to make a quick buck over at followersgrow.com.

Dude, follows, likes, blah blah blah... I don't think anybody but other musicians use Soundcloud. If you are looking for non musician fans that will actually like your music you may actually have to do some work and reach out to people and shove your music down their throat.
 
yes i make enough to support myself and then some to be frank.

no i do not work for that website. there are plenty of websites that you can use.... thats just the one i use.
 
Some of your ideas are solid...

And some of them probably violations of the ToS, and some of them are almost certainly illegal.
You retain ownership you have of any intellectual property you post to Tumblr.
We [Instagram] respect other people's [IP] rights, and expect you to do the same.

So there's that.

So to clarify, are you selling your service as a "soundcloud/bandcamp promotion expert" to other musicians? Or are you making a living selling your own music?

And since it's in the US, where asking people what their income is is considered rude, can you give us a ballpark estimate? Say in the category of: "I'm on food stamps", "I have 5 roommates", "I can afford health insurance", or "I have a mortgage that is less than 20% of my income"?
 
And some of them probably violations of the ToS, and some of them are almost certainly illegal.



So there's that.

TOS? sure. whatever. thats why i only do it on the promo accounts.
and illegal? hahaha thats hilarious

pretty nosy for a guy who thinks i belong in jail (again, hahaha). Lets just say i make over 80k a year... decent amount more.
 
I don't think it'll work for any kind of music. I think if you're not doing some hip hop, pop, techno garbage you mostly likely won't get more than a few dozen likes and/or not much more than that. Of course most artists on soundcloud are awful musicians and sound really bad. Some of them have a ton of followers and it's supersizing that people actually put up with that crap. To each his own... I guess :D
 
TOS? sure. whatever. thats why i only do it on the promo accounts.
and illegal? hahaha thats hilarious

pretty nosy for a guy who thinks i belong in jail (again, hahaha). Lets just say i make over 80k a year... decent amount more.

Word of advice (if you want to be taken seriously) - punctuate like a professional making $80+k /year.
 
and illegal? hahaha thats hilarious

I don't know if you noticed or not, but this is a forum for creative types. i.e. people who are passionate about creating some form of art.
Gloating about your process that relies on stealing other people's intellectual property is somewhat of a faux pas in such circles, even if said IP is from a different medium.

I don't really care how much you make specifically. I was just curious if you'd turned this into a real "career" income level or if it was a starving musician level of thing.
 
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