Have you ever wondered what makes music go viral on social media? Believe it or not, there is a reason for the madness. Social media is ever changing, but through the rise and fall of many platforms, music always finds a place to be heard. We want to help you understand how to create a social media strategy that works with the trends and gives YOU the greatest chance of being successful and influential as a music artist.
First, let’s discuss some of the ways successful music artists have used social media to help launch their careers and individual songs. By following the footsteps of others, you can help boost your reach, be inspired to create the best plan of action for yourself, and have the greatest chance of success when posting music on social media.
1. Use The Right Platform
The first tip for success when trying to create awareness for your art is to use the right platform. Choosing the best platform allows you to build traction and reach a large audience. An audience who will not just listen to your music once but will want to continuously support you. Essentially, your goal when choosing your platform is to get a loyal following. The best platform(s) to focus on could change throughout the years depending on the audience demographic of the platform and how you market your song. Some of the most popular platforms include the following:
● Tiktok
● YouTube
● Snapchat
● SoundCloud
Youtube, SoundCloud, and Tiktok are currently three of the most popular platforms that successful music artists use to promote their music.
YouTube
Youtube is effective because it allows you to post videos of any length, has a huge audience, and has a diverse demographic. Video links from YouTube are easily shared on other social media platforms or through text. YouTube also allows you to build a brand by making videos about your music where you can tell your story and be personable with your audience. It is the main source for releasing official music videos and music related content.
TikTok
TikTok is effective because of its algorithm on the “For You” page. If you create content a lot of people enjoy, people are more likely to engage with it and the algorithm will promote it for you, if it performs well. On TikTok, there are also a lot of options for how you can promote your song. You can play, dance, lip-sync, or sing your song in a video. Having your song playing in a video can start a trend that people can follow to dance or create a storyline.
SoundCloud
SoundCloud is an online audio distribution platform that enables its users to upload, promote, stream, and share audio such as music or podcasts. It allows users to listen to free music and allows creators to upload music for free. SoundCloud is also helpful because it focuses on independent music which allows beginning artists to upload and promote their music before the quality is perfect. This is one advantage of using SoundCloud rather than Spotify, whose focus is on promoting mainstream music.
2. Diversify Your Reach
The second tip to create success and awareness for your content is to post with links to your content on several social media channels to spread awareness. This concept is called cross-posting which allows you to do minimal work to reach a larger audience.
It’s important when doing this, to perhaps not post the exact same thing on every platform. That might make your brand look careless if you have the same followers on different platforms or your posts on one social media platform might not fit well on another. For example, if you make a TikTok of you dancing to your favorite song, it might blow up on TikTok while pushing away potential employers from wanting to hire you if you post it on Linked-In. You will want to make sure the captions you add and the videos you post are relevant to the page you are posting.
If you are focusing on growing on YouTube, a great idea would be to cut a segment out of your YouTube video and post that segment on TikTok. Doing this repurposing saves you so much time and allows you to create more content to get yourself out there.
3. Make it Trendy
The third tip is to consider creating an original song with the purpose of it being a good background song of a popular social media platform. Out of the platforms above or another one that’s not listed that you think might perform well, choose a platform that you want to make a song for or a song you already made that would perform well.
Figure out what songs are currently trending on a specific platform then post it there.
For example, on YouTube, you could make long background music and post as free use so other people can use it and promote it for you. Another example is on TikTok you could see what other songs are being used and make your song fit into the trend so it could be used as background music or even start a trend.
4. Branding Yourself
To boost your music on social media, create a memorable brand. This will help people, or your audience, recognize you and more easily search for your content. The more they recognize and become familiar with you, the more likely they will become fans and share your content with others.
One tip for creating your brand is telling your story. Storytelling allows people to know about you and the meaning behind the songs that you are writing. This adds meaning to them and connects your audience to the songs in a deeper way. When they build that emotional connection with you, people often are more compelled to support your work.
The second tip in branding is being consistent with the content you put out. Make the posts you make or the album covers you design have a color scheme. It could be as simple as performing your music in a random location or with a random object that people will remember you by. There is no right or wrong way to do it, your goal is just to be creative in getting people to remember you and your mission. Many artists go through “eras” in their careers and these eras can have strong themes creatively to follow.
One example of successful branding is the brand ‘Crash Adams’. They have over 750 thousand followers on TikTok and three videos that had over 10 million views. They are known for always carrying a red couch with them. Each place that they go and perform, they bring their couch. They had a goal of bringing their red couch to every major intersection in the world to bring awareness to their brand. This idea is so successful because it is unique and something that people will remember. Even if you google broad keywords to find them, like “red couch singers,” they will be the first ones to come up because they have created a unique memorable brand. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnyOyaC8znQ
5. Be Consistent
As you post consistently, this will allow your current audience to become connected and invested in your art. It will allow other people to find your content. You never know how many views you will get or if something you post goes viral. It’s important you are posting content that is good content, but don’t let little imperfections prevent you from posting consistently.
In the Book “Traffic Secrets” Russel Brunson said, “If you publish daily for a year, you’ll never need to worry about money again.” https://summaries.com/blog/traffic-secrets
Of course this content has to be good and we have to be logical in the way we monetize our brand, but his point is true. Once your content is solid, it’s all about getting it out to the right people.
https://www.thehuntingphotographer.com/blog/qualityvsquantity
In this story, the author talks about how quality comes with quantity. The story is about a group of students who were separated into quantity and quality groups. They had a certain amount of time to go shoot art and focus on either perfection or just the overall amount of content they could get. At the end of it, they were able to conclude that the ones who focused on perfection didn’t have hardly anything to show for it. The quantity group focused their time on getting lots of variety with their photos and playing around with skills, which in return gave them both better quality photos and more content.
https://austinkleon.com/2020/12/10/quantity-leads-to-quality-the-origin-of-a-parable/
This is another story that similarly talks about how quantity produces quality. Those who focused so much on their pottery being perfect didn’t have much to show for as those who spent time making many different pieces and learning from their mistakes. One main thing we can conclude from this is “The more you do something without worrying about it being perfect, the better you get.”
5. Learn to Monetize
Learn the best ways to monetize your music on social media and do it early. Some important places to monetize:
● Spotify
● YouTube – via ads
● Apple Music
The best companies to monetize on social media using music apps are Spotify and Apple Music. These two sources are where most of the public listens and streams music. If your music is accessible on the two, you will be able to share links to your music, interact with fans, see the metrics of your songs, and make money. https://help.soundcloud.com/hc/en-us/articles/360053309994-Premier-Monetization-FAQs
On YouTube, you can do things like join a paid partnership program, sell products, license content to media, get products from brands to influence others to use them, and become an affiliate marketer. Within Soundcloud, you can enable monetization on a track. You have to take certain steps to get it approved and monetized. All of these platforms are great resources to monetize and make money with the work you do within the platforms. https://www.shopify.com/blog/198134793-how-to-make-money-on-youtube
6. Obey Copyright Laws
Make sure to abide by copyright laws. If you don’t abide by copyright laws, your content can be defunded, you could lose rights to your music, and even have to pay thousands of dollars if sued.
Copyright laws are broken every day, every month, and every year. In 2017 it was said there were 3,472 copyright infringement cases filed. Some might be surprised at the amount of famous artists that have been sued for or have copyright cases against them. Some recent cases of famous artists include Dua lipa, Lizzo, Childish Gambino, and Lana Del Ray. Some
landmark cases in history include singers like Vanilla Ice, Robin Thicke, Ther Vere, and others. The Musicians Institute library has last updated these cases as of March of 2022. You can look at the recent cases on their website through the following link. https://library.mi.edu/musiccopyright/currentcases
Even though these are all popular artists who have had cases of copyright filed against them, some everyday people also break these laws and get sued. Copyright is so important and following the guidelines properly can save people a lot of time, money, and stress if they don’t break the law. https://library.mi.edu/musiccopyright/currentcases
When using music on social media platforms, to ensure you are following copyright laws, make sure you always get permission for any music you use or replicate. You want to make sure that the permission is from the music owner. If you are making something that will be monetized, it is recommended you get not just verbal but written permission.
In some cases, it is not required that influencers get permission to use the song from the owner depending on the platforms they are using. Platforms like Instagram, Tik Tok, Facebook, etc. already have rights to songs that people can duet or create content with. You must learn the different rights you have when using music on each platform or supplying music to the platforms. If you do use someone else’s work, even with permission, you should still give credit to the artist if it’s not implied.
According to Epidemic Sound, there are certain permissible ways of using copyrighted music. The following are some of the ways to use copyrighted music on Instagram.
A. Primarily, platforms pay the right holders a flat rate for the song to exist on the platform.
B. Secondly, people are permitted to use music recorded in live performances, and short content with sounds. Using music on Instagram is also allowed because Instagram provides the sounds available in the music search section (with the rights for its usage).
C. One other way that influencers use music on social media platforms is by collaborating (or co-producing) with the artist/right holder of the song. That way they can grant you a license.
D. Lastly, one other main way that music is used legally on social media is through royalty free music. Some of the best websites to get royalty free music are Sound Strip, Epidemic Sound, and Snapmuse.
Using music to make the content better and to catch attention is a great tool to use on social media, if done correctly. It is important for artists to make sure they use music correctly within their social media platforms. In an article from Lumanu, Zach Watson states, “Here’s an open secret: music is a powerful way to influence how people feel. It turns out, our brains closely associate music with emotion.”
Conclusion
Throughout this recap, we included many ways and examples to help you learn from far reaching artists about what we should and should not do in striving for success in launching music through social media. We hope you were able to find new ways to pick a platform that works best for you, how to be diverse and stand out, make your music trendy with the right platform, create a brand, be consistent, monetize your content, and understand copyright laws correctly. Thank you for reading and we hope you start applying all of these things to the work you do!
Sources:
https://www.epidemicsound.com/our-license-model/
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/04/07/social-media-use-in-2021/
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