Soundcloud Has Removed Groups. What Now? (Here’s One Alternative For Promoting Music)

Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or alternatively, you just don’t use the platform that much), you will have noticed that the social sound platform, Soundcloud, have removed groups.

What Were Groups?

To put it simply, groups were a way of spamming distributing your uploaded tracks amongst likeminded musicians and listeners to garner more plays, likes, and followers.

It was a handy tool, one which was very popular amongst many readers of this blog. It allowed them to promote their music and increase their following.

And it made sense!

However, now that they are gone, every musician I know seems to be crying. Why?

Groups were the only way these musicians were promoting their music.

Ridiculous, I know. But guys, I have your backs!!

The One Alternative That Makes Sense

Everyone knows Instagram…

Or do I need to use that idiom I started this article off with? Honestly, if you don’t know what Instagram is, then I am concerned.

Just in case you have been living under a rock, Instagram is a photo and, more importantly, a video sharing social platform. And THAT makes it a great way to share your music, in video form.

Yeah, I said video.

If you’ve spoken to me in any capacity over the past year, you’ll know I’ve been raving about the importance of video in today’s world of marketing.

And you need to jump on the bandwagon too.

Every important social media platform has some form of new video product which they are pushing hard.

Side note: Instagram have recently introduced “Stories” if you didn’t know – it’s like Snapchat, but it has Instagram’s discovery functionality. It’s impressive.

And this brings me to my point…

Instagram has a discovery system similar to Soundcloud’s groups feature.

#UseThem

The way many users on Instagram get likes and grow their followers is by hashtagging, and you need to as well.

I have a little task for you that I want you to follow, right this second.

1. Open your Instagram (or download the app) and make sure that your account is set to public (double check in the “settings” tab).
2. Instagram gives you the ability to display ONE website link in your profile. So, I want you to add the link to the song you wish to promote on your Soundcloud. You’ll need to go into “edit profile” to do this.
3. Open up a note on your phone and go to Hashtagify.me and search for hashtags related to your niche in the bar at the top of the mobile browser (I.e. “HipHopBeats” would be what I’d search for). Select all the hashtags you feel that are relevant, then click copy.
4. Go into your note on your phone and paste them in. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until you have about 25-30 relevant hashtags. (By the way, Instagram won’t allow you to tag more than 30 hashtags to each post so there’s no need to do more.)
5. Record a video of you playing the track (you have 60 seconds, so use it wisely). Be creative with it.
6. Type in a nice little caption about the song, followed by the call to action: “The link is in my bio”.
7. Publish the video.
8. Copy and paste the hashtags into the comment section of the video and publish the comment.
9. Finally, go to THIS post here on Instagram, and comment saying you’ve followed these instructions. I’ll check out your music when I can. 🙂

Voila! You should get quite a few likes and comments, and hopefully a few clickthroughs to the song on your Soundcloud.

The best method of encouraging people to clickthrough to your Soundcloud would be to offer an incentive.

Therefore, for the purpose of this little post, instead of using the call to action of “the link is in my bio”, add “the link is in my bio for a free download”. It’ll encourage people to check the song out in full, as there’ll be something in it for them. That’s if you don’t mind giving away a free download of your song!

It’s not the best example of incentivising, but it will certainly help.

So, Have I Helped?

I hope you’ve found this article helpful. If you have and you’ve followed the instructions, please comment on THIS Instagram post so I can check out your music (it’s what I did this article for).

Further, if you would like more articles like this, then I’d recommend signing up to the Internal Affairs newsletter below for FREE helpful tips.

There’s a little freebie when you sign up as well, take me up on the offer!!

Cheers,

Jordan Brace