Finding a community on SoundCloud

SoundCloud is pretty much a must for any aspiring musician these days - and it's obvious that a community of musicians and creatives ought to be somewhere that you can find support and fans.

Now they are getting to be really helpful in advising musicians on best practice tips for their own service.

We wrote about their overall guide here - definitely check this out - but they keep adding to it.

The latest posts are this one - How succesful SoundCloud users build meaningful connections in the SoundCloud community.

This comes with lots of bits of audio interviews (naturallly....) from those users.

And the other is their guidance post - How to build your SoundCloud community. This is full of great usable suggestions.

If you're not on SoundCloud, you should be and this will help you get started.

 

SoundCloud - How To

SoundCloud is a bit of a mystery to me.

I use it, lots of my clients use it and we all love it, but what should you be doing there?

Is it just an audio store, or a community or a place to promote your music and find fans.

Well, it's all these things and that's the beauty of it as different people use it in very different ways. I just wonder if I should be pro-actively using it to promote music or just being part of the community!

And, now that it powers various other tools, notably RootMusic's BandPage, you might be virtually forced to have a profile and some music on there.

I've long wanted to write about the definitive way to use it, but I don't need to as SoundCloud have their own Guide.

It covers all sorts of stuff. Make sure to check out the 'Basics' section but also the 'Masterclasses'.

How to use SoundCloud to run a remix competition anyone?

How to set up Groups?

Check it out.

How to use Soundcloud to promote your music

Soundcloud is awesome.

I spent a good part of yesterday updating a Soundcloud profile for one of our artists and when I went back today there were 40 new followers and literally hundreds of plays! Can't argue with that.

Sure, it works especilly well in the electronic music community but all genres can benefit from it.

It is definitely somewhere that every musician should have a profile and all their music.

Watch this video to see the benefits.

SoundCloud - Scion Music(less) Music Conference from Scion A/V on Vimeo.

Here's the link for the dodgy embeds!

Video tagging on Facebook - a la SoundCloud

This is an interesting new app that could really take off on Facebook.

If you use SoundCloud, you'll know that the most listened to, shared and downloaded tracks or mixes are crammed full of annotations by listeners.

Clicking them and reading what people say about a track or a mix is one of the most compelling things about listening to stuff on SoundCloud. It's brilliant fan engagement. A mix or track with lots of annotation is also getting loads of social proof that makes you want to see why people are bothering to leave a note.

So, what if you could do this with video?

Well, that's what this app, BlipSnips, does. It's only a Facebook or iPhone app for now but it allows you to upload any video to Facebook and share it for that kind of tagging.

Seeing how this works at SoundCloud, I think this could be massive on Facebook.

More and more users are sharing video through Facebook, whether by dropping in links or uploading their own clips. Facebook is the fastest-growing referrer of video traffic, and users are beginning to upload videos to the site in higher numbers as well. And now a new iPhone and Facebook app aims to give you even more reasons to use Facebook as a video hosting destination.

The app, called BlipSnips, allows users to tag videos along the timeline. This is huge, because under the default Facebook uploader, users can only list friends who appear somewhere in the clip  Now, with BlipSnips, you can tag the exact moment on the video timeline when they appear on camera. Sweet.

Read the piece about it on ReelSEO here.

SoundCloud updates make it ever more essential

I love SoundCloud - all my artists use it to host tracks and, in particular, DJ mixes.

It's not brilliant for directly interacting with followers (although that can be done) - more importantly, the annotation and commenting on their players massively encourages interaction with your music - which is where a fan relationship starts. It's a great part of your online music promotion toolbox.

Plus, the players are embeddable and customisable.

I don't recommend using it exclusively, but I do recommend having a presence there.

This article talks about some very clever updates to their offering that they have recently made - more about live recording on the web to SoundCloud rather than about using it for your music hosting and dissemination - but doubtless you can find some creative way to use this to further your cause.

Today, SoundCloud, an audio platform that has concentrated on music makers so far, makes a significant pivot into the wider sphere of audio sharing. Up until now SoundCloud has done a pretty incredible job of attracting well known artists to its platform such as The Foo Fighters, Kylie, Deadmau5, Moby and Caribou, who have used it to effectively socialise their music. But today Soundcloud releases the ability to record sound direct via the site, and via it’s updated iPhone app. That puts it into the realm of pure audio sharing platforms such as Cinch and Audioboo. In other news SoundCloud has also passed two million users.

Read the piece here.

 

SoundCloud Social Download - key tool in fan engagement

I love SoundCloud - it's a great place to host your music and the community is very influential in breaking music.

It should definitely be part of your online music promotion mix.

They have just released a great application that allows you to trade your SoundCloud hosted music file for a potential fan's tweet or share on facebook, or even email address.

You should be using this!

SoundCloud-Social-Download from SoundCloud on Vimeo.

Read the whole post at SoundCloud.