SoundCloud promotional channels These host other artist’s music on their own account and help broadcast the music to their audience, sometimes reaching hundreds of thousands more than if the artists were to upload individually.
These accounts are often dubbed SoundCloud labels and tend to differ from traditional record labels such as Heroic, Monstercat and Spinnin, in the sense that most don’t distribute music to stores (Spotify, Apple Music, iTunes etc). They’re usually run by young founders, are lenient with how legitimate content needs to be in order to get uploaded (many don’t screen for uncleared samples) and relationships with the artists are maintained through Facebook chat. Nonetheless, in similar vein to YouTube promotional channels (such as Mr Suicide Sheep and Trap Nation), some highly successful channels take their growth and use that to pivot into real record labels, setting up distribution, signing records and monetizing their copyrights.
The concept is simple: for audiovisual blogs, content is the growth driver. If records perform well, they will get traction and drive traffic back to their accounts. A like-to-download gate on the releases is going to accelerate that process and because all the artists want exposure they’re also going to be reposting the content. The bigger they grow, the easier it’s going to be to acquire that content, so it’s an auto-catalytic process.
SoundCloud promotional channels tend to be genre specific. The first accounts grew hand in hand with the rise of electronic music. Originally “tropical house” (think Kygo) and “future bass” (think San Holo) were the first genres to be widely adopted, fueling their trajectory to mainstream EDM adoption.
Most of them started promoting one genre and then branched out into more as they launched sister accounts and launched promotional networks, where they leverage each account’s individual reach through reposts and gating. Tracks are usually submitted for upload or repost via a direct SoundCloud message or by Facebook message to the founders.
Check out our list of top 10 SoundCloud promotional networks here covering electronic music sub-genres from future trap to tropical house and more.
Like to download gates
We need to segue to like-to-download gates for you to fully understand this process.
Like to download gates facilitate the exchange of content for social actions.
In other words, you can give away an MP3 of a track in exchange for a SoundCloud follow, repost, Facebook like, Twitter followers, Spotify follower and so forth. New gating destinations are being added constantly as social platforms rise to relevancy and introduce new features. When you upload a track to SoundCloud or YouTube, you can customize the buy button to say ‘Free Download’ and link it to the gate for that particular release, or add it to the video description. In turn, a portion of the listeners are going to want to download the record, but before they can do so, they have to perform the required social interactions.
This phenomenon has changed how music is promoted as most gates allow multiple users to be included in exchange for one download. In other words, for this one MP3, you may have to follow the original artist, a promotional channel and a record label.
This has aligned the interests of the parties involved and means that if there’s an upload of a release on either of those party’s channels, all the other parties included in the gate are incentivized to promote it. After all, more exposure leads to more people clicking the gate, leads to more followers for everyone. When you factor in the repost gating feature on SoundCloud, the effects compound quick.
Services that facilitate like-to-downloading include Artist Union, Hive, Click.DJ and ToneDen. We’re going to be dedicating a full article on download gates soon.