Let’s address the elephant in the room right away: there’s no secret formula that guarantees a straight path to the top of the charts. What you’ll need for your career to take off is a good amount of effort, time, and some old-fashioned creative thinking.
When it comes to building your online presence, you’ll need to cover three main areas. We’ve created this comprehensive guide to help.
➡️ Part 1: how to regularly upload and share your work.
➡️ Part 2: how to promote it across your socials to build your fanbase.
➡️ Part 3: how to pitch to promotors, playlists, venues, and tastemakers.
Data helps you greatly in every area, and we’ll go into the details at each step.
With so many channels out there, it’s smart to get to know the specifics of each one and see what’s best for you. Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, Beatport… each of them has its own pros and cons, ranging from genre specifics (for example, if you play Black Metal, there’s probably no use turning to Beatport) to local availability, need for a distributor, etc.
Still, once you go past the technicalities, the basic principles apply to all of them.
The more professional your profile looks, the better chances you have of people subscribing or sharing your work.
Once you've uploaded your music to YouTube and tweaked your profile to perfection, the real work starts.
With some time and effort, you can find a channel that will give you a shout-out, or connect with other artists for a collab – see the Mike Williams interview we mentioned above for more.
📌Tips and Tricks on How to Be a Successful Musician on YouTube
SoundCloud has grown hugely popular over the years, especially in the independent Hip Hop and Trap scene. If that’s your jam, you obviously need to learn the ropes to stand out.
📌5 Tips for Musicians on SoundCloud
To release music on Spotify, you’ll need a label or a distributor. If you don’t have one yet, do some research and see which one's a good fit. Viberate analytics can provide insights into successful artists and the labels behind them.
See other artists’ advice on getting onto playlists.
Similar to Spotify, you’ll need a label or a distributor to release tracks on Beatport. You can do your screening of artists and the labels behind them with our Beatport analytics.
📌Five Key Steps for Optimizing Your Beatport Releases
If you want to make music your career, you need to approach it like a business. Having more than one revenue source is a good idea – so research your options.
Spotify boasts high subscriber numbers, with 130M paying subscribers (and a further 156M free users), ahead of Apple Music with about 70M paying subscribers, meaning not only are you likely to hit the one-million mark faster on Spotify, you also get more promotional exposure.
Soundcloud Premier and YouTube allow you to monetize directly – you can upload your music straight to the platform without having to go through a distributor.
📌 How Much Money Is a Million Streams?
With many channels to manage, a growing audience to think about, and an always-changing industry to succeed in, staying agile is perhaps the most important tactic. Having a complete analytics tool helps you stay on top of the game. You can try Viberate analytics which will help you to:
🔎 get to know your fanbase,
🎯 identify your dominant channels and learn from the best in your genre,
👣 effectively track your promotions, new releases, and social media efforts,
🕸️ work on your music network and find new collab opportunities,
🗺️ research potential markets and find new opportunities.
Did we mention you can stay on top of music analytics with one easy-to-use tool? Do check out what the right music data can do for you – there’s a plan for almost everyone.