The heart of SoundCloud is its deeply engaged community of creators who share the sounds they create with each another and the world. SoundCloud is not only about sharing sounds but also about sharing common interests, attitudes, goals and connecting with people who share your passion.
How to Grow Your SoundCloud Community
Here’s a handy list of 10 tips for you to learn about how you can build your own community on SoundCloud.
Listen closely to many sounds from many ‘Clouders.
This is the first and most important step in growing your own community: understand what’s already out there and who’s doing what. Use search tools and groups to find sounds you like.
If you like it, fave it, drop a note and follow.
Adding a track you like as a favorite goes a long way with people, who may just return the favor. Dropping a timed comment often starts a conversation, and following the person keeps you in the loop for future uploads.
Make honest, relevant, useful, encouraging comments, often.
It’s ok to say “nice” but even better to say “nice drums, but sounds like some bass details are getting lost. Check EQ?”. It’s not great to say “nice, listen to mine” if you didn’t actually listen to it – many perceive that as spam.
Reply to your comments and messages, connect with your listeners.
A polite response to compliments on your tracks and in your inbox is generally appreciated by your listeners and keeps the conversation going.
Share your favorite artists and tracks with your other social networks freely.
It’s great to get Tweeted or Facebooked by a follower who likes your track, right? Return the favor in advance.
Consider collaborating via private track sharing.
SoundCloud makes it really easy to collaborate by letting you share works in progress privately, preserving full recording quality in the actual file uploaded.
Offer your own tracks for remixing and consider Creative Commons licensing.
You might be surprised what unexpected variations and usages come back from the overall SoundCloud community of hugely diverse genres.
Join a Repost Network
By getting others to ‘repost‘ your track, it’s published to the streams of all their followers. Technically, a repost by an influential account could lead to significant exposure.
Use a Download Gate
ToneDen and Hive were some of the first websites to pop up allowing people to create their own custom download gates. What these websites would give you control over is “fan-gating” a listener to be able to download a track or album for free in exchange for following the artist’s Soundcloud. The use of social media platform’s API allowed for growth beyond just Soundcloud and ended up expanding to the concept of “Tweet for a Download.” Instagram and YouTube would begin to be added by many fan gate platforms, and even more popular now is gating Spotify.
