There are numerous workout pop videos, from the questionable Eric Prydz remix of Call On Me to the excellent Olivia Newton-John’s Physical and now we can add this gem of a song from Moxy the Band entitled The Feeling of Letting Go:
I found this track while randomly perusing the Submithub Hot Or Not charts and as usual the top tier here never disappoints.
If you’re a fan of modes you’ll recognise the huge lydian influence; add to this a rock solid bass line, gorgeous lilting vocals and most agreeable choice of synth tones, I think you’ll agree this band has an absolute monster of a tune.
One thing I also admire is the band’s attitude to workouts; smoking away and lifting 2kg dumb bells. Verily, this band has the correct approach to getting physical. Mine’s a vodka and coke BTW xx.
Script writing meeting for ep IX must have gone like:
“Right folks, my name is Chris and we need a PLOT for Episode IX! And I want NO DEATH STARS!! OK, no fcking goddam Death Stars, SERIOUSLY! Episode 4 – Death Star. Guess what? It gets BLOWN UP Episode 5 – Death star gets rebuilt. Fuck that noise. Episode 6 – Guess WHAT? Death Star get’s blown up! Episode 7 – FML you’ll never guess what?”
“er, Death Star” “That’s RIGHT Sarah – you’re on the ball!” “AND GUESS WHAT HAPPENS!”
“It get’s blown up?”
“Damn straight Sarah, that motherfucker get’s blown the FUCK UP”
Chris stares round the room, visibly shaking with rage and continues:
“Episode 8 – no idea what the fuck that was but there was no Death Star! Luke dieded but so what?”
Chris takes a bite out of an apple and ruffles his polo neck with his fingers.
“So, what you got team?”
JJ shuffles papers nervously and crosses out STEATH DARR from pictures of planets being blowing up.
“Hi, er, I got an idea” “Go for it JJ” “Imagine instead of a Death Star…” “I said NO DEATH STARS JJ!” “I know, I know, but hear me out… what if we had like 1000 Star Destroyers EACH ARMED WITH A MUTHERFUCKING STEA… I mean DEATH STAR!!!!” Chris pauses for a second “Go on” “Zombie palpatine”
Let me introduce Wallet Jackson who naturally hails from Nashville, United States, home of cowboys, the Grand Ole Osprey (a big bird apparently and not the theatre place I’ve deliberately misspelled for comic effect).
I caught this particular track recently on my journeys round the interwebs and I think it’s such a neat twist on country and western insofar as it makes C&W goddam cool:
Smooth, melodic, with such an clever arrangement. Rarely do songs pique my interest so quickly and this did so with the minimum of fuss.
But what do you think? Don’t like ospreys? Or birds or stuff? Hook me up in the comments and let me know!
Here we go! Very synthwave it is too but that seems to be the vogue these days and something I’m happy about because my band Corserine are synthwave. Heh.
The folks at JPU have this to say about it…
New Tokyo’s electronic pop duo FEMM have released another technologically impressive music video ahead of their EU and UK tour this July. The pair also announce that laser artist YAMACHANG, responsible for the music video’s impressive visuals, will be joining the sentient mannequins for the London performances at Boston Music Room and Hyper Japan. Plus, FEMM will add a further date to the tour with an appearance at Japan Expo in Paris, the largest celebration of Japanese pop culture outside of Japan. FEMM’s tour merch designs have also been revealed.
Brand-new video ‘Falling For A Lullaby’ has just been released. The song is produced by Jenna Andrews, the songwriter responsible for k-pop mega hit “Butter” by BTS. Featuring a pounding, cyberpunk synth bassline and super-sweet pop vocals, it has become one of FEMM’s most defining tracks and is one of the duo’s most streamed songs.
I wanted to promote my band’s music on Spotify by placing a few adverts in Instagram. Here’s what happened.
Tl;DR
It works, but I found it expensive. In total I spent maybe $200 and picked up 30 Spotify followers and 60 Instagram followers which equates to about $1.80 per follower.
Promoting posts inside Instagram was a fast and easy way to advertise on IG
Setting up adverts using Facebook’s Ad Manager is very hard and you need to learn the platform
You need to mono control your mix: most folks be using phones so you must check your track sounds decent on these devices
Use a short video clip of your track’s catchiest section. Keep the clip about 15-30 seconds long
Creating an advert
I used Distrokid to make a very basic 30 second video of my track. I used the strongest section of the song. Here’s the one I used for one of the campaigns:
You can also use any movie making platform, but the point is – use the best music you can and some visuals that maybe say a bit about what the viewer is listening to; and include a call to action such as “click to follow us on Spotify” or something similar (if you work in marketing, it would be cool if you could jump into the comments and advise best practice).
Once you have your advert in mp4 format you’ll need to send it to yourself via email or some other method of getting it on your phone. Otherwise you won’t be able to post it on Instagram and use the boost post feature.
Boosting a post within Instagram
Difficulty Easy
Cost $20
Technicalities You need to convert your IG account to a business account but that’s simple. Next, you’ll need to post your wee video that you sent to your phone. Once you’ve done that, simply follow the instructions to promote it:
What button can I possibly press to promote my post??
You’ll need to specify what genres you want the advert to match to and I found these to be more general than I would like: so no Synthwave category; I used proxies like Synthpop and Synthesiser music (whatever that is). So if your genre is microthrashdeathmetalgrungecore you may need to branch out a bit.
Destination of your advert You can set whatever destination you want to so I set mine to my Spotify artist account. But you can choose to get direct messages or for folks to visit your IG profile.
Results
Warning: if you stop your campaign early Instagram erases all history of the advert so you lose all your tracking data. Which is hella lame-o.
I ran two adverts like this with a total spend: $40 and I picked up around 10 Spotify followers and 20 IG followers which works out at $1.33 per follow.
Using Facebook’s Advertising System
Difficulty Arrghhhhhh
Cost $130. I spent a lot just to see what would happen because folks on Reddit be all like “blah blah you spent $15 on an advert blah blah”
Technicalities There are clear instructions in this handy guide at Submithub. But I can summarise thusly:
Create an advert
Choose your audience
Generate a Facebook Pixel (a wee bit of code that reports back to Facebook about who clicks the advert so Facebook can refine the advert’s targeting)
Put the pixel on a forwarding website
Point the forwarding website to your Spotify track page. This allows folks to quickly save the track if they want. This is important.
You’ll need a glass of vodka because Facebook’s Ad Manager is a confusing mess of shiny knobs, buttons and Fuck You so even creating the advert is a mission. The biggest thing to get your head around is the information architecture. Everything is geared around the concept of ‘Campaigns’ and your advert is a child of this concept so you have to wade through 3 layers of garbage to get to the advert you’re running.
I could write a book on the UX
Other technicalities
If you’re using the mp4 video you got from Distrokid Facebook doesn’t like it for some IG placements because of the aspect ratio. Facebook has a conversion utility that converts it but it looks fugly. Just something to be aware of.
Note the border around the advert bc its not a 1:1 ratio
The targeting isn’t very precise with the genres, just like the set up in IG:
Retro style! But no Synthwave
The advert I ran
Results
For my $130 the advert reached 14,765 people of which 240 clicked on the advert link and were directed to my Spotify page for the song.
Here’s where it gets interesting. Of those 240 click throughs I noticed a comparable uptick in plays for the song but also a good amount of saves. Saves are important because they are like a micro follow and they’re good for the mythical algorithms.
Other stats: I estimate I gained 20 Spotify followers and a further 40 IG followers. On a per click basis that works out as $2.16 per follow so not as good as the IG boosted adverts.
Key takeaways
There are some benchmark metrics here and clickthrough rates for most adverts seem to be between 0.5% and 2%. But the cost per follower of my adverts was lame at $1.80 per follow. Brian Hazard, another blogger, was able to get his cost per follower down to $0.29. I need to accept that something had gone wrong here and I can summarise:
The music isn’t good
My advert targeting wasn’t precise enough even though I carefully chose country, age, music preferences
Toneden may allow more precision with targeting and that’s something I’ll bear in mind for the next campaign
Low interaction and click through rates might be a symptom of the fact IG adverts default to silent and my adverts lacked a clear call to action
But what do you think? Too many beginner errors? Think Synthwave is too purple? Then hook me up in the comments and if you feel like it drop me a follow on Spotify or Instagram.
As part of my ongoing mission to throw money into thin air I decided to promote some of Corserine‘s songs on Spotify.
Objectives: increase monthly streams on my Spotify artist page so I can get picked up by Spotify algorithms better. Which in turn means I get on even bigger playlists which in turn means….er… profit?
Did it work? Yes, but with massive caveats. I got onto lots of playlists and my monthly Spotify plays went from under 10 to over 2,000. I have yet to be picked up by the big Spotify algorithms though.
Getting your music onto playlists
There are folks on Fiverr who will get your music onto 1934828 playlists for $$$ but I didn’t choose this route as I feared they were crazy high risk.
Groover and Submithub work much the same way: you pay about $2 or $3 to submit to an individual playlist curator. Soundcampaign works very differently: you select a genre(s) and declare a budget and the system comes up with a shortlist of curators for you which it then sends your track. But it’s much more expensive at about $9 per submission. You cannot target individual playlists with Soundcampaign which makes for a ‘lucky dip’ experience (which I actually quite enjoyed truth be told).
A word also needs to be said that Submithub and Groover appear to use the same types of curators as I recognised some names on both platforms. Submithub is incredibly competitive as the number of artists vastly outnumbers curators. This is why approval rates are lower on these types of service.
Relative success on each platform I submitted the same track 10 times to Submithub, Groover and Soundcampaign:
Results
The cost per stream is my key metric and for that we observe Soundcampaign is the clear winner.
How many streams you get depends on a few things
How many likes the playlist has. More likes means you’ll get more streams
How many songs the playlist has. The more songs means you’ll get less streams
Your position in the playlist. The nearer number 1 you get means more streams
How long you’re on the playlist for. The longer the better. On this note, look out for warning signs your targeted playlist is transient. You’ll see this under the date added column:
This is a red flag. Avoid these playlists.
Some playlists tick all the boxes and some tick none
On Submithub an approval went into a playlist which had over 2000 songs and 44 likes. I went in at position 200+ for only a few days. That playlist referred zero. The caveat here is that some approvals on Submithub are called ‘Shout-outs’ and they are like the curator saying “we really liked your track but we have no more room on our main playlist” or somesuch – a bit like baby Jesus. So you need to watch out for that. All my Submithub approvals were ‘shoutouts’.
On Groover one of the approvals never got added to a playlist. So again, that playlist referred zero.
An approval on Soundcampaign went in at position 50 of a 50 track playlist and was removed a day later. That referred 17 streams.
My best success came with a playlist that had 69k likes and I went in at number 2. This was referring 100 streams per day.
Important update March 14 >>>>>>>>>>>> I ran another song on Soundcampaign and this time the results are depressingly different:
Launched: Feb 21 2021 Cost: $159 Total streams to date: 290 Cost per stream: $0.55
The reason I’m updating the blog post is because of the 7 playlists the track was accepted, the song has since been removed from 4. Of the other 3, only one has referred any streams yet (3 Streams FML).
To add hilarity, one playlist not only referred zero streams but has since removed the track too! Utterly fuck all use.
So I’d steer a wide berth round Soundcampaign; you just can’t trust the integrity of the playlisters.
The elephant in the room
For all these streams the end goal is more followers and at the very least some ‘saves’ of your track. I can’t pick apart all the data because I don’t have access to it all on Spotify. What I can say is that the big playlist of 69k likes and 100 streams per day I mentioned earlier has unusually poor user retention (23 saves for another song I was promoting) which complicates things yet further: is this a robot playlist I was added to?
In general I observed the ‘save to listener’ ratio at around 5-10% which is what seems to be the consensus.
And the number of followers I picked up? Maybe 10.
Key finding Paying for Spotify playlist promotion does not relate to an increase in followers. Do not use it if this is your goal.
——
Record labels During my research I also ran into a few record labels. One playlist curator ran a label and liked my track. This is a contact I will use in future. Through Groover and Submithub I would sometimes pitch to labels. Often times I would get no response but sometimes they expressed an interest in hearing more. If this happens to you, have solid back up tracks to send them. Don’t link to your generic Spotify account like I did. But whatever, these responses are more contacts for you.
I also ran into a few labels on my travels on Submithubs Hot or Not feature. More on that later.
Pitching to blogs I pitched to a number of blogs on Submithub and got approved by none. I find blogs very competitive and running a blog myself know that the blog has to be a really big hitter for your track to gain some traction. I expect this post to comfortably hit a few thousand views FYI and its these kind of numbers your post needs.
Pitching to Instagram influencers I pitched to a number of influencers of Submithub. If you’re approved, your track will go up as background music to some post about whatever narcissistic nonsense about makeup or how amazing they are. Or as I found out, it won’t go up at all and the influencer is pulling a fast one. Avoid.
In praise of Submithub and its Hot or Not feature For all the competitiveness Submithub has a really nice social component to it. A chat feature lets you share salty tears of despair with other artists and a Hot Or Not function is quite a good way of getting objective feedback on your tracks so you can refine them further.
If you use the Hot Or Not function be prepared for a lot of potentially hurtful comments as the feedback is often anonymous (with thanks to the Submithub community for some of these):
This track was OK until Elmo showed up
Really bad, you need to learn basic rules of making music mate
This track reminds me of Kings of Leon. I hate Kings of Leon
Just horrible
So fair warning. But it’s also a way of forging new contacts since some reviewers let you get in touch with them. I’ve gained a few followers this way.
Another tangential benefit of the Hot or Not function are interactions with labels. Often times you’ll see a label favourably reviewing your track. And sometimes a label will flat out ask you for a track they like (before saying yes, make sure you’re happy with what they offer).
The Hot or Not function also has a chart where the best in the website are listed. I’ve had a track go top 5 before but I wouldn’t hang your coat on it as nothing happened: no labels knocking on my door, no world fame, not even a change in my social media stats. PS don’t try and figure out how the chart is worked out: it’s baffling. All I do know is downvotes kill any chance you have of making the charts.
La fin….
So there you have my somewhat lengthy discussion on more adventures through music promotion. If this has been an interesting read, maybe you can follow Corserine on Spotify and make this experiment a totally 360 degree recursive loop of artist promotional weirdness?
And I want to know what you thought too. Think I should focus more on forging individual contacts rather than frittering away petty cash on pointless exercises? Sure! Tell me that in the comments!
If you don’t know FEMM, they had a catchy wee song a few years ago called FXXX Boys Get Money which was loads of fun and featured the band in full-on mannequin mode. New Single ‘Level Up’ sees them ditch this ridiculous shtick (yo!) in favour of something much more normal. Thank god.
Level Up is from FEMM’s EP 404 Not Found, which you can order from our old friends at JPU Records.
Ps when you get to that page ^^^ it’s not a really a 404. Ahahahaha.
You may remember a few weeks ago I took out a Youtube advert. The advert was one of those ‘In Stream’ adverts that you can skip after 5 seconds. The advert linked to a full version of this song.
You’ll be shocked to learn it was about as much use as an ashtray on a motor cycle and no one clicked through to the full song. Although there was one strange insight where the advert had a higher than normal view retention of 50% (benchmark is 15-40% apparently). I surmised either the Google Ads algorithm is counting views incorrectly or folks hung around for the song but didn’t click through because there was no clear call to action on the advert.
Second Youtube advert I wanted to run another version of the advert. This time with a button signposting users to the full version of the song on my Bandcamp page.
I also found a way to target the advert a bit better. Google Ads allows you to be a bit more clever with who sees the advert but it does take a bit of digging around the system:
So what happened? I found out that viewer retention went up and now about 60% were watching 30 seconds or more of my advert:
But how many users actually clicked through to the full song on Bandcamp?
2 people. Out of the 411 views, mostly watching more than 30 seconds of the advert (allegedly), 2 people clicked through to the full song on Bandcamp. I sad.
Key finding Users really don’t want to be distracted from the video they want to watch so in-stream adverts did not help me promote my track on Youtube although it may have helped raise brand awareness given the good view retention scores.
Third Youtube advert Armed with another huge marketing budget of around $15 and some more clue of how Google Ads worked I set off on another epic adventure to promote my soon-to-be-number-one international synthwave EDM hit.
This time I was going to choose a different song and used a different type of advert which was a discovery ad. These show up in the related content bar or search results when you’re watching your favourite EDM hyper banger:
One observation was Google Ads forces you to choose a title and subtitle for your advert, I guess to lure users into clicking it. I think this requires lots of experimentation to get just so, but I chose whatever best came to mind; “New synthwave tune” and “Brand new single”. With hindsight this was probably uber lame.
So what happened? I would say this approach didn’t not work. I only got around 90 folks clicking through to my song over the 5 days it ran. This represented a click through rate of about 1% which is standard. Of these 90 views clicking the advert and going to my synthwave tune, I got one new Youtube subscriber and 3 likes. This is a small victory.
But it turns out Google Ads behaves in unexpected ways which might seriously trip you up if you try to take out an ad.
The first, is that for reasons between Google Ads and the Dark Lord Satan, it decided to target users unevenly:
I don’t know about you, but music played out of tablets or mobile is sucky. So I had to go away and change that so these devices were excluded.
It also skewed the keywords to synthpop music:
View retention on the third advert I found out view retention was lame when users did finally click through to the tune:
There are two lines here: the orange line is users coming in from the advert and the blue line is organic users who found the song naturally (I think). The users coming in from the advert lost interest very quickly compared to organic users who tended to hang around (which is nice).
Key finding Even if your advert successfully drives traffic to your full song, you still only have a few seconds to capture their attention. Forget promoting your 11 minute EDM banger with a five minute white noise intro.
Summary Here’s my key take aways:
Google Ads is fiddly and hard to learn
In stream ads don’t work
Discovery ads kind of work
The track you link to must be catchy
But what do you think? Used Google Ads? Like synthwave music? Hook me up in the comments and let me know.
Introduction As a producer you want to increase the number of folks that hear your song. You might have Soundcloud or other pages. I have a Soundcloud page but what I’m finding is that I reach other EDM producers by virtue of the way I network (feedback channels). This might be just like you.
I wanted to find out if a Youtube advert with a small $10 budget could drive listeners to hear my songs.
The advert I placed on Youtube was a 40 second clip of a song I wrote. The advert linked to the full version of my song on Youtube.
The advert was aimed at a ‘music’ demographic, and that could be any kind of music. The advert was not branded, had no calls to action, was a static image, was just music playing.
I paid $0.04 for anyone watching more than 5 seconds of the advert. I paid $0.07 for anyone clicking through to the full song.
Results 470 folks viewed the advert. 0% clicked through to the full song. 50% watched the full advert compared to a benchmark of 15-31% for an average advert.
Discussion Is it worth it? I spent $10 and it was a fun thought experiment. If you want to add views to a video at all costs then maybe this is for you but I was not able to prove its worth beyond that. The only other interesting finding was the advert held attention higher than the benchmark (50% watched the full 40 seconds of the advert).
Comment on low click through rate Click through rates vary but are around 0.5% for a regular advert. My advert was 0%.
Clicking through to the destination link from the advert interrupts the users task “watch my video”. Probably compounded by no clear calls to action on the original advert. My advert was fairly useless driving users to my full song on Youtube.
What you could do better Target the advert better: I chose default demographics. You could be more thorough.
Make the advert better: clear calls to action, clear message, not just music playing against a plain background.
YOSHIKI feat. Hyde won two awards at the 30th International Pop Poll in Hong Kong on May 10th, 2019.
YOSHIKI feat. Hyde’s single “Red Swan” – the first Season 3 theme song from the hit anime Attack on Titan – was voted “Top Japanese Gold Song” at the event hosted by the major Hong Kong radio station RTHK Radio 2.
The awards were sponsored by RTHK (Radio Television Hong Kong), the public broadcasting network founded in 1928, and the Top Gold Songs Awards are the oldest major music awards in Hong Kong. This year, YOSHIKI feat. Hyde was also named the “Top Artist from Japan”, ranking above fellow superstars Namie Amuro and Hikaru Utada. YOSHIKI is the leader, drummer, and pianist of the band X JAPAN, and Hyde is the lead singer of the band L’Arc-en-Ciel.
Released in October 2018, “Red Swan” debuted at #1 on iTunes Rock Charts in 10 countries. The single also reached the Top 10 on mainstream iTunes Charts in 16 countries and climbed the iTunes Rock Charts in the U.S. (#6) and the UK (#8), becoming the first Japanese anime song in history to rank this high on iTunes Rock charts.
Najinsan!!!!!!!!! 