My friends, you are about to learn how I got 10,000 plays in the last 30 days on SoundCloud with less than 100 followers, and after years of not doing anything on SoundCloud at all. What is really exciting is that, based on everything I am sharing here, this should work for almost anybody who does the same things I did. I am now over 100 followers and have an audience that is building and consistently coming back. I essentially started from scratch to build this up.
So what is the number one thing you need to do? Publish music. Now, that sounds stupidly obvious, but what did I do that got me over 2,000 plays in a single day? If you look back before this, I had nothing going on. There was nothing happening on my SoundCloud. If you go back further in time and look at my all-time numbers, I had a total of 298 plays in 2022, and 520 before that. I had not put music out on SoundCloud for years. But back when I was publishing music, I was getting plays. So what you need to do is consistently publish music. And if that sounds difficult, I am going to show you how to make it so much easier.
What I did here is I had not uploaded some of the music I had already published on Spotify and on other platforms. So I caught my SoundCloud up with the other platforms and put up like 20 or 30 tracks on this day, or right before it. But the thing I did on this day that really kicked everything off is that I signed up for the SoundCloud artist plan.
Signing Up for SoundCloud Next Pro
This is extremely effective. I am amazed, when I look at SoundCloud for Artists, how as soon as I signed up my tracks pumped. SoundCloud Next Pro is the name of the subscription. I signed up for SoundCloud Next Pro for $99 a year, and they immediately started pushing my songs out on the very day I signed up for it. Right now it is about $8.25 a month. You can also distribute your tracks with it. I am on AWAL, so I do not distribute my tracks through this, but you can push your tracks out to Spotify, YouTube, and more using it.
When I look at this Next Pro membership, I wish it was sponsored, but it is not. I am only saying this because it works. In my experience this has been the best value I have seen anywhere for promoting music. So when I signed up right here and uploaded my tracks, they pushed all of my recent tracks out like crazy, which was awesome to see. And they have a feature called First Fans, where they get you about 100 or so listens on every one of your new tracks. That is pretty sweet. You can upload 30 tracks a day and they put them out. This is an experimental initiative, so it is potentially temporary. Hopefully it stays permanent, but it is something brand new they have started offering, and it is working really well for me.
So as soon as I signed up and uploaded my previous tracks, they pushed all of them out at once. Now, some individual uploading is limited to 30 a day, and I might have uploaded more than that. Some of them hardly got any plays. But all the newer ones got a lot more plays, and what is awesome is that all my new tracks are consistently getting hundreds of plays as well.
Make Music as Fast as You Possibly Can
Now, yes, it does matter what kind of music you are making. For example, my instrumental tracks have not done nearly as well as my trap and my rap music tracks have. But let me walk you through this, because if you are thinking, "Oh, this is too hard, I cannot put 30 tracks out a day," well, of course not. You do not need to put 30 tracks out a day. What I would suggest is that on average you upload a new track every day.
Now you might be thinking that is impossible, that you cannot possibly create that fast. Here is a song I made yesterday called "Tuesday Hot Yoga." I am not going to play my music here because you can listen to it yourself if you want to. But this track took me an hour to make. I used an AI-generated beat. If you want to do the beat yourself, you should be able to make a basic, simple beat in 30 minutes to an hour if you are a real musician. Or I use AIVA to generate AI beats, and then I just rap, or trap, or talk over them. That is what I have been doing on a lot of my recent tracks. I take an AI-generated trap beat or rap beat or whatever I want. I am doing a music video on my Jerry Banfield music channel showing all the different things you can generate, and that will be out soon.
So on this track I used an AI-generated beat, and I used ChatGPT to write exactly what I wanted the song to have in it, and it generated the song for me. I edited the lyrics that ChatGPT gave me. ChatGPT is a little wacky and not real enough sometimes, but sometimes I have used ChatGPT's tracks completely unedited, because if you give it everything you want the song to have, it handles the lyrics and the rhyming.
The moral of the story is that I want you to make music as quickly as you possibly can. Now you might think, "Well, I cannot make low-quality music that does not represent the best of what I can do." In my experience, this is one of the biggest things I see standing in the way of musicians being successful: you do not make enough music, and you think there is some perfect standard you need to live up to. What I am showing you is that my willingness to just make the easiest song possible is working to get listeners, it is working to get followers, up to 100 followers now, and it is working to get people to like my tracks. And this is just the beginning. This is literally the first month. Wait until you see how this snowballs. I am filming this September 14th, 2023, so check my SoundCloud and see how this has snowballed as I repeat it over time.
Walking Through the Tracks
On this song, I took a trap beat and literally just did a spoken word freestyle over it. And people liked it. It got almost 500 plays, 499 to be exact. A couple of people actually reposted it and commented on it. This next one was an instrumental AI track where I took the MIDI and put in my own instruments. If it is instrumental, the AI's instruments are often kind of boring, so I put it into Ableton, changed the instruments up, and made it sound more interesting.
This one is a song I did about XRP and uploaded on my crypto channel. It is my top-played track now, and this one track got 719 plays. On this next one, I used the AI-generated beat, wrote a song about a girl I had met in the club, and used AI art in the background. You do want to make sure you always use artwork. The easiest thing you can do is generate AI art and then put yourself on there. I just use AI art, sing the song, record it in my studio while I am singing, and then take a picture of it and put that as the cover.
On this one it was the same basic process. On this one, I actually went and made the song from scratch myself in Ableton Live 11. This was an idea I was really excited about. I took the Deadmau5 song "Aural Psynapse" and made my own version of it. But notice that this one performed poorly compared to most of the others. For me, I am seeing that my trap songs tend to perform better than some of the other ones. I spent a lot more time on this one, and it only got one like in a hundred-and-something plays. Whereas some of these others that were very quick and easy to create did much better. On another quick and easy one, I used an 8-bit retro gaming sound from the AI and used a gate so that whenever I spoke, the volume would crank down and pump a little bit while I was speaking. People really liked that song, and I still have the lyrics memorized from it.
Then you will notice the instrumental ones are not getting as many plays, but they are so easy. If you stop being a perfectionist, stop trying to make everything perfect about your music, and on SoundCloud just get a song out, join Next Pro if you care about your music at all, and crank a song out every day. Every day if you can. Yes, I have missed some days. There were periods where I cranked a song out every day, and then there are like four days where I did not make one, and a couple of days between others. I have reformatted and set my computers up so that I can make music every day. And if you really want to take this to the next level, record yourself singing the song and then put that out as a video on YouTube and everywhere else on social media. That is what I am doing to really go nuts.
Spreading Tracks Out and Reading Your Insights
Now, if I scroll back to when I mass-uploaded all these songs from my last album, a lot of those did not get many views at all when I dumped a bunch in one day. So generally, if you have got like 20 songs, put one of them out a day. And on top of that, I am cranking a brand-new song out every day. Then I publish one full-length album on Spotify, YouTube Music, Amazon, and Apple Music, and that is linked here too.
Another thing to pay attention to is that I did not just get these plays from the algorithm either. I have got some real listeners. One guy has played my tracks 112 times. Then you have got others who have played them 29 times, which is awesome. Some of the music is going out globally, but your biggest single audience will be in the USA. So these are not just bots from what I can see, which is great. You will also notice I have gotten plays from Google, and I have promoted my SoundCloud on Facebook as well. Those were not a ton of plays individually, but every follower on SoundCloud is important. I have gotten a few followers from my other social media platforms.
You will also notice that I have been added onto some playlists. So what you want to do is look at the discovery playlists on here and look at what tags they use. That will teach you how to tag your music better so it can get discovered correctly. Look at your insights too. You will notice the most plays I have gotten, 8,000 of them, came from related tracks. That is from the SoundCloud subscription, which is amazing. And if you look at the SoundCloud apps, you will see these are mostly on mobile devices. So what is happening is that the algorithm is putting my track into related tracks, and that is based on the kind of music I make and the tags I use. Then when people actually like it, some of them put it into their playlists, some of them follow me and hit like and come back and share. If you want to learn this alongside me and get my help putting it into practice, the best way to work with me on it today is to join the Jerry Banfield Family community.
Keep it simple: one song a day
To me, all you really need to do on SoundCloud is join Next Pro and then crank a song out every single day. Make it easier on yourself. Some of these songs, I've literally done the first take. The first take, I've used those vocals, dropped them into Ableton with an AI-generated backing song, uploaded it, and people are listening to my music. Some people are genuinely enjoying it. This one's got seven likes and a repost, and my music is making a difference. This song is so inspirational to me.
I'm also tagging the number of the song it is. I put a little hashtag with the track number. That way, if you find, say, Tuesday Hot Yoga, that's track number 103, you get the idea that I've got 102 other songs you could listen to as well. One person went through and listened to almost all my tracks, which is awesome. And yes, I've done almost nothing else besides this and uploading my videos on social media. So whatever else everybody is doing to market on SoundCloud, I don't even know about it. I am just doing what I've shared here with you. If you want to verify this is working today, check out my profile and see exactly what I'm getting.
Half of music is marketing
If you want help with marketing your music, that's my specialty. I've been a full-time entrepreneur and content creator online for 11 years now, and in my experience I've become very good at marketing. I hope my music skill is going to catch up with my marketing skill someday. The way I've gotten great at marketing is that I've done it in so many different forms. I have seven YouTube channels I upload to, plus a music channel as well. I've got SoundCloud. I have a website. And the best way to get better at marketing your music alongside me today is to join my community, where I'll help you work through it, because half of music is marketing. If you're making music and you're not doing well with your marketing, you're leaving almost everything on the table. I see a lot of music producers who are ineffective marketers, and I want to hear your music. I want to get to know your music. It's actually difficult to discover somebody making new music unless you're a musician yourself. So I invite you to think about making music for the average person and then getting it distributed directly to them.
I'm very good with social media marketing, and the plays I've got on SoundCloud are just the tip of the iceberg. While I've gotten 10,000 plays on my music in the last 30 days on SoundCloud, I've gotten probably 100,000 across all my other social media platforms. Hardly anybody has come over from those other platforms to SoundCloud. I've gotten way more plays on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and X. So if you want people to actually listen to your music, come and join my community. I would love to help you. I would love to hear your music myself and help you get it out directly to the people who want to listen to it.
My filming and distribution process
The main thing I do is I've got a filming process where I film myself singing each track I'm making. I sync the music with the video, and I film vertical and horizontal at the same time with two different computers and two different cameras. Then I put that out on all the different platforms. TikTok and Instagram get a vertical video. On Facebook, I send people over to other platforms, although I've uploaded directly there before. YouTube has a channel where I put that up. And on X, I bring people over to YouTube as well.
What's amazing is that in an hour of real time, I can make the lyrics for a song with ChatGPT, pull an AI-generated beat, record the vocals in Ableton along with the videos of me singing, sync the vocals up with the music, and master the track in LANDR. Then I upload that to all my social media platforms in an hour or an hour and a half of real time. So if you're telling me you're too busy and you don't have time, if you have an hour, if you really care about your music, you should have on average an hour or two a day. In an hour or two a day, you can have a song made and distributed everywhere. If you want to learn how to do that, I share a lot of how I approach this in my website and across my videos, including in my YouTube Coaching playlist.
Come take a look at what I'm doing, dig into my process, and if you enjoyed this, I hope to see you on jerrybanfield.com.