SoundClick.com is a great first stop once your music has left the closet. Soundclick offers a store solution for your music. A store that you can embed on your website, internet pages, blog or where ever you can add a framed widget. The store offers the buyer payment options; debt/visa card or Paypal. Purchased songs can be downloaded in formats wav or mp3. As you and your music move forward in the pursuit of mass production you won't forget how easy the SoundClick site made it for you to set up a corner store on the internet. Past SoundClick, getting your music heard on the internet is all about site participation & shelling out cash; uploading your music, making connections, creating playlists. Basic promotions on the internet will become an effort and require time participating in these social website accomplishments.
* KicKRaTT screenshots of SoundClick Stats.
SoundClick puts all of it's uploaded music into genre & sub-genre charts giving your music an instant audience. Which is a first good reaction that all music producing artists need after the creative work has been accomplished. Is there an audience of listeners on SoundClick or is it an audience of music producing artists? If you run the traffic stats on the website, SoundClick receives about a half a million visitors per month. A fair speculation would be to say that half are listeners and half are music creators. Even on this assumption, it makes SoundClick.com a great first place to front your music and build a presentation of your work. Use Soundclick.com as a place to design a album. I wrote this journal entry a couple days after the SoundClick KicKRaTT stats page image I attached above. You can see that the eight songs that I have mastered from my SoundCloud uploads, that the number of plays and profile views far exceeds anything that could be hoped for on YouTube and dwarfs the number of plays on SoundCloud. This demonstrates one of the core failures of YouTube & SoundCloud. Artists, musicians & bands don't start off with a zillion followers. Followers come with time after the artist or band has played out; on stage, bar, club, sidewalk, talent show... wherever. The majority of artists are introverts and gain a following through the display & presentation of their work. Word of mouth, is the next promotional factor that propels a artist or band. These factors are not even a consideration by YouTube or SoundCloud. Music on YouTube or SoundCloud only gets a good promotional kick off if the account holder has a massed a huge online following. For any artist starting off, to have to made enough connections, gained enough subscribers, held on to enough followers at the time when your music is released... is a lost cause in promoting your music and getting heard. These sites; YouTube & SoundCloud are geared against any forward traction of new music. They are founded on the high school clique concept, that those that have more; friends, connections & popularity must somehow be ultimately better??? & for that, should have a priority to be heard. How wrong this is when it comes to music. This whole bogus followers / subscribers based concept for new music & musicians is an epidemic issue as almost all music sites & sellers rely on the concept in their own music site's promotion. How different the whole music industry would be if the effort to get your music heard was more like SoundClick architecture. Where on the first week of your song's release it was thrust into a charting system, that gave a new song just as much right to be there as a old song. A system where the listener dictates the rank of a song as it moves from sub-genre to genre by searching it out, clicking on it and listening to it.
If you imagined a world where music didn't exist, and then out of the blue a record store showed up in town. People would flock to the location and start listening to the available music. The ear would guide the population towards their favorite music and would thus create a billboard rank as to which bands & songs were the most listened.
What a music world it would be, where the listener determines the best music, the best recording artist & music producers. Way to go SoundClick for keeping some aspect of this alive. Even with SoundClick artists & participants being able to click their way to the top. This SoundClick system of presenting new music is unmatched and very unique to the online music sites that are available.
The KicKRaTT project is about generating music. On my SoundClick profile page you will find that only half of the music presented was generated. Threads of Noise, Helios Bird, wink of a eye & Traveller are non generated works. Arboreal, island, chrysalis & Keys to The Lock are generative productions. This is the only promotional slant I have taken in displaying my music at this first level. Where I am using songs from the past to help promote current songs. I can only hope that my audience appreciates the effort to get the generative work out there. The only thing in common between the two groups of songs on SoundClick is that they are both honest work by me as a musical artist. Together these songs have moved me towards the collective display of these mastered songs as a completed album on YouTube.
WEBSITE........VISITS......GLOBAL-RANK
+----------------------------------------------------+
Audius...........250K.........242,671
SoundClick......500K.........122,841
jamendo........1.35 mill.....57,585
audiomack......5.6 mill......17,308
YouTube.........1.8 bill........1 & 2
tik-tok..........2+ bill.........14
Weird huh? That TikTok is below YouTube but gets more hits. Tik-Tok is competing with YouTube on new visits with it's short videos. Where as on YouTube you get your big subscribers with long videos. You definitely get the feeling that the herd has left YouTube.
Created account for KicKRaTT at AudioMack. Uploaded first three songs; Helios Bird, Threads of Noise & Arboreal.
AUDIENCE COMPARISON BETWEEN YouTube & SoundClick
There almost is no comparison between YouTube & SoundClick on my traffic. Music tracks uploaded to YouTube get NO initial traction. YouTube traffic flat-lining in a week after upload/release. Soundclick uploads maintain traction and will bob around for weeks if not months within their genre charts. This equates to more listeners. Isn't this what it's all about in the beginning? Listening? Music is about listening. Take notes YouTube. Go SoundClick!
This difference is pretty large. Look at it this way, if my band is looking for a contract to play out for a week, which club do you think I am going to play at? Club YouTube where my music got heard at best 35 times over a week's period or Club SoundClick where my music got heard on average over 800+ per day. Way to go SoundClick! The initial listening audience pool is much larger and because of SoundClick's genre charting system you have a much more focus "Listening to music is what the audience is there for". NOT bouncing all around through videos of different subjects. Even YouTube attempts to change your mind, losing listening focus by advertising up an opposing video. A video that your only being showed because someone has paid to have it there. Even SoundClick engages in paid advertising, but that paid advertising doesn't alter too drastically the genre charts. But... maybe it would, if say you had 20 SoundClick artists per genre paying for Premium Service Advertising at SoundClick. Can new music be bought out of the charts by advertising? That's a interesting discussion for a future entry? I think the real food for thought here is, "Is SoundClick the premium NEW MUSIC site, and is this not what we are about?". NEW MUSIC?? SoundClick is a site I wish we had ten of & I could only wish all the best for SoundClick's continued growth. I speculate, that this is all because the mass internet herd is off banging their heads around on YouTube & TikTok??? Leaving a site like SoundClick to sail the pleasant waters of just being a MUSIC site alone.
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