SoundCloud Names Its Best Marketing Campaigns Of 2013
By SoundCloud's music content relations manager, David Adams. He selected campaigns from Of Montreal, Big Sean, Little Mix and A$AP Rocky to form Soundcloud's "Best SoundCloud campaigns of 2013" list.
Over the past year we’ve covered a wide range of creative campaigns using SoundCloud, from engaging fans on the platform, to building custom campaigns, creating audio content, and sparking collaborations with the creator community. In this end-of-year post, we’ll take a look at some of the most interesting campaigns from 2013 to inspire you as you start planning for the year to come.
Leading a conversation – Of Montreal
After nailing the basics for optimizing your sounds, a great first point of call for digging deeper into SoundCloud is engaging directly with fans on the platform. Here’s how Of Montreal have made this work for them: in conjunction with posting a new track from their upcoming album to SoundCloud, the band announced an hour-long time slot when their lead singer, Kevin Barnes, could log into SoundCloud and respond to fan’s timed comments on the track in real time.
Most marketers view timed comments as a fan feature, but it’s vitally important and beneficial to lead conversations with fans and take time to engage with them in a bidirectional manner. There’s often a huge missed opportunity here for fan engagement so we were super excited to see Polyvinyl Records and Of Montreal fill this gap in a unique way.
- For all the details on the campaign check out the SoundCheck post here.
An artist’s voice – Little Mix
In 2013 we saw a number of influential artists put together SoundCloud audio strategies to add a layer to their marketing campaign. One of our favorites came from Little Mix.
The girls take time out of their busy schedule to record regular updates for their fans, also known as “Mixers.” Their regular “Mixers Monday” clips showcase a wealth of varying content, emphasizing the power of using an artist’s voice as a marketing tool. Fans get an insight into artists’ personal spaces, from news, to studio updates, announcements, vocal warm-ups and giggles (Like cats? You’ll love this).
The pressure to have a constant stream of content for your always-active audience of followers can seem quite overwhelming, but fear not: try thinking about the best way to fit an audio strategy around your personal brand as an artist. Mixers Mondays is a great example of an artist understanding their audience, providing them with simple snippets of content that they want to hear, and using the power of their voice to make that connection.
- For all the details on the campaign check out the SoundCheck post here.
- Read about other audio strategy campaigns we have covered on SoundCheck here.
Creator Community – Big Sean ‘Beware’ Freestyle
Hip-Hop is one of our fastest growing genres and it’s fascinating to see how creators in this community are discovering the ability to easily distribute their sounds. As the genre continues to expand we’re seeing more and more high profile artists interacting and collaborating with members of the SoundCloud community as a whole, reinforcing our ideal that no matter what type of sounds you create, there’s always the potential to collaborate.
Big Sean is one artist who has set the bar in terms of fan interaction: recently he hosted a freestyle competition using SoundCloud to promote the release of his new album, “Hall of Fame.”
Big Sean asked fans and aspiring rappers to freestyle over 16 bars from his new single "Beware" and upload the track to a carefully-curated SoundCloud group. The competition was a huge success, receiving over a thousand entries.
- Listen to Big Sean discuss his collaboration with the creator community in this blog post and read more fantastic creator community collaboration stories here.
Custom Campaigns – A$AP Rocky
SoundCloud’s API proves to be an infinitely-useful tool for developers to power bespoke artist campaigns, and the ingenuity came flowing through in full force this year as the fine folks from Eyes And Ears unleashed their web ninja skills on this A$AP Rocky app.
The idea behind this app was based on the activity seen from A$AP Rocky’s fan demographic: approximately 30% of Rocky’s website traffic comes from mobile. The campaign primarily uses both Twilio and SoundCloud’s API. Fans are instructed to dial into a Twilio number and leave a voicemail. Through h the Twilio API, the voicemail audio is downloaded, pushed to the site, and played back using SoundCloud. It didn’t stop there: fans with web audio enabled browsers get a little something extra with the ability to “Chop & Screw” the voicemails on playback. As with any campaign context is everything. Nice work E&E: you guys nailed it.
- For full details on this campaign have a read through the SoundCheck post and click here to explore more custom campaigns.
Well, that’s it for 2013! Stay in the loop for 2014 by signing up to the SoundCheck newsletter, and don’t forget to drop the team an email if you want to showcase your own successful SoundCloud campaign on SoundCheck.
Soundcloud needs more creative tools. The site is lacking in so many areas where it shouldn’t be. When these are the most creative ideas based on what can be accomplished through the sites features, there is a problem.