SoundCloud’s Interactive Features & Practices: Celebrating Artists’ Most Dedicated Supporters

With a mission of making fan engagement more meaningful, SoundCloud’s new interactive features and rules of best practice are set to bring artists closer to their devoted fans.

Interactive Features

In an effort to allow fans to interact with the music they love, SoundCloud has incorporated the ability for fans to comment throughout an artist's track, allowing written comments to appear at customisable points throughout a song file. These comments appear where you start typing as a timestamp. Fans can share their thoughts on a track and artists can reply by @ing them. In addition, fans can now utilise quick reactions within the track (such as emojis) to share how different moments of the music makes them feel. 

SoundCloud’s impressive new tool Fan Recognition highlights the foundational role that fans play in the journey of an artist's success. Available right on an artist’s track page, artists can now recognise their day-one supporters through First Fans and Top Fans. First Fans are those who have listened to or liked a track within the first week of release, whereas Top Fans are those who have listened the most ranked within the lifetime of the release. Fans can, of course, opt out of being included in this as these rankings are visual on the artists platform, yet they offer a shareable stat allowing artists to recognize and reward their biggest fans.

SoundCloud's Insights tool allows access to Geographical data, demographics, listening activity, playlist adds & fan engagement. Making use of the Insights feature allows artists to understand their audience, therefor allowing to find the best ways to build and maintain their connection with their biggest fans.

Engaging SoundCloud’s Direct Messenger not only provides a means of communicating and collaborating among artists but with fans as well. Direct Messages can be used to share upcoming release details among fans in a campaign, as a way of reaching out to and rewarding highest ranked listeners, and much more. 

Keeping all your music in one place, sharing private links can be a great way for an artist to reward their First Fans, Top Fans and other important listeners within their fanbase. These can be links to unreleased music, unheard collaborations, new remixes, and more, building hype amongst artists' networks.  

Best Practices

SoundCloud have also provided a few reminders of their best practices, helping artists optimise their performance and engagement on the platform:

- Keep your profile updated, including your bio, images and any links.

- Use Comments + DM's as mentioned above.

- Encourage Shares, Likes & Reposts.

- Upload tracks, snippets, demos & beats.

- Repost your tracks and share your favourites.

- Build a playlist, enabling fans to find your top tracks easily.

SoundCloud has shared that their promotional opportunities, including plays and support on SoundCloud Radio on Sirius XM (which is notably mainly Hip-Hop at the moment but is set to widen its scope) and placement within their digital billboards, are built upon prioritising artists who are leaning in to utilising the platform to it’s best abilities and integrating it as a part of their story. Through engaging with the platform’s new interactive features and practices, artists can incorporate their presence and support on SoundCloud into a part of their journey as an artist.