MusoSoup. Adventures in Music Marketing

Okay…. Interesting morning.

Last week in submitting my new single ‘Horses’ to a local music blog I came across a marketing platform of sorts called ‘MusoSoup’.

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So to give you some background, the first two singles that I put out, ‘Fox In The Hen House’ and ‘I Got Mine’ had no real budget. I pay about £75 a year for a Soundcloud Artist Pro account that allows me to upload as many of my home demos as I want, master three a month, and distribute whatever I like to platforms like Spotify, Apple, YouTube….whatever. 

We record at Jeffs for free, Steve does some home mastering, and we’re off. Aside from petrol and keeping Jeff’s beer fridge stocked, getting a song out to the world doesn’t necessarily cost that much. I accept that it absolutely depends what your standards are and what you’re trying to achieve, but the fact of the matter is, you can write, record and release with a laptop in your bedroom with minimal gear. And a lot of people do.

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Listen to 'Horses' here via Soundcloud....

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Getting people to hear your song though is another matter. There are places, like internet radio stations or even the BBC where you can upload your music for free for consideration. Some local DAB stations like The Flash in Waterlooville are excellent at playing and promoting local music, but at the end of the day unless you’re a social media wizard, you have to pay to get your music marketed. Everybody wants and deserves to get fairly paid for their work, no issues there.

So after chatting with a friend (thank you Beth) I decided to give MusoSoup a try. Basically it was £30 for a three week campaign which pitched my song to a collective of bloggers, playlisters, artists and DJ’s, and then they decide if they’d like to offer you some kind of promotion. Incidentally, if my campaign received no offers, I’d get my money back. That was two weeks ago, and I hadn’t heard anything……

The mistake I’d made was that I’d thought the offers would come via email, but apparently, you have to log onto the site to view them online. And there they were, all 48 of them…..

Time to put the kettle on....

I’ve now been through and read all 48 offers, and answered them. Offers tend to consist of blog pieces, reviews, boosted social media posts and premium playlisting. The cheapest offer I received was £1.20, the most expensive was £38.00. The offers were global, from the States and Canada, to Europe, Egypt, Brazil and Africa. It became clear quite quickly I’d have to set myself some limits…. 

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Firstly, anybody who offers TikTok or X (twitter) promotions got binned, I’m not on there, they’re not platforms I use. I might be wrong not to, but, there you go.

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Secondly, I appreciate not everybody speaks and writes in English, thank goodness for diversity! But I for my faults don’t operate in Spanish, Arabic…. If I’m paying for a review, I’d rather it was an easy share.

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Thirdly, any offer that quite clearly hadn’t listened to the song, because they wanted to put me on a rock, heavy metal or jazz playlist got binned to. Even if you do think <quote> your extreme bitching track would go great on my Gods Of Metal powerhammer playlist <end quote>...

These categories accounted for about a third of the offers, still leaving me at least 30 more genuine propositions to consider. I’ve chosen four. Three blogs (I like blogs) who either had the right idea about what my music was, or who actually said something intelligent and personal about my campaign, like, <quote> the blending of the your and Helena’s vocal is very effective <end quote>. It gives you some confidence any review might be vaguely positive at any rate. The other one was an instagram offer from Europe. They appear to have a collection of artists working on all sorts of stuff who showcase their work, and they use your music as a backdrop to an appropriately themed piece. It was £3.50, and it sounded really interesting and different, so I went for it!

All the others I accepted a free option of inclusion on their spotify playlists for anything from one to four weeks. Why wouldn’t I? The effect of those adds will be pretty easy to track, so… Total spend so far £30 campaign + £17 of promotions = £47. Let’s see where that gets me.

Well actually, before I'd even finished writing this, my first 'free' playlist inclusion came back.... so thank you ILLUSTRATE independent music magazine - you get a special mention....

I hope to come back to this in a few weeks with more news on my progress.....