u/ArtistPulse

Producers: have you had a beat that felt finished on its own, then a vocal take made one part obviously unnecessary?

What did you take out: a counter-melody, a percussion pattern, fills between lines, something else? And did removing it solve the problem, or did you end up rewriting the part so it answered the vocal?

Rappers, what has a producer removed or changed that gave your delivery more room without making the beat feel empty? Interested in an actual track you worked on and the decision you made, rather than a general rule about keeping beats simple.

Saw someone here asking about deleting tracks to free up upload space, and it made me think about the songs people take down for a completely different reason. The ones they’ve outgrown.

If you’ve been uploading for a few years, do you leave that early stuff up where anyone can find it, or clean up the profile once your sound changes? I can see wanting your strongest work to be someone’s first impression. But that rough old song might be the one somebody keeps coming back to.

Have you ever taken an old track down and had someone ask where it went?

Been reading the conversations here about keeping up with content and it got me thinking. By the time a song comes out, you’ve already heard the demos, the mix revisions, probably watched your own clips a hundred times. I can see getting tired of it way before someone else has even heard it.

So when a release doesn’t really go anywhere at first, how do you decide whether to give it more time or move on? I’m curious about people who had an older track start picking up later. Was there something you changed, or did someone else sharing it make the difference?

Especially interested in what made you stick with that particular song. There’s only so much time and money you can put into one release.

Before calling a music campaign good or bad, write down what each dashboard is actually counting. An ad click, a visit to your landing page and a click on its Spotify button are three different events.

Here’s a made-up example: you spend $50, get 200 landing-page visits and 40 clicks on the Spotify button. That works out to $0.25 per visit, $1.25 per outbound click and a 20% click-through rate from that page. You still haven’t established how many people listened. Spotify counts a song stream after at least 30 seconds of playback.

For a useful comparison, line up the date ranges first. Spotify for Artists uses UTC, which may differ from your ad account. Keep clicks to other streaming services separate when you’re comparing against Spotify.

Then follow the route on a phone. Does the page load, does the artwork and title match the ad, and does the button open the right track? If that works, choose one thing to test, such as the clip, and leave the page and audience alone for that comparison.

I’d keep a small note for each test: what changed, what you expected, and what happened to both onward clicks and listening. A rise in total streams is useful context, but other promotion and playlists can contribute too. Those totals alone can’t tell you which listeners came from that ad.

So I got kind of obsessive about this last year. I started logging every single thing I spent money on to promote my tracks on SoundCloud and where my actual growth came from. Not just plays, like actual followers who came back and engaged on the next release.

I’ll spare the full spreadsheet but the short version is I burned probably $400 on repost networks, a couple Instagram ad runs, and one of those “submit to curators” services. The repost networks got me plays. Like technically yes the number went up. But I’d check back a week later and none of those people followed, none of them commented, none of them showed up on my next track. Just ghost plays that made my stats look weird.

The Instagram ads were even worse honestly. I was sending people to my SoundCloud from Instagram and the bounce rate was insane. People don’t want to leave the app they’re in to go listen to some stranger’s track on a completely different platform. I think I got like 11 followers out of maybe $150. Not great math.

The curator submission thing I actually don’t regret as much because it taught me something. The one playlist I got on that was niche and specific to my genre actually sent me listeners that stuck around. The three bigger playlists with generic names did nothing. So it’s not that playlists don’t work, it’s that broad ones are basically the same as bot plays with a nicer label.

What actually moved things for me was way less exciting. I found like 8 artists making similar stuff to me, not huge ones, people roughly at my level. I started genuinely listening to their stuff, reposting tracks I actually liked, leaving comments that weren’t just “fire bro.” After a few weeks their followers started showing up on my page. That was free and it outperformed everything I paid for.

The other thing was just fixing stuff on my profile I didn’t realize was broken. My bio was trash, my tags were way too broad, my header image looked like I made it in 2019 because I did. I cleaned all that up and my conversion rate from profile visit to follow went up noticeably. Nobody talks about this but your profile is basically a landing page and most artists treat it like an afterthought.

I’m not saying never spend money. But if your profile isn’t converting visitors into followers organically, paid traffic is just expensive proof that your page needs work.

I make music and release on SoundCloud and for a long time I judged everything by plays. But plays kind of lie. A track can have a few thousand and be completely dead, and one with a few hundred can be quietly building if the right stuff is happening underneath.

Here’s what I actually look at now.

First few seconds of retention. SoundCloud cares whether people stick past the intro. If your track is meant for discovery and has a long slow intro, you’re killing it before it starts. Front load the good part.

Reposts vs likes. A like is just polite. A repost actually puts your track in front of someone else’s followers. If you’re getting likes but barely any reposts your track is “nice” but not something people want to share. That’s usually a hook problem not a promo problem.

Comments tied to a moment in the track. That’s the real engagement signal on SC. If you’ve got decent plays but zero comments people probably aren’t connecting to any specific part of it.

Follower to play ratio. If you have a bunch of followers but new tracks only pull a fraction of them, your audience went cold. Waking them back up matters more than chasing new people.

Your own repost behavior. SoundCloud is reciprocal whether people like it or not. If you never engage with other artists in your lane the network doesn’t carry you. Find like 10 people at your level and actually build with them.

Release rhythm. Steady beats random. Both the algorithm and your listeners reward you just showing up consistently.

If you run through those honestly on your own profile usually one of them is obviously the weak spot. Fix that before you spend a cent on promotion.

Quick disclosure since the sub has self promo rules. I built a free tool (link is on my Reddit profile) that runs this audit automatically and scores your profile across these things, you just paste your SoundCloud link and it tells you what to fix first. Free to get the score, link below if it helps. The list works on its own either way.

Drop your link in the comments too and I’ll give you an honest read.

Spotify changed how it pushes music and I feel like most independent artists haven’t caught up yet.

It used to be pretty simple. Get saves early, land on a playlist, trigger Discover Weekly. That’s what everyone optimized for.

That’s not really what’s moving the needle anymore.

What I keep seeing now is that repeat listens matter way more than unique streams. Like a song that 100 people play 4 or 5 times is getting pushed harder than a song that 400 different people each listened to once and bounced.

Pre-save campaigns bring in one time listeners.

That used to be enough to trigger the algorithm. It’s not anymore. You’re getting streams but not the engagement signal Spotify actually cares about now.

The artists I see actually growing are focused on smaller audiences who genuinely love their stuff and come back to it. Not maximizing reach, just getting in front of the right people who replay.

Problem is most artists are still watching total stream counts and wondering why nothing’s happening.

They’re measuring the wrong thing.

Anyone else actually tracking their repeat listen rate? Curious what numbers people are seeing.