Every electronic music producer’s wet dream… Getting their music release to chart the Beatport number 1 spot. First the release’s genre chart but then climbing up that coveted Top 100 overall *drool*.
This means that track is the most downloaded music release by other DJs, electronic music producers, and avid music collectors.
Ensuring your music is being played all over dancefloors worldwide… and is spreading like fire.
But how do you get a Beatport number 1? Of course creating quality music is the first and main part of this recipe. The music needs to be *chefs kiss* GOOD.
Let me share how we got that sweet number one spot with BLOND:ISH’s track Tra Tra and the long journey it took to get there.
- Music Collaboration
With this specific track BLOND:ISH was collaborating with music producer Hugel and reggaeton artist Nfasis. When you collaborate with other artists, you get access to new audiences through their fanbase.
Hugel is growing fast in the Latin House genre and Nfasis is a big reggaeton artist from the Dominican Republic. This was a great way for BLOND:ISH to tap into a new audience through their brands and vice versa.
When you collaborate you also have 3 channels to promote the song through. All artists are promoting the track. Creating content and pushing to their fanbases. You do not only have to rely on your own channels. You get a lot more distribution and promotion through collaboration.
- Create a Demand before
Although the track was released on November 4th and we hit #1 in early December, the work on this track started several months before – close to a year. You see BLONDI:ISH has been playing this track in her sets all year. This is several gigs a week in front of thousands of people for several months. Which means 100s of thousands of people have already enjoyed the track live and connected with it.
Not only that. BLOND:ISH also sent out the track to other fellow DJs so they could play it out and help spread the music to more ears globally. This resulted in other big DJs such as Diplo, John Summit and Fatboy Slim playing it out. The track was being heard everywhere loooong before it was even released.
The great thing with doing this is that you have time to collect a lot of content to use for promotion in your own channels. Here is when we shared BLOND:ISH’s Exit Festival set video where Tra Tra was track number 2. See all the comments of people asking “what’s the track ID on number 2???”.
Through content, we are creating demand online too. Not just the Exit Festival YouTube video – but through social media posts too. We also started gathering the content of other DJ’s playing the track. Which is great to use when you are in a heavy promotional period because it’s easy content you’ve not had to produce (or pay for).
And if you want DJ’s to download the track.. You need to show the power it has in the wild – on dancefloors around the world.
An easy way to send your tracks to a list of DJs is to use Meta’s Inbox tool to label your DJ friends. Let’s say you have lists of DJ’s you label into categories: A, B & C. Who should get the track first (and early)? The coolest, most influential artists of course. Then a bit later, the B list comprises people with a lot of reach so you send the music to those DJs once the A list has had time to play it out and feel some exclusivity. And finally, the C list who are the lesser known or ‘not so cool’ DJs who should get the track a few weeks before it gets released.
If you use Instagram to DM people, then you can begin labeling these conversations using the META inbox tool – which means you can then select people by a label and message them individually. Super easy way to push your music out to the right people, in the right order.
Here is a video I’ve made showing and explaining further.
- Promote through your own content
- Pre Save
We started the heavy promo period with a pre-save campaign. This is where we wanted to first reach out to our superfans and get them to pre-save the track. In order to do this you typically have to give them an incentive to Pre-Save.
For BLOND:ISH we decided to give out $ISH tokens as BLOND:ISH has her own web3 tokens. These tokens can then be used inside BLOND:ISH’s web3 community – and as she has a strong web 3 community around her we wanted to tap into this for the pre-save campaign.
We also went out with the Pre-Save through online content which was an email blast, Twitter post, Instagram story and her Discord channel.
- TikTok
We decided to push the track 1 week earlier to TikTok so we could begin creating content using the official TikTok sound before release day. As it was halloween a week before release we wanted to start using the sound by creating some cool transition style videos for halloween. This was in hope that others would use the sound for their halloween transitions.
We also started creating more shareable content using the track on TikTok. Where the goal was for the track to be spread. Here is an example of some of the sharable content we created:
https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGedP8Njg/
https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGedfK4ts/
https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGedfK5MU/
- Main feed content (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube Shorts, etc)
As I mentioned earlier TraTra has been included in our content for the last 6 months before the release date. This had generated TONS of comments asking for the track ID – so we decided to use them in the ‘release day’ post and use the headline “My most requested track ID in 2022”.
This strategy helped immediately show the demand for the track which will get other DJs and producers over to Beatport to download it as they know audiences want it.
We created content with the collaborative artists: such as a photo shoot, ‘making of’ video in the studio etc. People love to see how music is made when they connect with a song.
As BLOND:ISH had many shows during the track’s promo period – we also included performance video of TraTra in almost every Instagram / Facebook carousel post after a gig. Then creating TikToks, Reels, Stories, and YouTube Shorts using the clip of the track being played out too.
- Content Collaboration, Influencers and Techno pages
So the content on your own channels can only go so far. You need to think of how the track can make it onto other people’s content too. We paid influencers like Brian Michael Hinds (Bottom G) to use the track in his content – which generated millions of views.
We also had so much performance content of BLOND:ISH playing the track at amazing locations so we distributed these on different techno music accounts like Techno & Chill, etc. which have millions of electronic music fans consuming their content.
This is a great way to promote your brand and the track in itself as other social media accounts with a loyal following will share and you get exposed to their audience.
We also did some other content collabs that were non-track-specific to get a new influx of followers and profile visits. For example this collab which resulted in a lot of new followers.
There are so many creative ways you can collaborate through content to tap into each other’s fanbases.
- TikTok effect
Creating a TikTok effect can be a great way to spread your track to the masses. You can attach your music to a filter / effect so your sound is played when the effect is used.
- Ads
We also ran ads on the TraTra content we posted. The record label was great at running ads on behalf of us on across Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.
We also ran ads and targeted a warm audience. Everybody who has interacted with our content over the last few months will be fed the new release. As we are all constantly fighting the algorithms and not all followers get shown posts – you sometimes have to pay the social media giants to get the reach you need.
Ads are a great way to make sure many more people see your promotional efforts. We used the ‘release day’ post as an ad so we pushed more traffic on an existing post – and it also adds a button where viewers could easily tap and listen on their preferred DSP page.
And finally a month after release date… we hit Beatport number 1!
We were the most downloaded track in the electronic music community. And of course what better way to celebrate than with a thirst trap to get attention and to celebrate the win. Just like this.