Marketing Yourself with only ID3 Tags

Tagging Your downloads for Marketing Purposes on LAST FM.

LAST FM is a great music website. Especially for marketing yourself. It is not as useful as Soundcloud is for a musician, from a production & feedback point of view, however it is somewhat more useful from a marketing point of view.
LAST FM allows you to create an Artist page, upload images into an album, upload free downloads (no limit), create your Artist BIO and more, much like Soundcloud does as well, except the difference here is that LAST FM then recommends and plays your music to listeners on their website based on their musical tastes - which are mostly FANS - the guys you are trying to reach.
Soundcloud is mostly for people making music and LAST FM has mostly Fans as their subscriber base, and this is an extremely useful marketing tool that is somewhat under utilised by musicians trying to get exposure - especially by South African artists from my experience.

Last FM claims to have in excess of 50 million registered accounts, as per info here.

Soundcloud even adds the LAST FM icon when you link your artist profile into your profile on Soundcloud - and it shows up in your profile, like so:


To take advantage of LAST FM by doing the least amount of work is by at least tagging your downloads in Soundcloud correctly, i.e adding your artist name, track name and album name in the track tags before you make it available for download, not such a difficult task if i dont say so myself. When you do this and a LAST FM user listens to one of your tracks downloaded from the web then LAST FM will add it to their count of overall tracks played by their users and display that statistic too.

This is what it will look like in the LAST FM 'scrobbler' if you tag your tracks and a LAST FM user listens to your track they downloaded - from anywhere on the web, provided that it is tagged, and nothing else has happened:



This is what it looks like if your tags are missing or incomplete - not so cool, and not so hard to do either :



And finally, this is what it looks like when you tag your tracks and setup an artist profile on LAST FM :



If you take the time to setup a LAST FM Artist profile, upload some of your tracks and your free downloads. LAST FM will start recommending your music to listeners of similar music as yours from all over the world. You can choose to make it downloadable or not much like soundcloud as well. Once you have everything setup - you don't really have to do anything else, as the site will automatically do marketing for you, however much like anything you are going to reap what you sow.

If you want to see what a complete artist page looks like on LAST FM, check here DJ Shadow Profile

Finally another great blog post on how to go about promoting yourself with LAST FM here.

Sign up for LAST FM   Sign up for Soundcloud


Peace !