The Best Music Promotion Tools and Software

  • Fundamentals, Tools

We doubt you got into music because you loved the idea of promoting it. However, without promoting your music there’s no way to get new people to listen in order to grow your fans and followers. 

In this article we’ve gathered together a list of the best music promotion tools and software to help you increase your fanbase.

We’ve broken down the tools below into different categories so you can find what you’re looking for, and we’ve given a short overview of each tool.

Whether you need a tool for sending promos, want to reach out to influencers, or need something to help with your music submission – here is our list of the best music promotion tools:

Generalists

Most of the music promotion tools in this article are specialists, focusing on one specific promotion task. However, some tools don’t fit neatly into these categories as they offer multiple different services, and so are more general music marketing tools. We’ve gathered these together in this first section.

Beatchain

Beatchain is an app that offers independent artists tools to build their fanbase. Their free package allows artists to track the stats from their playlists and streams, and offers insights about your fan demographics, as well as providing you with a social post scheduler and limited monthly distribution.

Premium plans give you extra services such as unlimited distribution, branded smart links, and an instant website.

Push

Push.fm is a music marketing platform for artists and labels. Push provides you with listening statistics and analytics so you can see how your fans like to listen to your music, and how they found you. Push also offers tools like fan links to help you capture new fans.

Spotify for Artists

If you’re not on Spotify it will be difficult to connect with your fans, as this is the most popular music streaming platform (after youtube.com). Spotify for Artists is where you can upload your music, view all your data on how your music is performing, update your profile and generally promote your tracks on Spotify.

ReverbNation

One of the most well known sites in the music industry, ReverbNation provides a range of tools making them difficult to place in any one category below. 

They offer advertising on relevant music sites, digital distribution, promo tools for you to get your message out through email and social media, widgets for fan sharing, and more.

Label Engine

Label Engine’s marketing platform provides four main services: distribution, so your music goes to the main streaming services; accounting, including handling licensing agreements; promotion, involving things like email promo campaigns and follow gates; and demo management, which is a service for labels. 

The whole platform is aimed more towards labels than it is independent artists.

Link Aggregators / Smart link creators

These are services which create user friendly links for you to use when promoting your tracks. This can be a link to a page that itself links to your track on many different services, or it could be a link directly to follow you on Spotify, or pre-save one of your tracks.

Linkfire

Linkfire logo

Linkfire (affiliate) is probably the most well known of the link sharing platforms. Linkfire doesn’t just allow you to add links to your tracks, but you can also promote your merch and your tours. This can be done on a global basis, meaning users in Sweden can see your next gig in Stockholm, and users in Denmark will see your next gig in Copenhagen.

Amplify.link

Amplify.link is a link sharing service that allows you to aggregate links to your music from many different music streaming platforms such as Spotify, YouTube, Soundcloud, etc. and share them all with one link. 

Your music sharing page can be customized with different artwork, descriptions and links, and you can track the performance of your links through their dashboard. At time of writing the service is in beta so for a limited time you can sign up for free.

Hypeddit

Hypeddit’s (affiliate) smart links let you create a landing page that contains links to your music on all the most popular streaming platforms. For any sites that don’t integrate with Hypeddit you can manually enter a link to your music. 

In your dashboard you can find which platforms your fans prefer to listen from, this will show you where you should be focusing your promotion efforts.

Soundplate Clicks

Soundplate Clicks gives you the same music links as other providers, sending users to the streaming service they prefer. It also lets you create pre-save links for Spotify, Deezer and Apple Music. You can also import your Songkick events to sell more tickets to any upcoming gigs. 

Tuneer

Tuneer allows you to group all your social / music links together in one easily shareable link, like many of the other link sharing options mentioned here. There are a few other benefits with Tuneer, for example you can create QR codes for your link, or collect push subscribers, so you can send your fans notifications.

Promo Tools

These tools help to make the somewhat laborious process of sending out promos to your email list more efficient; whether it’s helping you manage your contacts better, speeding up the process of outreach, or simply making it easier for your contacts to interact with your promos.

DropTrack

DropTrack (affiliate) allows you to send professional looking promos to your curated email list of music industry contacts, or share them via social media. 

These promos have extra features that allow you to prevent people from downloading tracks without providing you feedback, and analytics tracking so you know who’s been responding well to your promos.

Promoly

Promoly is another great platform allowing you to keep track of your promo campaigns. They simplify the process by allowing you to upload your tracks and your email list. 

You can then send out a promotion campaign and see who has been opening your promos, who played your tracks and who downloaded them, all in real time. 

Promoly is great for independent artists, one downside is that it doesn’t watermark your audio.

Inflyte

Inflyte is very much on the pricey side, and is aimed at PR companies and record labels rather than independent artists. 

It has extra features that make it particularly useful for people working with bigger artists and email lists. These include features like tagging and filtering for your contacts, more detailed reporting, and offline listening and feedback.

Haulix

Haulix provides many of the same features as the other promo tools featured here.

While it doesn’t provide as many features as Inflyte, it does come out cheaper, and watermarking is included at a cheaper price than through Inflyte.

Promo Cloud 

Promo Cloud is one of the cheaper tools on the market. Through their Fusion ecosystem you can send promos out to your contacts. You can customize the theme of your promo and schedule the release. 

This is one of the few promo tools that will also suggest contacts for you, the contact has to have their profile set to public though.

Influencer marketing tools

Getting your music in front of influencers is a key part of your marketing strategy. Influencers are people who have big followings on their Spotify playlists, YouTube channels, Soundcloud, Instagram or TikTok etc. 

These influencers mentioning or promoting your track to their audiences can be the difference between a successful track and one languishing in obscurity.

Fanbytes

Fanbytes is not specifically for music, however it has been used by brands like Sony Music, Deezer, and Warner Music. Fanbytes allows you to create a campaign brief that is delivered to influencers with a large online presence who are curated by Fanbytes and picked by you. 

These influencers will then create content for your approval. Finally you can check the performance of the campaign in the analytics dashboard provided by Fanbytes.

BitSubmit

Unlike Fanbytes, BitSubmit is created specifically for the music industry. On BitSubmit you can send your music to people with YouTube channels, Spotify playlists, music blogs, radio stations and more. 

Once these influencers have received your track you can get invaluable feedback from them, and make connections that could lead to some awesome promotion.

Upfluence

Upfluence contains a huge database of social influencers. Using their tool you can filter for the type of influencer you want to contact and then contact them at scale. 

You can manage the responses in the app and measure the performance of your outreach campaigns using the app’s analytics. This is a solution more geared towards agencies and labels rather than independent artists looking to promote themselves.

Ninja Outreach

With prices starting at $299/mo or $1,428 if billed yearly this isn’t a tool aimed at people creating independent music trying to promote themselves from their bedrooms. 

Ninja Outreach has a database of millions of Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Twitter influencers. You can search this database to find influencers of the right size, location and budget, and use their built in CRM to keep track of your marketing campaigns.

SubmitHub

SubmitHub is one of the most well known music influencer marketing platforms, allowing users to submit their songs to bloggers, playlisters, YouTube channel owners etc. You can filter the music influencers to find the perfect ones for you to submit your music to, and when you send your track you can do so through a free or paid credit option. 

Free credits mean you have to stagger your submissions, as you only get 2 every four hours, and there’s no requirement for the influencer to provide feedback on why they didn’t choose your track.

MySphera 

With MySphera you can upload your track and let them take care of the rest. They will connect your music with the relevant bloggers, DJs, playlist curators and more to get your song featured on Spotify playlists, Instagram stories, and Twitter. 

Once you’ve started your campaign MySphera will provide you with weekly updates of how your track is doing.

Shoutcart

Shoutcart is not specific to music and the influencers are Instagram based, so you may have to spend some time searching for the perfect influencers you want to promote your track. However, it is relatively inexpensive to get the influencer to post an image or video promoting your track.

Fluence

Fluence is a platform based around making sure that the bloggers, influencers, artists etc. that you’re sending your music to actually spend time engaging with it, and provide you with useful feedback. 

This makes it invaluable for artists, as even if your music isn’t promoted by the people you’ve sent it to, you will have real honest feedback from industry leaders who’ve spent time with your track.

Playlist marketing tools 

Spotify has been promoting its own playlists, and those of major labels, to the point where user curated playlists aren’t quite as popular as they once were. 

Nevertheless, many playlists will allow you to submit your track to them for free, and you can still get a decent boost to your streams from user curated playlists. These tools remain one of the best ways to get your track on these Spotify playlists.

Tunemunk

With Tunemunk you can choose the playlist you would like to submit your music to, you can pitch your track for free, but you’ll have to follow the playlist first. The playlister can then listen to your track and decide whether or not to add it to their playlist.

Playlist Pitching

Playlist Pitching currently only works with artists in the following genres: EDM, Rap & Hip-Hop, Pop, and Rock. It’s a simple service, you send them your track, if they think it’s worth pitching then they’ll pitch it to relevant playlists in their network. You can choose the minimum number of streams you want to achieve, and if this isn’t reached then you receive a full refund. 

Soundplate

Soundplate is free, but before you can submit a track to a Spotify playlist you’ll need to follow the Soundplate account, follow the playlist curator’s account (if it’s not a Soundplate curated playlist) and follow the playlist you want to submit to. 

INDIEMONO

One of the most well known places to submit your music for playlist consideration. INDIEMONO offer their playlist consideration for free, but due to the volume of submissions you won’t get any feedback if your track wasn’t seen as a fit for any of their playlists. However, that is also true to other playlist submission tools mentioned here. 

PlaylistSupply 

PlaylistSupply isn’t a pitching tool like the others mentioned above. It’s a subscription based music service that gives you an up to date database of publicly available playlists including information like follower count, owner/curator name, contact details, and more. 

When you’ve found a list of playlists you want to pitch to you can pitch via, Instagram, email, or whichever way the playlists curators would prefer. 

PlaylistPush

PlaylistPush has around 1000 curators on their platform who manage playlists on Spotify, YouTube, Apple music and others. 

PlaylistPush has run playlist marketing campaigns for DefJam and Atlantic Records. Once you submit your song, curators will be able to review it and have the option to add it to their playlist.

Analytics tools 

More data allows you to make better decisions. If you know how people are responding to your track, or which people are responding, and on which social media platforms, then you can focus your marketing strategy in the areas where you’ll get the most reward. 

Here are a couple of options on where to get this data. 

Viberate

Viberate provides comprehensive music data analytics for music industry professionals. Streaming, social, radio and other music data is turned into meaningful information for immediate action. You can use Viberate to discover or screen new talent, track artist roster, evaluate releases and promotional efforts, create reports or gain market insights.

They offer a free plan, and also offer a 7 day free trial of Viberate premium.

Songstats

Songstats provides you with real time analytics on your songs, so you know how they’re performing on different platforms. They will tell you when your track gets added to a new playlist or starts charting in a new region. 

They have plans for everyone ranging from smaller artists to labels.

Soundcharts

Soundcharts is used by the big boys of the music business: Sony, Universal and Warner. The platform provides stats on the song plays on the major streaming services as well as social media, and even monitors over 1,500 radio stations to provide real time data on your own tracks and any competitors you’d like to monitor.

Chartmetric

Chartmetric provides data on how your tracks are performing across dozens of platforms and a thousand radio stations, as well as giving you historical insights on how they’ve performed in the past. The charts and graphs are attractive and easy to use, and there’s even a free plan (with reduced features).

Streaming Royalty Calculator

All the above services are a great way of measuring your current activity. If you want to see how this data converts to real world monetary value then try out our streaming royalty calculator.

Fan connection tools 

These are tools that allow you to directly communicate with your fans, leading to a more fulfilling experience for them than just reading your latest post on Facebook. As an added bonus this is an extra revenue stream for your music.

looped 

looped lets you create amazing connections with your fans. You can either have one on one video calls with them, or set up live events involving a chat room where fans can chat with one another and ask you questions. 

LÜM

LÜM is a mix between a streaming platform and a social media platform. It allows you to promote your music and receive direct support from your fans as well as chatting with them, running competitions, and receiving money every time your track is played.

Download gates

Download gates are a great way of giving your fans something and getting something in return, a win-win. You can let your fans download one of your tracks in exchange for a follow on Spotify or Soundcloud.

Followgate

Followgate is a great way of building your followers on Spotify and Soundcloud. There is a free plan which gives you a download gate for Soundcloud as well as analytics of how people are using your download gate. The paid plan gives you a Spotify download gate along with many more features.

Distribution

Once you’ve recorded your tracks you’ll want to make sure they’re on as many streaming platforms as possible so your fans can listen to your track using the service they prefer. 

These distribution tools will handle this for you, as well as handling the collection of royalties you’re owed from the streaming platforms. 

Amuse

Amuse will deliver your tracks to the major streaming services for free and allow you to keep all your royalties from these platforms. The downside is that it will take a while to distribute your music on the free version. 

The paid version will get your tracks on Instagram, get you YouTube Content ID protection and more. 

Songtradr

Songtradr will distribute your music as well as handle licensing if your music gets used in TV and film. On the free plan you only get 90% of your royalties and 60% of your sync and licensing fees.

Soundrop

Soundrop is interesting in that it’s aimed specifically towards people writing cover songs. Because of this they make it easy to licence and distribute your cover song. Licensing costs a one time fee of $9.99 per song.

Advertising tools 

Advertising is one of the most obvious and important means of promoting your track. The following tools can help with the setting up and automation of your advertising campaigns whether that’s on social media platforms like Facebook, or banner ads on music promotion sites.

Show.co 

With show.co you can run audio ads on Spotify and iHeartRadio, run Spotify pre-save campaigns, as well as turning an already existing video or track into an ad. Their marketing platform also has an ad builder that makes it easy to create banner ads that will run on the top music sites. 

Toneden 

Toneden (affiliate) offers a range of music promotion features. Through their platform you can set up and run ad campaigns, create personalised marketing messages on Facebook, or use their smart landing pages similar to the link sharing options above.

Online Show Streaming

A lot of your fans might not be able to make it to your live shows, and after COVID-19 a lot of your fans either won’t legally be able to see you on stage, or won’t want to be in such close contact with others. Performing live shows online is the perfect solution to this problem.

StageIt 

StageIt is a place for you to perform live online shows that are never recorded or archived. Your fans can ask you questions, request songs, or chat with each other. You can set the price for the ticket and your fans can tip you extra money while they’re watching you.

Side Door

Side Door allows you to host events over Zoom which means you can see your audience as you perform. If you plan your show with other people Side Door can automatically split the payout for you. There is even a marketplace of artists and venues that you can plan your shows with if you want.

Design and Creation Tools

There’s so much more creative work involved in the promotion of a track than just the audio itself. 

Especially early on in your music career, when you don’t have the budget to pay professionals or the skill to do it yourself, these tools can make your music videos, album artwork and Spotify canvas look more professional.

Canva 

Canva (affiliate) allows even the least design oriented person to create professional looking images and videos. There are almost endless ways this can be useful to an artist, from creating ads to use for your promotions, to graphics on your merch or artwork for your latest track. 

Lalal.ai

There’s going to be times when you need to make edits to your tracks to isolate the vocals, instrumentals or particular stems. This is where Lalal.ai comes in. Using high quality stem splitting technology it makes it easy for you to isolate the parts of your track you need. This should be an essential part of any musicians toolkit.

 

Rotor 

A professionally created music video is way out of the budget of most artists without label backing. However, with Rotor you just upload your track, choose some clips, choose a style and add any text overlays to create a quality video at an affordable price: $25 for a one off. And prices get cheaper if you subscribe for more.  

That’s our list of the best music promotion tools and software, it’s a work in progress and we’ll constantly be adding to it, so be sure to keep coming back to view the most up to date list. Also be sure to let us know if there’s anything we’ve missed off this list that you think should be included.

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