Pitching and Driving Traffic to Your SourceAudio Music Library Site

Driving traffic to your site is a vital aspect of a music company’s business and looks slightly different for each unique brand, their offerings, and their target market. 

Oftentimes it occurs through direct, personal communication (i.e. pitching) to a potential client, while other times it looks more like reaching as many online leads as possible and “warming them up” to your products.

SourceAudio’s robust suite of sending features, reporting panels, and informative resources provide all the tools needed to start generating revenue with a high-quality music library!

Before you begin pitching your music or driving traffic online, you’ll want to get your branding and site layout optimized so that your users’ experience conveys a clear identity of your brand and highlights your most valuable assets. For ideas on how to approach your site’s layout and feature set, check out our tips on how SourceAudio sites can be configured to serve a wide variety of business models. We also recommend tagging your tracks with thorough metadata for efficient searchability, notifying your users of our powerful Sonic Search tool, and checking out our other track search optimization tools as well.

Pitching

Once your material is ready to share, SourceAudio offers tools that make it easy to send single tracks, whole albums, or playlists of your best tracks.

Tracks, albums, and playlists can be sent via a coded URL that overrides normal access permissions or via a SourceAudio-generated email which can be customized to display whatever images and text you’d like. Additionally, you can simply copy and paste the URL of any page and send it out to your recipient as long as the material is sufficiently accessible to that user’s log in account or a logged out site visitor as applicable.

Sending a Track
To send a track, head to its detailed view by clicking its title from any track listing. The track’s detailed view will display the track title in bold font towards the top of the page with the waveform across the screen just below the title.

Scroll down just a bit and look to the right under “Send/Share”. Click the curved arrow icon, and a pop-up will appear, prompting you to select your sending method of choice and desired access permissions. Feel free to send a track to yourself as a test. Fill out your permissions and click “Send” for your recipient to receive a SourceAudio generated email, or click Copy URL to send out a coded URL yourself with the permissions as displayed in the pop-out under “Please note:”.

Sending an Album
To send an album, view it by clicking its listing from any list of albums, or by clicking the name of the album from a track listing. You should then see the album’s artwork and name at the top of the window, and its track list underneath.

Click the More Options drop-down in the top right, then click the option to Email and a pop-up will appear, prompting you to select your sending method of choice and desired access permissions. Feel free to send an album to yourself as a test. Fill out your permissions and click “Send” for your recipient to receive a SourceAudio generated email, or click Copy URL to send out a coded URL yourself with the permissions as displayed in the pop-out under “Please note:”.

Sending a Playlist
To send a playlist, view it by clicking its listing from your left-hand toolbar. If your browser window is on the smaller side, you may have to expand your left-hand toolbar by clicking the icon of 3 horizontal lines at the top of the collapsed bar on the left edge of your window.

Once you’re viewing your playlist, click the More Options drop-down in the top right, then click the option to Email and a pop-up will appear, prompting you to select your sending method of choice and desired access permissions. Feel free to send a playlist to yourself as a test. Fill out your permissions and click “Send” for your recipient to receive a SourceAudio generated email, or click Copy URL to send out a coded URL yourself with the permissions as displayed in the pop-out under “Please note:”.

Plus… when you’re sending material with SourceAudio, you can be confident it will look great on whatever divide it’s received on, whether it’s viewed on a desktop interface or on our mobile optimized site.

Detailed Reporting on Sent Pitches
Head to your sent reporting section by clicking the user icon in the top right » Dashboard » Sent. Here you can see all of your sent material listed out with the date, time, and recipient, as well as the number of clicks, plays, and downloads made on that send. You can also see these stats for all the sent material from all of your site admins in the admin panel » View Statistics » Admin Sent.

Pitching Tips from the Music Supervisors Themselves
Wondering what music supervisors really look for in a good pitch? Check out what four accomplished music supervisors has to say on this topic in a SXSW panel titled “Music for Ad Agencies and Brands”.

Looking for leads to pitch to? Check out…

The SourceAudio Buyer Network
Since its inception in 2012, the network of music buying sites on SourceAudio has grown to house over 100 million tracks from SourceAudio libraries, catalogs, and labels. Top agencies rely on the buyer network to find the latest tracks from their site-to-site connections via the SourceAudio Buyer Network. Once you’ve gotten in touch with a buyer who wants to connect to your library, syncing up your sites is just a flip of a switch from each party. The seller controls exactly which of their catalogs and labels get synced over to the buyer when connecting, while new labels added after a connection is established need to be manually accepted by buyers so that they always know what they’re getting.  A connected buyer and seller can also exchange track requests and/or briefs that list budgets and reference tracks for their project along with an integrated, easy-to-use brief-response tool.

The SourceAudio Blog for Quarterly Updates on the Best Online Music Industry Events
Every three months, we share a handpicked list of the best online resources for composers and music businesses in the coming months. Find our latest post here, and get notified of future events by following our socials on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin.

Your Favorite Companies’ Online Presence and Reach Out Directly
Pitch to your favorite companies using the tools outlined above! Check out our write-up on pitching for an artist-brand partnership for more helpful information on how to approach a company with your music.

Large Scale Marketing

If you’re new to online marketing, the concept of a sales funnel is essential reading. Check out our write-up on sales funnels in music licensing.

Build Your Landing Page
Unless you’re sending a very targeted sector straight to the exact music you’re marketing to them, you’ll want to be sure you have a high-functioning landing page that instantly starts warming up your leads by demonstrating your credibility and offering easy access to exactly what they’re looking for. SourceAudio makes it simple to create the perfect landing page for your library site, or use our custom page builder tool to create your own landing page with HTML and CSS.

E-commerce Features
One of the most effective ways to move a lead down the funnel from interest to decision is to offer a coupon with our e-commerce suite. This is also where you can set up an automated checkout process for licensing tracks or recurring subscription plans. All of these features have been tailored for use by high-traffic volume music licensing businesses and are currently used by some of the biggest audio licensing solutions in the world.

Live Chat
Another great tool for a SourceAudio site expecting a high volume of traffic is a live chat module or chatbot. We offer an easy-to-use integration with Olark, the leading in-app chat module provider.

Traffic Acquisition and Reporting

Once your site’s been optimized to funnel traffic from first contact to a purchase action, you’re ready to start driving traffic. A paid advertisement, a referral from another brand, or a Google search listing are some of the most common places this contact is made. Explore and investigate what combinations of discovery methods lead to the most sales and invest accordingly.

For thorough reporting on your traffics’ behavior, the best place to start is the SourceAudio statistics panel. Here you can view, play, and download statistics by user, identify your most played and downloaded material, view activity trends over time, see your users’ most searched terms, export complete play and download reports, and more!

For even more reporting on your site traffic, we’ve made it easy to connect your SourceAudio site to the Google Marketing Suite.

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