Being an independent artist might be risk-free, having nothing to share with a record label like Warner or Universal Music. However, there are some hassles in return of being an indie artist. After you've got your songs ready and put them out on music platforms, you'll notice that you can't drive streams to your Spotify out of thin air; it doesn't work like that.

I wish though, it took me years to build a steady flow of streams on my Spotify account.

Unless you've already made it and built your audience, it would take you an arm and a leg to gain a hike in streaming rates on YouTube or Spotify for yourself.

It comes down to two reasons:

1. The competition in the trade is fierce, more than ever.

2. You might be unfamiliar with algorithms and marketing/advertising strategies.

Nonetheless, there are marketing platforms and music promotion services that can lend a hand in your music career. These services can help you find your niche and build your reach. ToneDen is one of best and I still use it on all my releases.

It's a fan engagement platform offering a handful of easy-to-use tools that meet your music marketing needs. Let's dive deeper into ToneDen's features for musicians.

Social Advertising without Requiring Your Effort

As a fan engagement platform, ToneDen's main job is to help you out with the numbers in social media as well as promote your upcoming releases and shows. It offers automated social advertising, which extensively saves you time and energy you can spend on making music.

Moreover, the advertising targets the most prominent platforms that can remarkably expand your brand, including Google, Instagram, Spotify, Shopify, Facebook, EventBrite, and MailChimp.

All you need to do is to set up new items in the advertising section and make the best of ToneDen's algorithm based on the allocated budget and customized settings. Put next to Ads Manager or other tools where you need to be familiar with the tricks of marketing,

ToneDen has paved the way for independent artists to run campaigns with the least effort and keep track of the details, such as CPC (cost per click), CPP (cost per purchase), purchases, CTR (clickthrough rate), and generated revenue.

Mass of Data about Your Audience

The connection between the artist and the audience is always a critical determiner. The more you understand your audience, the better your audience perceives your music. Consequently, you're more likely to appear successful in stimulating people emotionally and, therefore, expand your audience sphere.

In doing so, having enough data about your fans, their preferences, and where they're located can come to your aid. Like Spotify Artists and other platforms, ToneDen provides vast data regarding your audience and their engagement, mainly through the 'Social Unlocks' tool.

With the given data, you can have a better grasp of a solid following in regions for later tours or your audience's taste by tracking fan engagement of your most popular songs. In a similar way, ToneDen's FanLinks and Tour FanLinks provide you with nifty data, such as the streaming ranking for music platforms and engagement rate for tours.

Smart Links for Easier Access for Your Fans

The aforementioned FanLinks and Tour FanLinks tools are particularly useful in stacking up plenty of options at their fingertips. Both enjoy artist-friendly designs and can effectively help you promote your brand and streamline your online presence.

Also, ToneDen allows you to create pre-release landing pages to ensure a better kick-off for your fresh releases by getting your fans notified.

For example, here's the most most recent smart link for a single that I release in 2022:

Through FanLinks, you can facilitate access to your songs, albums, EPs, and social media profile by creating one multi-use landing page with all the links in one place neatly. That mainly serves in two ways:

1- Your fans won't have to cast around for your social media and works.

2- It helps to drive more traffic to your social media and songs, cramming up everything on one page.

Similarly, Tour FanLinks can significantly contribute to your brand growth. As the title suggests, it's designed specifically for tour promotions where you can sort out everything about your upcoming shows, from ticket links to tour dates and other important information.

Furthermore, you can customize your Tour FanLinks more efficiently using off-the-record data, a shortcut that helps artists potentially amp up ticket sales. All you need to do is create a smart link for tour promotion and add the requisite details, such as tour date, location, and ticket URL. Following this, the landing page is ready to be customized with background images and such.

Further Features of ToneDen

In addition to the essential services, ToneDen has a few extra beneficial items up its sleeve. Viral Contesting, for instance, is the icing on the cake that creates a win-win environment for both artists and fans. Through viral contests,

ToneDen sets the stage for you to trigger your fans with a bonus like early pre-sale or VIP tickets to promote social actions like subscribing, following, sharing, etc.

This trick is exceptionally powerful when you're about to drop a new release or plan a tour, where you need more awareness in social media.

Spotify growth playbook is another valuable feature that can slip your release into Spotify's playlists, among the ocean of songs all striving to get featured.

Through this method, your songs will appear in algorithmic playlists where you can drive new waves of followers and streams to your Spotify. The daily cost varies and depends on your budget; however, a $5/day fund is enough to get you started, and you can allocate bigger funds as you get desired results.

Signing Up With ToneDen

Signing up at ToneDen is free, but I recommend you opt for the other paid subscription plans to capitalize on all ToneDen's premium tools. These plans are as follows:

Basic: $50 per month

Pro: $100 per month

Elite: Billed Annually – You should contact the ToneDen team to discuss your contract's terms.

With the free plan, you'll be privileged with viral contests, Social Unlock, FanLinks campaigns, and custom domains for links. If that doesn't fit your need, you can level up to the basic plan, which integrates a few more options in the workflow, namely an automated Facebook and Instagram Ads platform with a monthly ad spend limit of $500, removal of ToneDen branding from campaigns, and access to social integration.

Furthermore, the pro plan offers the same options with the $1,000 limit for monthly ad spend. That said, the elite program offers unlimited ad spend and special services, including weekly grouped office hours and guided onboarding and training for your team.

Final Thoughts 

An estimated 20,000 songs going live on Spotify daily explains the hardships of getting heard as an independent artist, much less growing your brand and building up an audience with dedicated fans who keep track of your works.

Because of that, a marketing service could immensely help your journey, and ToneDen is the epitome of it. As a cloud-based software, ToneDen offers a number of efficient tools, such as strategy guidance, real-time social marketing updates, budget optimization, and all-inclusive reports.

What's more, ToneDen is armed with a leading-edge targeting engine and automatic audience generator that makes it all easier than ever. Independent artists often don't have marketing skills or the time and interest to learn them. Instead, they can make the most from such merits to be in charge of marketing their brand and expanding their fanbase while allocating their energy to their art.