Selling SoundCloud Followers: Is it legit?

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
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Selling SoundCloud Followers: Is it legit?

Hi DJTechTools community,

My name is Felix, and I’ve been DJing and producing for 7 months now. I recently came across an article that mentioned sites that sell SoundCloud plays and followers. I was really skeptical and did a bunch of Google searches to dig deeper. I’ve seen sites that are very obviously fake and useless. I’d rather have 100 real followers who are interested in my music than 100,000 bot accounts.

That being said, some of the other sites that I came across seem to look more legitimate. The pricing is higher, and they claim stuff like “We own over 30 Music & Entertainment websites! High traffic on daily basis enables us to offer you comprehensive promotion through music targeted front page promotional postings over our vast network.”

Before I do anything, I wanted to know what you guys thought of services like these. Has anyone ever used it and gotten any good out of it?

Specifically, the most “legit-looking” site I found was this one: http://www.simulalabs.com/. I’m still sketched out quite a bit, but do you think I should risk $30 and see if I get any actual results?

Thanks everyone!

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There may be some merit to it if they are showing your music to real people on reputable blogs, but you need to ask yourself “have I made anything that is going to impress people enough for them to want to follow me”. If your fairly new to making music and don’t feel that you have made anything worthwhile, I would stay away from advertising something people aren’t going to enjoy.

If you do feel confident in your music and want to put some money behind promoting it, do some research into different promotion options. Aside from paying these websites, you can advertise on numerous social media sites, you can hire a publicist, advertise on a blog, etc.

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It’s a waste man. You’ll get a bunch of inactive followers, a bunch of fake plays on tracks you’ve uploaded, no comments, no likes, etc. What’s going to happen when you upload a new track and you have 3000 followers and struggle to get 100 plays in a month? Plus, all of those robot followers get deleted over time. You’ll watch your list shrink by the day.

It’s just bogus.

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It works but the followers won’t do nothing and will disappear , also it is against Soundcloud’s Terms of Use.

There are a lot of other sites that sell this kind of service to Facebook, which also work, followers also do nothing and will disappear, but it’s not against Facebook’s Terms of Use.

Soundcloud is a very good tool to have unknown people rating your stuff. If you show your music to your friends they will be much more likely to lie to you and to say things are AWESOME when atually they are just ok.

I see this kind of service as a bad idea, but if you really need followers and plays quick to impress someone (?) it will work maybe.

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Everyone in the industry can spot fake numbers a mile off.

A local DJ around here has 11k twitter followers. Zero interactions from any of them.

Thousands of plays on selected mixes on Soundcloud. 260 followers.

It would annoy me, if he was getting away with it. But he’s not. Nobody books him.

Any label or promoter will be impressed by 1000 genuine, organic, followers on a service. They’ll see straight through this bought-in nonsense.

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I also know a guy like this… would piss me off…but he’s also not getting booked.

As Mojaxx wisely said, it’s very easy to tell if the guy bought the followers.

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Another interesting thing to note is that when you buy followers you may actually be harming your reach. Only a certain percent of followers on facebook, soundcloud, twitter, etc. see what you post. When you pay for followers, you “dilute” the number of real followers you have; so whenever you post a mix, less real people end up seeing it. This COMPLETELY messes up your social media and makes it fairly useless.

Also, I read on reddit that these fake accounts will go and like other similar pages in order to seem legit. There was one dj in particular who’s account ended up with waaay more fake likes than real, even though he didn’t buy them. Again, this entirely messed up his reach and his page. Moral of the story is; when you buy fake followers, not only are you messing up your social media presence, you could be messing up that of similar artists as well

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its messed up in some way cause big djs definitely do buy followers but its not something that is held against them {cough cough\ dutch}

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All true. And it also makes the work that genuine people put into getting genuines likes, basically worthless.

A friend of mine has worked hard to get, like, 5000 proper Facebook likes in the last few years. He says it’s not even worth mentioning to promoters anymore, as they just assume they’ve been bought. As a metric of popularity, it’s become meaningless.

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That’s all bullish*t.

This site is just trying to convince DJs who don’t want to buy fakes they’re going to bring them likes and plays from people who are really interested in their music.

You can tell that’s simply not how it’s going to work since they guarantee you a certain number of followers and plays, something they could never do if they just put links to you stuff on some of their websites.

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Okay - that explains some of the followers I’ve got recently on sound cloud… And there’s me thinking my “shit iz the bizomb”. :laughing:

Another great point. Good post!

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tl;dr
Stats boosting should only be a small part of your online promotion, most your time should be focused on gaining real users.

There are two ways to take an active role in your soundcloud promotion. Some people argue both are wrong / immoral and the music should speak for itself. Maybe they have a point, but that isn’t how the music industry has ever worked. Artists / labels have paid for radio plays / magazine inteviews / positive reviews / flyering / postering etc.

One is a straight up stats boost (like the site OP linked to). Note these are ALL fake. Fake followers / likes from fake accounts. The accounts will probably look fake as well, real name doesn’t match account name, no tracks uploaded, not many followers, haven’t liked / commented / reposted anything. Quite sparse accounts.

This does have it’s benefits, but is the weaker of the methods. All it really does is show users consciously or unconsciously that this is music is being listened to and they should check it out. This is true of all styles from mainsteam pop music, where popularity rules above all else and more underground styles (no one wants to be the last to hear of an upcoming artist).

But stats boost is only good as part of the promotion. Having 2,000 plays or 200k, the effect is the same. Having 20k followers or 2k is the same.

The other promotion method is to interact with other users. Listening to tracks, liking tracks, commenting on tracks, reposting tracks, following other users. When you do this, the other user will get a notification and more often than not will check out who has just intereacted with them / their music. This is the whole point of the social network.

The interaction promotion methods are infinitely greater than pure stats boosting as it gets REAL users into your follower base, opens up new opportunities.

Remember everytime you upload a new track / repost a track / create a playlist, it is syndicated to the home page stream of all your followers.

If you are interested in doing both kinds of promotion and more, you can check out http://soundcloudmanager.com
Disclaimer, I am the author of the software.

Mods, if this isn’t allowed (it is on topic and is a response and not a pure advert new post, so I think is ok), I apologise and please remove link.

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it is the bizomb :wink:

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Thanks and Here’s Proof

Hey guys, thanks for all your responses. This is definitely something that I will not invest in. Yesterday, I spoke to someone in a support chat on one of these sites and she offered me 1000 free “trial” plays.

The plays came really fast, at about 3 per minute. In less than 24 hours, I had over 1400 plays on one of my mixes that previously only had around 300. Here’s a link to the mix. It’s really easy to tell that these are fake due to the low number of favorites, comments, and reposts.

https://soundcloud.com/effexusa/generation-102

Good thing SoundCloud offers some pretty detailed stats about your plays. This morning, I was able to click on “stats” and see the full specifics of all my plays. Here’s the photo of what I saw:

Screen Shot 2014-02-05 at 11.44.10 AM.jpg
Screen Shot 2014-02-05 at 11.44.10 AM.jpg450×280 12 KB

I’m a DJ in Durham, NC, so it doesn’t make any sense that I’d have so many plays from Brazil, Bulgaria, etc.

Anyways, at least I didn’t lose any money on this. Absolutely DO NOT pay for stuff like this. Now, I feel really illegitimate because I have a mix that clearly has fake plays because a sound I uploaded yesterday only has 15 plays…

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Of course you can buy SoundCloud plays and followers. But don’t buy FAKE plays. Fake plays and followers cannot help your music.
I found this one: Build My Plays
Different from others they provide Real Plays. I’ve used this serivices for 2 years to get more audiences, and they they never disappoint me.

p/s: Now http://buildmyplays.com have Buy 1 Get 1 Free program.

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Soundcloud

https://soundcloud.com/

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Y’all, it might not be the longest in waiting necro-thread, but this is an absolute quality gem of a post.

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I think someone bumped a seven year old post recently. Been alot of that going on lately.

I am also willing to put some chips on mr./mrs. rmandrey being a bot.

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Build your following. Work your fingers to the bone marketing yourself. You want your music to go to people that like YOUR music. Those are the people that will help you both grow and get noticed.

Numbers are not important. The love you get from your fans is important.

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I get the odd porn site bot follower. kind of amusing really. Earn your followers mate :slight_smile: