First and most important; If you’re serious about progress, hire a manager, a promoter, and monitor your music. The manager and promoter will move your music much faster than you can on your own. It’s very difficult to break into the top positions while working alone, and without data. Study the charts and see. Let’s dive into the tips.
1. Make Great Music
This is the bare minimum, great audio/visuals are your ticket to the music game. However, it’s important to note that great music is not enough. It’s simply the first step. There is a lot more work needed to make it to the Top 100 Songs of the Year.
2. Submit to Platforms Early
Add your song to platforms as soon as it is released. This way all your plays will be tracked and counted when the song is still hot and new. If you add the song to SongBoost months after you released the song, the system will not know about all the radio and TV airplay that the song got in its first days or weeks. The key platforms are SongBoost for radio and TV airplay tracking, Spotify and YouTube for online streaming.
3. Pay Attention to the Charts
SongBoost runs 3 radio and TV airplay charts; Daily Top 100 – the most played songs over a 24-hour period. Weekly Top 40 – the Top 40 Songs from Monday to Sunday. Top 100 of the Year – the biggest songs of the year. Install the SongBoost app to keep track of airplay charts.
Each Chart builds on the one before it. You can’t have a song that did not make it to the Daily Top 100 doing well on a Weekly Top 40. You also can’t have a song that didn’t make it to the Weekly Top 40 doing well on the Top 100 of the Year.
4. Know When Not to Release
If you have a song that is doing well on the charts, don’t release yet. Releasing another song will displace your existing song and dilute its airplay. Program directors and schedulers are not likely to have multiple songs of the same artist on high rotation at once.
5. Know When to Release
If your song has started declining on the Daily and Weekly Charts, it’s time to release your next song. In our experience and based on our data, a good release cycle is 6 to 8 weeks.
6. Promote Your Song
We live in a world today where 100,000 new songs are released globally every day. It has become impossible for music to stand out without proper promo planning and a good promo budget. Invest in a good promo plan and budget to take this great work to the audience. If you’re sure you have a hit song that people need to hear, promote it like your future depends on it.
SongBoost offers you 3 ways to promote your music; 1. Social – Have your new release artwork posted on socials of our partner stations. 2. Airplay – Have a 20-30 second music teaser of your new song played multiple times a day on our partner stations. 3. Interviews – Book media interviews on our partner stations through the SongBoost app.
7. Crossover
Crossover music appeals to multiple audiences and is therefore played on more stations. Once stations play you a couple of times, they are more open to playing your other songs. Crossovers are a good way to get your foot in the door. A few success stories we have monitored on SongBoost include the following.
Inspirational Crossover
Thank God by Vinka appealed to Gospel stations and mainstream non-Gospel stations and so its airplay was high. Gospel stations would typically not have played Vinka.
Genre Crossover
Ugandan HipHop sensation Navio’s Njogereza appealed to hiphop and cultural audiences so its airplay was high. Cultural stations would typically not have played Navio.
Artist Crossover/Collaboration
This seems to be part of Joshua Baraka’s rise to fame. Collaborating with great artists gives you access to larger audiences and therefore higher airplay.
About SongBoost
SongBoost runs an airplay monitoring and music promo app used by musicians and their teams. The app automatically notifies the artist when their music is played on over 400 radio and TV stations in Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and beyond.
Follow these steps to start tracking your music across Africa.