Recently, Erykah remixed Drake's Hotline Bling with Hotline Bling But You Caint Use My Phone. It was reviewed on Pitchfork and Wired, made national radio news, and crossed over between Drake and Erykah fans. Take a look at the strategy behind artists such as Boyce Avenue, Justin Bieber, and Karmin. It's hard to deny the power of a unique cover to boost audience traffic. Create something unique, share it with your friends, and hope for the best right? Wrong. Thanks to everyone and their technology-challenged aunt having a microphone and the ability to record on their phone or computer, YouTube has been flooded with countless cover songs that fall flat to our music saturated ears. To be successful gaining a greater audience through cover songs, you have to be strategic.
Above all else, make sure you're exploiting SEOs. Include the song title, the original artist, and your artist name in the cover song title. Hot words like "original" and "official" are effective and work if you use them to indicate that it is your original arrangement or from your official page. Descriptive words are good if they indicate unique features in your music, such as "acoustic," "freestyle," or "instrumental." Make sure that if they don't fit in your title, you include them in the video tags. Sharing your video on social media? Hashtag the living daylights out of it. It is amazing the retweets, follows, and likes I have gotten simply from #songwriter, #music, #piano or the like. Generic tags can sometimes generate interest.
To stand out from competing covers, you can also do something creative with the title like Erykah did ("but you caint use my phone), to indicate the attitude or character behind your cover. If you're using YouTube, avoid videos that appear unprofessional, such as you sitting on your bed using your Apple headphone speaker. While it is a great way to show off your raw talent, most listeners are quick to skip over low quality video and audio. We have iMovie, Garage Band, Final Cut Pro, and Logic Pro at our fingertips. At this point, there is little excuse to not have a decent quality cover song.
Pay attention to when you are posting your music. Research indicates that there are definite times when social media users are checking their feed but not posting. Often early and mid-morning times on weekdays are a safe bet. (Check out this and other social media trends from AdWeek's news.) To minimize competition, use these low-post windows of time to share your masterpiece with the world.
Is a popular artist coming to your area? Regional searches of that artist's music will rise as the concert approaches. Recently, Ariana Grande visited Chicago. You had better believe she was trending in the greater Chicago area across social media. Use that kind of free publicity to your advantage and post a cover a week or so before the concert. Your local audience base will thank you and you will get more exposure thanks to people searching for the visiting musician's work.
Finally, there is nothing like cross-linking to make sure your video is viewed by as wide an audience as possible. Do you have a Facebook Artist Page? Share your video link. (For Facebook Pages, make sure you encourage those who "like" to also "follow," or they will miss your updates.) Tweet a quick promo, share the audio on SoundCloud, or do a quick snap on IG to generate interest (and put the link in your bio not the photo caption!!!!).
You can find internet success with your music, you just have to make sure it's easy to find, good quality, and easy to share on social media. Now, you've got some work to do! Go be brilliant in the studio and share it with your fans. If you want, post it in the comments below to share it with me too ;)
