Download gates are a great way for artists to gain more followers and get more traffic to their music.
By using them, you are able to get a new follows and likes each time your song is downloaded. You can also choose in which social media listeners will need to follow or like you.
In this article, I’m going to teach you how to use music download gates and which services suits the best for you.
What are download gates exactly?
Download gates are services which allows your listeners to download your track in exchange for a follow, like, repost, comment or email address. Download gates are widely used, because they allow artists and other content creators to gain more following.
In these days people are often not willing to pay for a song. Instead, everyone are streaming, sharing, liking and commenting them.
However, you can use this to your advantage. Giving your song away for free might sound a terrible idea, but with download gates you are actually not giving it for free.
When someone downloads your track trough a download gate, you gain more audience in a long term. You can then start to create relationship with them and build trust. Once they know you are a cool guy, they will listen to your new tracks more likely.
They may not listen to your every track, but most likely some of them.
How to use music download gates
Many websites enables you to use download gates. The most popular ones are:
I have tested Toneden, Hypeddit and Tuneboost. Currently I’m using Toneden. To use download gates, you simply register to these websites, upload your track and choose in which social media you want listeners to follow you.
Some of the services requires that you link your track trough your SoundCloud to the download gate. This way listeners can stream the track via SoundCloud before downloading it. Tuneboost works like this.
You can require listeners to follow, like, comment or repost your track in multiple social media sites. However, I do not recommend this, because it can be annoying to have to follow you everywhere. Also, don’t forget that everyone might not be present in the same social media sites than you are.
This is why I recommend to choose one social media at a time and stick with that. Personally, I like to grow my Spotify following, because a listener might also listen to my other tracks, if he/she follows me on Spotify.
So whenever someone downloads my track, he/she needs to follow me and save the track to their Spotify library before it can be downloaded. This is a great way to grow your Spotify audience.
I have also grown my SoundCloud audience in the past. When I wanted to get more SoundCloud listeners, I let them download my track in exchange for SoundCloud follow, like and repost. Even though it’s three different actions listeners had to take, it all happened in one click, because they are on the same social media.
You should also consider collecting email addresses. Having an email list is a powerful asset you can leverage your whole artist career. You own your email list so no one can take it away from you. Social following can be easily lost, because you never know what social media is going to be popular in the future.
If you want to learn other ways to grow your audience even without following, check out my other article: How to get listeners without following as a music producer
Which social media you should grow?
Well it depends. It all comes down where your most active fans are and which social media site’s algorithms are favorable right now.
Facebook was one of the best places to grow audience couple of years ago, but because of it’s recent algorithm changes, it is very hard to get your posts seen by your followers now.
Usually when you make a post on Facebook, only about 5 -10 % of your followers will see it. Only if you are willing to pay money for ads, you can get a lot of traffic.
That’s why I can’t recommend to grow your Facebook following right now. Instead, you should try to grow your YouTube or Instagram following. Especially Instagram’s algorithm is very favorable now.
You can also try to grow your YouTube following. YouTube is still one of the best places to find new fans and get exposure. It has become a little bit harder to grow your YouTube channel in these days, because of the high competition.
However, if you are consistent and upload quality music, you can get big results.
Along with Instagram, Spotify is also a great platform to gain new audience. This is because you can grow your playlists, track plays and followers at the same time. Plus listeners can also find your older tracks easily as well.
I wouldn’t try to grow Twitter or SoundCloud either. SoudCloud has become this weird place between YouTube and Spotify with no clear identity. Even though you can still get good results growing your SoundCloud page, Spotify or YouTube are much better platforms.
Twitter is also stuck between Facebook and Instagram. It really doesn’t work well with music, because it’s designed for short tweets and messages while we are focusing on audio and visual content.
So to recap everything, I recommend to focus on growing either your Instagram, YouTube or Spotify audiences. Of course, if you have an active community on some other social media, I wouldn’t abandon them! It depends on your current situation.
Collecting email addresses
Having an email list is the best way you can contact your followers. Unlike social media following, you are in control of your email list.
Social media platforms can pretty quickly lose their popularity, when a new platform appears on the market. This means that you will lose your following and reach on that social media, because no one is using it anymore.
This is already happening to Facebook. It’s much harder to reach audience there and that’s why people are transferring to other platforms such as Instagram, YouTube and even TikTok. In fact, TikTok is right pretty hot platform and many artist have already break trough with it.
Conclusions
The get the most out of download gates, you’ll first need to identify where most of your target audience hangs out. You need to also consider, which social media platform is popular right now and worth growing. You should also consider growing your email list.
Once you’ve decided that, pick up a download gate provider you like. You can use multiple services and test them out, before seriously using them.
After that you need to drive traffic to your download gate. This can be done by promoting the link of the download gate when you release new music. You should add the link to the places where people can find it easily.
I usually put the link on the track’s description on YouTube, SoundCloud and Newgrounds. You may also promote the link on your social posts or email campaigns.