How to establish a following on Musical.ly

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Written by:

Most often, producers are promoting their music on the likes of YouTube, Spotify, and Soundcloud etc. But in order to stay ahead of the market, you should be looking at upcoming platforms gaining a lot of attention for different demographics. Eg. Facebook was extremely popular amongst the younger generation and college students before more “mature” audiences began adopting it for their social media use. During this article, we’re going to discuss what Musical.ly is, and how you can establish a following on it. At first, many people initially dismissed it as a lip-syncing platform for kids. But having sold for a billion dollars, a lot of large figures within the music industry (including the major record labels) are taking their Musical.ly strategy very seriously. As an example, BUNT did a campaign on the platform for their song “Old Guitar”. Having gained loads of attention from the app, they saw their Spotify monthly listener count increase from 86k to 902k within a matter of weeks.

Look at trending hashtags on the homepage

One of the best ways to grow on Musical.ly is to look at trending hashtags for the day. This can be found on the discover homepage. As they have a large search volume, there is an extremely good chance of your content being discovered. Therefore, if it’s good, people will share it, and hence your follower count will increase. In a similar fashion to Instagram, hashtags are a great way to get your content discovered. So by using your own music in your videos, your song will go “viral” if the video does.

Collaborate with other musers

Also, collaborations are key. Like with any platform, working alongside influencers within your particular niche are a great way to grow a social platform. So once you begin generating relationships with “musers” in your city/country, the opportunity is open for you to film some content together. But even if you’re unable to meet up, the application offers a split screen collaboration option – so there is no excuse for being unable to work with influencers around the world. Plus when you have people dancing to your song, it also doubles as some pretty good social content for your artist Facebook & Instagram page.

Use music promotion channels

Musical.ly promotion channels are a rising trend within the platform. Often with millions of followers (examples include RapidSongs & FlightHouse), they perform a function very similar to that of a YouTube channel. However, the key here is the fact that the application now has a partnership with Apple Music. If you’re able to get loads of attention on Musical.ly, you’ll notice a significant increase in Apple streams!
In promotion campaigns that are targeting a specific location or territory, I would highly recommend creating a list of 500-750 musers within that location to use the song. Once you have hundreds of people using your music, it becomes very easy to have potentially millions of people hearing each song that you create. But what do you message an influencer when asking them to use your music? Here’s a real-life example that we recently used:

“Hey! How are you? I’m the manager of  (insert producer name) – a producer with over (x amount of) YouTube views.We recently made a song called (track name), and would love to give it to you free to use in your Musical.ly videos! We’re massive fans of your content – especially (insert title of their recent video). Of course, we’re more than happy to promote your video etc on our social media platforms!
All the best,
Matt”

It will be extremely obvious if you’re copy and pasting every single email. So try and personalize every single one to the influencer that you’re sending music to. Simple!