My Soundcloud went mad this week

Subject: My Soundcloud went mad this week
From: GUEST,SteveO
Date: 21 Sep 13 - 03:18 PM

Hi everyone I don't normally post on this site but I am an amateur song writer and sometimes I sing my songs at folk clubs and festivals, I know that some of you know me as I often read this site and recognise many of your names. I set up a soundcloud site two years ago as sometimes after I have sang a song people ask me if I have a recording and if they could sing one of my songs. I don't make CD's so soundcloud is an easy way to share my songs with the people who want to sing them.

I was hoping someone could shed some shed some light on why one of my songs on soudcloud has started attracting so many plays recently. I won't name the song as I don't want anyone to think that this is some kind of promotional stunt. Up until this week the song in question had been played 65 times in the two years it had been on soundcloud. Then on Wednesday it had 105 plays and on Tuesday 102 plays. It has now died down but it started the week with 65 plays and is now on 296 plays. As I say I don't promote my songs and am completely baffled by the increase. According to the soundcloud states it is being played all over the world which makes even less sense. Has anyone else had this or can anybody suggest why it would be happening.

Subject: RE: My Soundcloud went mad this week
From: GUEST,.gargoyle
Date: 21 Sep 13 - 11:32 PM

Be happy.

Enjoy the exposure. Gather the data for origin of hits.

REJOICE ! ! !

Sincerely,
Gargoyle

a chanty singer man asked a simular question on mudcat ... he was advised - the same I give to you. He took another route. Sorry days followed.

Subject: RE: My Soundcloud went mad this week
From: GUEST,SteveO
Date: 22 Sep 13 - 06:49 AM

Gargoyle, If only I could rejoice, but to be frank I don't believe it and am finding it very irritating not knowing why this is happening. According to the data it has been played in 30 countries and it is rally beginning to annoy me now. There have been no comments (good or bad) and the other tracks I have on soundcloud have only had a slightly higher than normal amount of plays this week, all of which leaves me to believe that it is some kind of computer generated bot thing. What I can't work out is why would someone do that?

Subject: RE: My Soundcloud went mad this week
From: RTim
Date: 22 Sep 13 - 09:06 AM

SteveO - what is your name on SoundCloud??

My site hasn't received anything like this number of visits, etc. in the last week?
Must be your singing, which I would like to hear.

Tim Radford

Subject: RE: My Soundcloud went mad this week
From: GUEST
Date: 22 Sep 13 - 11:34 AM

Tim. I would rather as I really don't want anyone to think I am in any way trying to promote my songs. As you can see from my previous post my site has never received anything like the attention that it has this week and I can't think of any reasonable explanation why it should suddenly start to be played in so many different countries. I am concerned that it is being used for some dodgy purpose that I don't understand.

Subject: RE: My Soundcloud went mad this week
From: GUEST,SteveO
Date: 22 Sep 13 - 11:41 AM

Tim, I think I have just found you on Soundcloud am and now following you, if it's not you it's some bloke with the same name as you with a lovely voice singing some fantastic songs.

Subject: RE: My Soundcloud went mad this week
From: GUEST,Woodsie
Date: 22 Sep 13 - 01:07 PM

If it is only the one song attracting attention - and this is only recent then something hat may be relevant/current in the title has made it turn up more frequently in searches = then there's the snowball effect of a few people liking it and sharing or liking it to a facebook post. As Gargoyle said rejoice! Without any other info, I doubt if any help is available.

Subject: RE: My Soundcloud went mad this week
From: Tattie Bogle
Date: 22 Sep 13 - 08:32 PM

I have "liked" or followed someone else I know. Sometimes I go back to listen to one of my own tracks again, but if I'm busy doing something else and it gets to the end of my track, hers will automatically launch, so she is getting more plays by this route. Maybe a partial explanation, tho' it could just be that someone heard, it, liked it, and shared it with his entire Facebook friends list?

Subject: RE: My Soundcloud went mad this week
From: Haruo
Date: 23 Sep 13 - 02:49 AM

I don't think I have been in any way involved in your song's sudden popularity, but certainly Woodsie's suggestion of a Facebook like is not an unreasonable guess at an explanation. I am on FB a lot and have hundreds of friends in dozens of countries (mostly Esperanto speakers), so when I do like a song on FB it's likely that dozens if not hundreds of people in dozens of countries will at least glance at it. I wouldn't expect a bot-based occurrence to show such geographic spread in the hits.

Subject: RE: My Soundcloud went mad this week
From: Haruo
Date: 24 Sep 13 - 12:50 AM

For example, if someone posted a link to one of your songs on the Esperanto FB group , this could easily result in the sort of hits you're talking about.

Subject: RE: My Soundcloud went mad this week
From: gravyben
Date: 24 Sep 13 - 10:30 AM

You might try searching google for links to your song on the web. If I'm not mistaken the syntax is something like this:

[in the google search box] link: http://www.mudcat.org

This will search for other web sites that have links to www.mudcat.org. I think :)

Subject: RE: My Soundcloud went mad this week
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 24 Sep 13 - 10:35 AM

SteveO, you could do a little backward search to see where that song turns up. I keep a half-dozen browser programs in my computers but they're not all logged on to every account. Sometimes you see useful stuff when you visit a place as a visitor, not a member. I suggest you use a browser that you don't have logged on to your SoundCloud and do a search both on your song name at the site, and also do a general Google search on your song title or even fragments of the title. If you can't get into SoundCloud without being logged on that's fine, but poke around in the search results to see if other sites are linking to your song.

I have only visited SoundCloud a few times, but they must have a dashboard that will let you look more closely at some of the places your song has been played. As Haruo pointed out, links to your song will show up as hits, so a facebook page liking your song can keep it in play for a while. If someone has linked to it for background music for another site you will also discover that. This is borrowing your bandwidth to augment their site. (At least this does link back to you, versus their simply lifting it and embedding it in their own site without credit.)

Good luck sorting it out.

SRS

Subject: RE: My Soundcloud went mad this week
From: GUEST,SteveO
Date: 24 Sep 13 - 05:26 PM

Thanks everyone for you advice, I am (sort of) please to say that it has now died down. I did find one link to it on Facebook using Gravyben suggestion. The song in question is about the increasing of pension ages and someone I know had shared it in on a Facebook campaign page. This only happened after the initial increase so that could explain some of the later plays but I still have no idea why it suddenly got so many plays in the first place. Thanks for all your helpful suggestions and possible explanations.      

SteveO

Subject: RE: My Soundcloud went mad this week
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 24 Sep 13 - 05:30 PM

The facebook campaign page link probably explains it - any time someone places a new comment on a page it brings it back to the top for a lot of viewers and could bring repeated waves of hits.

SRS