If you spend any time at all online, you’ve probably heard of Reddit. Branding itself as “the front page of the internet” Reddit is a hugely popular site. Yet, many musicians fail to make proper use of it. In this blog, we’ll learn all about how Reddit can help further your career as a musician.
While “the front page of the internet” is certainly a bold claim, in Reddit’s case, there is quite a lot to substantiate it. Alexa currently lists the site as the 3rd most popular page in the UK, and the 18th most visited globally. Whilst Facebook (The ultimate guide to Facebook for musicians) and Twitter (The ultimate musicians guide to Twitter) are arguably more ubiquitous, Reddit is certainly one of the big players.
What is Reddit?
Reddit can essentially be summarised as a huge collection of forums, covering every subject imaginable. Each one of these forums is called a “subreddit”. Jake Widman of Digital Trends explains it thus;
The name of a subreddit begins with /r/, which is part of the URL that Reddit uses. For example, /r/nba is a subreddit where people talk about the National Basketball Association, while /r/boardgames is a subreddit for people to discuss board games. Those are straightforward subreddits, but they can get weird, such as /r/birdswitharms, a subreddit devoted to pictures of birds…with arms.
Jake Widman
Subreddits can then be “upvoted” or “downvoted” either increasing or decreasing their visibility to other users, with a similar system in place for users’ comments.
The front page of Reddit will show you various posts that are currently trending on the site and gives visitors the option to filter what they are seeing via several different options. You then have the option to search through Reddit for various subjects of interest.
Once you have created an account, you can then create your own subreddits. However, they must meet some basic criteria. IE. Your account must be at least 30 days old and relatively active.
Similar to Wikipedia, Reddit relies on teams of volunteer moderators to police each subreddit and monitor the content.
Above them, you have the admins. They are direct employees of Reddit, able to ban subreddits as well as discipline users and moderators.
Reddit accounts operate a “Karma” policy, and every account has a “Karma Number” attached to it. It’s a little mysterious as to how this number is calculated, but good and positive use of the site seems to be key.
Reddit has something of its own language. This usually takes the form of initialisms and abbreviations, like OP (original post) or TIL (today I learned).
You can learn more about Reddit on their about page.
Reddit for musicians
Reddit can be beneficial to musicians in several different ways. Broadly speaking though, they usually break down into two different categories – education and promotion.
Education allows you to make use of other people’s experiences on Reddit, and learn more about your craft, instrument or industry.
Using Reddit for promotion will generally mean using Reddit as a vehicle to promote yourself, your services or your music.
The first step on your journey as a musician on Reddit should be to head to the music subreddit – /r/Music/
Some great subreddits for musicians
Reddit for education
Reddit can be a great place to learn about the music industry. One of Reddit’s most popular types of post is the famous AMA – ask me anything.
Virtually every hour there will be someone else on the r/music subreddit offering the benefit of their experiences.
They could be big-time producers and session musicians that worked with world famous artists – or they could be a grassroots singer-songwriter waiting for their big break.
One of the most important things to remember, as a musician, is that everybody (no matter how rich and famous, or poor and struggling) knows something that you don’t know. So get out there and ask!
Find people with similar goals to you, or that are currently in a position that you’d like to be in, and ask them questions!
You might gain valuable insight into what it takes to achieve your goals or (just as importantly!) you might learn what doesn’t work at all.
Outside of AMA posts, just search for the subject you’d like to learn about and get reading!
Some great subreddits to learn from
Reddit for promotion
When it comes to promoting your music or your services, many people instinctively now head to sites like Facebook or Twitter. However, Reddit is just as valid a way of connecting with people as either of these.
Although it’s a subreddit from 2014, this thread is an excellent collation of resources for musicians on Reddit. It’ll lay down a couple good guiding principles for promoting yourself.
A big thing to remember is not to over promote on Reddit. Try not to shoehorn your music into posts where it doesn’t belong, and don’t spam people for the sake of it. Not only is that not going to get your anywhere, but you’re much more likely to turn people off to your music than turn people on to it.
Some great subreddits to promote on
Try and only post links on relevant threads and find subreddits that are specifically designed for people to promote their music, or for people looking for new music in your genre.
r/WeAreTheMusicMakers is a great community on Reddit, with over 1.4m members. You can often find advice here about promoting on reddit, or just how to promote your music in general.
Some other useful blogs:
Do you have any good advice for musicians starting out on Reddit? Post your comments below…
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