SoundCloud and Audio (for artists)

Artists with either a free or premium account can integrate Audio into their Profile and Dispatches. This allows you to fully leverage the discovery and filtering tools we built to help journalists find music they want to cover. Once you have integrated Audio into your StoryAmp account, journalists will be able to access one-click audio throughout the StoryAmp website, in our journalist-only radio player, and in any emails they receive (if you choose to Distribute Dispatches to them). If you haven't used StoryAmp with Audio, you haven't leveraged the power of our platform.

StoryAmp's audio is powered by what we think is the best provider of audio hosting: SoundCloud. More and more musicians are using SoundCloud and more and more smart phone and web applications are being built to integrate with SoundCloud. We've heard SoundCloud referred to as "the YouTube of audio."

To get started with integrating Audio into StoryAmp, here are the steps:

1. Go to SoundCloud and Sign Up for an account (the basic account there is free).

2. Upload your current recording to your SoundCloud account here. If you are having trouble, use this SoundCloud help article

3. We recommend that you change your SoundCloud setting to allow for downloads (journalists like that). If you don't want the rest of the world downloading your tracks for free, then set the account to private. Even though it is private, you will be giving StoryAmp permission to access the tracks and serve the downloads to journalists in the steps below. If you don't even want journalists to download the tracks, you can disallow that in your SoundCloud account.

4. We recommend that you organize your tracks into sets in your SoundCloud account. If you are pushing a new full album, make that album into a set and name the set the same as the album name. You can upload multiple albums in this way. If you are doing a tour, you can make a set that reflect the repertoire on the tour, like a SoundCloud compilation of your performance set list.

5. Go to your StoryAmp Profile and scroll down to the music section and click "Connect with SoundCloud" and enter your SoundCloud credentials.

6. You will see your SoundCloud Set Lists appear in your StoryAmp Profile. Select one Set List as Your Default Set List. And select one track from the Default Set List as the Default Track. The Default Track should either be your most accessible track or most compelling track depending on what type of journalists you are hoping to target. Journalists will be able to stream all tracks from your Full Dispatch, but they will only see the Default Track in your shorter Dispatch Listing and from the Journalist Radio Player. Make sure to hit Save Profile at the bottom of the page once you have selected a Default Track.

7. Adding audio should make your Dispatches more "sticky" to journalists. We'd love your feedback on SoundCloud, including what your other favorite SoundCloud uses/applications are.