Community Building: Tips for Attracting Collaborators on Kompoz
So you’ve started getting involved on Kompoz, but you’re not getting the traction you were hoping for? If you’re uploading your own idea tracks and waiting for the fish to bite, here are some tips for making your projects more appealing to potential collaborators. The bottom line is that Kompoz is like a community, so you have to build your reputation.
Get involved in the community.
Support your fellow artists and their songs, leave positive and helpful comments on other people’s collaborations, engage on the Community Page, and make sure you have a complete and well-written profile. Kompoz also has a feature that allows you to endorse artists that you’ve worked with or whose work you like. You endorse an artist, easily, by going to their page and clicking the button to endorse. You can use this feature to get more involved and be more supportive to your peers, which often gets paid back in social karma.
Contribute to others’ collaborations.
The best way to get yourself and your work noticed is to do work for other people's projects. It’s a great idea to contribute to the work of a paying member so that you gain access to their networks. You can also learn about how they manage their projects and gain insight from working with more experienced members. It’s also a simple fact that people will be more open to contributing to your projects if you’ve contributed to theirs. If you look at the profiles of members who have completed tracks, most of them participate a lot on other people’s projects. You can start by emulating them.
Make sure your idea has everything it needs.
Make sure that you create album art for your idea so that it catches the visual attention of potential collaborators. Fill out the Creative Brief, and include a mix track. A mix track can be as simple as a simple idea sketch of where you want to go with the track, that you can create on your DAW. Also include lyrics if you’re uploading vocals or you have lyrics you want a vocalist to set. Make sure you also include sync tones, which makes it much easier for other people to contribute to your track. A sync tone is an audio clip that you add to the beginning of your track and which collaborators also use in their tracks in order to help sync the tracks in your DAW. Something short, sharp, and repetitive, like three high-hat hits, is best. Others are more likely to participate in your work if you make it as easy as possible for them.
Make friends.
When you find other artists whose work you admire, contact them in a private messages and start cultivating relationships. Be friendly and not pushy. New people are joining all the time, so look through the list of new artists in the activity stream, as well, and start reaching out.
Promote.
Make sure you post your track on the Community Page so that more people see it! Don’t spam, but re-post whenever you’ve updated your track with something new.
Never forget that the other musicians on Kompoz want to collaborate, so don’t be shy. Everyone starts somewhere and the more you create and collaborate, the more you learn. If you’re seasoned, be magnanimous and open minded, you never know where the magic will come from. Happy collaborating!
Guest Post by Allie Mazon