How to Set Up a MusoSoup Campaign: Checklist | TAP

Three thousand pixels square is the working minimum. Look at it small, which is how a curator sees it, and ask whether the genre and mood read at that size. Cluttered or blurry artwork reads as an unfinished release whatever the music is doing.

The platform offers different levels of visibility. Higher is not automatically better: in a narrow genre, careful tagging at the standard level often beats paying for reach into a curator pool that does not cover your music. Try one level per campaign so you learn something from it.

If you have run one before, note which genre and mood tags actually drew curators and which drew nothing. Two campaigns in, that record is worth more than any general advice about the platform.

Cinematic, energetic, melancholic and the rest are how curators filter for a playlist that has to hold together. Three to five moods that actually apply will do more for you than a wider genre net.

Viral, underground and fresh tell a curator nothing and suggest you have not decided what the record is. Concrete words work: synth-driven, upbeat, sparse, live-tracked.

The genre your distributor sent to the streaming services should not contradict what you have tagged here. A curator who clicks through to something that sounds like a different record loses confidence in the whole campaign.

Running several at once is a chance to learn. Change one thing between them, usually the secondary genre or one mood, and note which pool responds. Changing everything at once tells you nothing.

Previous coverage, a notable collaborator or a support slot is worth a sentence when it is checkable. A biography is not. Every line a curator reads before pressing play is a line that has to earn its place.

Grime with live strings, a folk song recorded in one take, a producer people know: put that in the first two lines. Curators are scanning for something that gives a playlist a moment, and that is the sentence they are looking for.

Curators read dozens of these a day and skim anything longer. Short paragraphs and line breaks beat one dense block, and the first sentence does most of the work.

The best track you have heard, a guaranteed hit, the next big thing: all of it reads as inexperience. Curators judge the music themselves and resent being told what to think about it.

Typos and clumsy sentences cost you more here than anywhere, because the description is the only writing a curator sees. Reading it out loud catches both faster than reading it on screen.

A line like 'sits well in late-night and introspective lists, the vocal hook lands at 2:15' does a curator's work for them. It is the most useful sentence in most campaigns and almost nobody includes it.

Add tracking parameters to the streaming link you post here so the plays and saves that follow are identifiable in your artist dashboard. Without it you are guessing about which channel actually worked.

Some curators use an artist image in playlist artwork or when they share a post. A square image at two thousand pixels, and a version that works on a dark background, covers most of what gets asked for.

Featured vocalists, the producer, the engineer if the name means something in your genre. It gives a curator something to write in a caption and it is the detail bloggers most often ask for afterwards.

A single page holding the biography, the images, the credits and any behind-the-scenes material means you can answer a request in one line. Keep the files small and the link permanent.

The standard level is the right place to test whether your positioning works. Move up once you know which curators respond to your music, rather than paying for reach into a pool you have not identified yet.

Five campaigns launched on the same day compete with each other for the same curators' attention. One or two weeks apart gives each one its own run.

Two or three looks a week for the first fortnight is enough. Early interest tells you the tagging is working; silence in the first ten days usually means it is not, and that is worth knowing while you can still start again.

Save the genre, moods, description and level somewhere you will find them next time. After three campaigns the pattern in what draws curators to your music is visible, and it is specific to you.

An instrumental, a shorter edit, a different photograph, a line about the lyrics. Turning a request round inside two days is the single behaviour that makes a curator come back for the next release.

Curator name, playlist or publication, date and link. The people who champion your sound once are the first names on your list next time, and nobody remembers them six months later without a record.

Your artist dashboard shows which playlists produce plays, saves and listeners who come back. A placement with a large follower count and no saves behind it is worth less than a small list whose listeners stay.

A post naming the curator and the playlist costs nothing and is remembered. These are people running lists for love as much as money, and being noticed matters to them.

Every placement is a credential you can point at in the next pitch, to a station, a blog or a promoter. Build the list as you go rather than trying to reconstruct it later.

Two weeks with almost nothing means the tagging or the positioning has missed. Start a fresh campaign with the change made rather than waiting out the timer on one that curators have already scrolled past.