I don't about you, but I've seen quite a few websites that promise to get traffic to your music website for a fee. Does anyone have experience with these kinds of companies? Are they a gimmick or do they actually work? I was just contacted by a website that claims they can give you 1000 views on Reverbnation for $20 (with a 50% off coupon). I've always been very apprehensive about these types of services, but I know record labels do similar things for their artists, so maybe it's not as crazy as it sounds....idk.

They definitely do work but it’s just fluff views, not people actually interested in checking out your music. It’s all optics- labels and businesses and whatnot will do this so that when a regular user goes to their profile they think ‘oh x thousand fans, these guys must be pretty popular’.

If you think that might be useful go for it, but as an emerging artist I don’t really see that is has that much benefit because it’s not directly getting people to hear your music.

I recently tried the Reverbnation's promote tool for Fb, I used the free 3 day trial. About it:

Impressions 31,274 (people who had the chance to see it, according to them)
Clicks 42
Fan Interactions 39*
Recommendations 4

About the interactions:

26 Plays
12 Likes
1 Email subscrption.

Since it was for free, I can't say anything bad about it, but I can't really believe that +30k people had it on their news feed and only 42 clicked it.

For what I've learned, there are different prices for major reach volumes.

Websites that offer likes/views/followers are gimmicks that use accounts created solely for this purpose - it doesn't connect you with any real people.

I'm not positive but I believe ReverbNation's promotional tools are basically suggesting your band as similar to others, popping it up in searches and recommendations. Probably not too efficient.

Yeah, what Zodi said. I was also talking about the 3rd party sites that boost numbers in my first post, which is mostly useless except for optics.

Using the internal promotion tools can be somewhat effective, but they also piss me off. For instance, FB has turned total assholes now. Once you have a certain number of fans, your posts generally only reach somewhere between 15-20% of your fans… unless you pay to promote your post.

We’ve experimented with this and I think paying 10 bucks our post when from the usual 200 or so (of our 700 fb fans) to reaching 12000. We got maybe another 10 or so likes that day, so it wasn’t totally useless but there’s no way we can afford to pay for all of our posts. Plus the prices go up as you get more fans.

Yea, I've also dabbled with the Facebook advertising and the ReverbNation promotion tools. FB seems to be the most effective for the money--and I'd rather spend it with them since they'll probably be around longer than Reverbnation. It is bullshit though how FB has started limiting page's visibility once they reach a certain point.

That's why I deleted my bands ReverbNation account. It got to my nerves with all the spamming about promotions and playing local gigs. In USA. We are from Stockholm....

Agree, I would like to delete mine too soon, my email is FULL with their scum about having a chance to play in rock festivals in US ....and other crappy stuff.

It is annoying sometimes, but you will get legitimate offers to play shows on there. I think I've had at least a couple good show offers on there..

Maybe if you live in the states. But it's pretty pointless for us who don't. Stockholm is crap nowadays, when it comes to metal shows.
We have one newly started club though, that brings in good bands.

I agree with all of you. I used the Reverbnation tool cause it was for free, but looks like promoting directly in Fb it's way better - although it's incredibly unfair to pay for get almost the same reach than before. That's why I'm using more the bandcamp page.