Which music marketing smart link service should you use?
ToneDen’s smart link service has suffered from unresolved bugs and broken links, risking wasted ad spend. Explore reliable free and paid alternatives that offer better support, faster loading, and improved analytics for your music marketing campaigns.
By Andrew Southworth
Hey friends!
Today we’re going to talk about which music marketing smart link service is best for you.
A few days ago you likely received an email from me talking about ToneDen. I sent that email in a bit of a rush to make sure I got it out ASAP, but we’re going to start today’s newsletter by diving into that a bit more deeply.
What happened to ToneDen?
I’ve been recommending ToneDen to artists for a few years now because it was easy to set up and was 100% free to make links you could use in ads.
However they’ve been frozen in time since 2020 when they were acquired by Eventbrite. The site hasn’t been updated since then and bugs can sometimes go months without resolutions (sorry ToneDen team, if you’re reading this).
A few weeks ago they added a banner to the backend stating that ‘BigLinks’ and a few other types of links were having issues. These links were kind of niche so less of a big deal.
However a couple days ago I was on a call with a client and we noticed none of his links were working. When I read that banner I noticed they had added ‘Fan Links’ and custom domains to that list of domains that were not working.
This means that if your URL used fanlink, or if you used a custom domain, all of your links were broken. This also means any ad campaigns you had running were sending traffic to dead pages that didn’t load at all. Meaning you are effectively just burning cash for no good reason.
I understand and expect technical issues to happen. However I expect a marketing platform to inform their users when this happens via email and provide a timely solution. If I didn’t notice this hundreds of you reading this could have wasted thousands of dollars collectively.
It’s worth noting you can go into ToneDen and change your domains to get things working again. However I would recommend just switching to another platform at this point as soon as you can.
Let’s get into some alternatives after a message from today’s sponsor…
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Alternatives to ToneDen
Fortunately there are a TON of platforms that offer smart link landing pages. There are other free options, cheap options and fancy options.
Free Options
There are two main free smart link solutions I know of that provide Facebook pixel support, SubmitHub Links and Hyperfollow. In my opinion SubmitHub Links is the best between those two.
SubmitHub Links by default will fire events in the exact same way as ToneDen using Page View and View Content for landing page views and conversions. Additionally it loads super fast, gives daily analytics graphs and supports conversion API.
Jason over at SubmitHub has done an amazing job building up SubmitHub Links and it’s amazing that its completely free.
Hyperfollow does get the job done but i’m not a fan of the layout for their links and while the pixel tracking is more sophisticated, it’s unnecessary and harder to setup. It also doesn’t load as fast as SubmitHub links.
Paid Options
In terms of paid options I have 3 main platforms to recommend:
Hypeddit is the most affordable of the bunch and is still a massive improvement over ToneDen. It offers better analytics, conversion API tracking, custom domain support, download gates and more compared to ToneDen. It does a great job at competing with FeatureFm and Smart Noise at a lower price point.
FeatureFM is what we use at Forbid Media because of their amazing teams feature, analytics link sharing (Hypeddit has this now too), easy channel sharing and super fast loading speeds. We use their Pro Marketer account but I still think the artist tiers are awesome, just at a higher price point than Hypeddit.
Smart Noise is a newer player however they’ve also had the most rapid increase in features over the past year. They have a lifetime pre-save feature that few other services have, the ability to run a variety of campaigns directly through Smart Noise (Hypeddit has this too), an innovative feature called discovery funnels and more.
All 3 of these options are great. In my opinion it comes down to your budget and which features are the most useful to you. I recommend taking advantage of free trials to take them for a spin and compare.
Other Options
I’ve played with LinkFire lately and while it’s great, you don’t get Pixel support until you hit their $49/mo tier which I think is crazy.
I’ve met people who use Foundee and while the setup is odd, it does work fine.
ArtistHub has some nice features but be careful to not use their deeplink feature in ads because i’ve seen many people waste money.
While you can build landing pages on your own website make sure you know what you’re doing. Most of the artists I see trying to use their website end up doing something wrong. Either messing up the custom conversion event, the layout of the page, the speed of the page etc.
Conclusion
If you’re currently using ToneDen, either jump ship to another platform or fix your links.
It’s possible they might fix this problem faster than i’m expecting (I hope they do) and my confidence in them will go back up. However at the moment I don’t trust the platform. Will this happen again? How long will links be down?
The consequences of broken links is too great when you’re running ads and I expect to be emailed as soon as possible so I can avoid wasting money. I don’t get the vibe that they care about the platform or its users anymore.
New Content
When you're running ads to promote your music on Spotify, you have 3 main options: sending them to the track, your profile or a playlist. Each have their own pro's and con's, but one of them works best for triggering the Spotify algorithm.
Here are the top 5 mistakes music artists make with their ad campaigns.
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My ad agency. Forbid Media specializes in running Facebook conversion ads to promote your music on Spotify.
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I hope you enjoyed this edition of Music Marketing Monday! Please give your feedback using the poll below.
In case you’re curious what platform i’m using to run this newsletter, it’s called beehiiv.
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