The best ToneDen alternatives are Hypeddit, Smart Noise, FeatureFM and SubmitHub Links. Bam, no clickbait here.
If you’ve been marketing your music for a while now, you may be familiar with ToneDen. ToneDen is a music marketing software where you can create smart links, pre-save links etc. and run automated Facebook ad campaigns on them. There were one of, if not, the first to have the automated Facebook ad campaign feature.
In 2020 they were acquired by Eventbrite, and it seems like the site has been frozen in time ever since. Catastrophe hit in early 2024 when ToneDen’s main smart link domain seemingly expired, and everyone using the fanlink.to domain for the URLs they created lost their links. This means any links ever created with that domain were broken. From what i’ve seen ToneDen never reached out to their users to inform them of the issue, and many people wasted hundreds or thousands of dollars running ads to broken ToneDen links.
Ever since then, I don’t trust using their platform anymore. Hopefully they can fix this, but in the meantime let’s talk about some ToneDen alternatives that I do trust using.
Table Of Contents
Hypeddit vs ToneDen
Hypeddit is a smart link and automated music ad platform with a ton of great features.
- Unlimited smart links and pre-save links, with custom domain support and tracking pixels.
- Download gates and link gates to collect email addresses and/or followers on platforms.
- AI-Powered music ads with automated campaigns for Meta ads, YouTube ads and TikTok ads.
For years Hypeddit has been $10/mo, but recently they split their paid tier into a $10/mo Basic option and a $20/mo Pro option. If you just need Hypeddit for the smart links and you’re running your own ads you can stick with the $10/mo plan – which I think is totally fair.
Hypeddit has been quite good to the artist community for a long time. John Gold has released a lot of free or cheap music marketing education content. They added custom domains, conversion API support and TikTok pixel support quite early compared to most other platforms. In addition to Meta ads you can also run YouTube ads through their platform
Smart Noise vs ToneDen
Smart Noise is a newer company in this space, but they’ve been quick to release innovative features that are great for music marketers.
- Unlimited smart links and pre-save links, with custom domain support and tracking pixels.
- Early to implement lifetime presaves
- Created Discovery Funnels
Smart Noise is an excellent platform with lifetime presaves, CAPI support and a full blown fan CRM. They also have a lot of cool upcoming features i’ve heard about, but can’t talk about.
FeatureFM vs ToneDen
FeatureFM is the priciest on this page, but it’s the one I use for my ad agencies and for myself personally. They also make links for music distributors. The Orchard for example uses FeatureFM to generate pre-save links for all the songs they distribute.
- Unlimited smart links and pre-save links, with custom domain support and tracking pixels.
- Very fast loading speed, with great ‘channels’ feature.
- The platform can scale from a single artist to record labels and music distributors.
- FeatureFM just feels great to use.
SubmitHub Links vs ToneDen
SubmitHub Links is the only free platform on this page. You might be familiar with SubmitHub, they’re the company that lets you find curators and pitch music to them. They came out with their Links feature as a way to help their curators run ads, but then opened it up for anyone to use for free.
- Unlimited smart links, with custom domain support and tracking pixels.
- Very fast loading speed.
- They have an automated ads feature coming soon.
SubmitHub Links is the most customizable option in many ways. They support the pixel and CAPI, they allow you to change the conversion event that fires on the page, they let you customize the button text.
My Recommendation For ToneDen Alternatives
I often start new advertisers off with SubmitHub Links, because it’s free and easy. From there if you decide the quality of life features the paid platforms add is worth it, then do a free trial of each and see which one is best for you. Each platform has it’s own niche and would work best for different types of artists or businesses.
If you’re a record label, manager, marketing company etc. and can just the expense, FeatureFM’s business plans are fantastic. You can have separate folders for artists, and each artist folder can have it’s own team of people. As someone who runs labels and ad agencies this is awesome.
For my ad agency we use Feature FM, and it enables us to give the artist a real time dashboard of the smart link for their song. So they can see the see the DSP breakdown, the page views and clickthroughs over time, country breakdowns etc.
If you need team features, but maybe not ones so intense as FeatureFM’s, Smart Noise has it too. Both have lifetime presaves as well, both have tour links and both handle doing email reminders for presaves. Smart Noise adds automated ads and has a similar amount of campaign types to Hypeddit. Although Smart Noise only does Meta ad campaigns, not YouTube and TikTok like Hypeddit.
Hypeddit doesn’t have a teams / user / folder feature. So it can be kind of hard to keep things straight if you work on multiple music projects or have a big team. But if you’re a solo artist it’s the cheapest smart link platform that’s this feature rich out there.
