ToneDen Is Shutting Down: Do This Before December 1st

3:04free and it's essentially better than ToneDen in every single possible way. Uh you just go to submit.com, make a free account, go over to links, and then you can make links. But, they have this handy-dandy ToneDen import feature. They can actually import links from from all of these platforms, which is super handy. So, if I go back over here, um I scrolled all the way down cuz I was kind of curious what was the first link I ever made on ToneDen. Uh apparently it was this Fracture one, which um is a is a song I released under an alias, but it's basically an instrumental prog metal track that I did. Um my main instrument's guitar, if you don't know, but if you go look this up, you'll you'll find it. I've been actually thinking about re-releasing the song, fun fact. But, um this is what a smart link is, right? This is it's just a list of links where

3:49the platform goes. So, I can basically grab this link, and it's One thing I find kind of crazy is uh this banner is on the smart links, which means that every If you're you're using it, Um Anyone that you're showing your ads to is going to be seeing this banner about Tone Den, which is which is kind of crazy. I guess it just makes it more obvious, which is good, I guess. Um but I'm going to go to Tone Den here, click this, paste the link here, and save. Uh sorry, I couldn't find any data for that URL. Oh, okay, that's interesting. All right, what I just did is I grabbed another link that was a lot newer, and I'm going to see if this works. And it did. Okay, cool. So, I don't know why the first link didn't work. Um maybe because this one was made 5 years ago.

4:36Honestly, it might have actually been made before 5 years ago, but the the last edited was 5 years ago. Um the other link I chose was a lot newer. It was 3 years ago. And so, um this is is now working. So, essentially, it it imported the pixel, it imported the artwork, it imported the links that were on the page. I can I can um save this. And oh, the the the short link is taken, so I'm just going to add like a bunch of stuff at the end. Save it, and then now we can open this, and yeah, now I have this this link here is recreated on SubmitHub. So, if you're currently using Tone Den, um stop. But this is how you can very easily just

5:21migrate over. Now, making smart links from scratch is super easy anyways. You can just grab a Spotify link, or I think an ISRC code even, and just throw it on here, and it'll make the link for you. So, but if you have like a bunch, and you've been using Tone Den for a while, it might just be easier for you to do it this way. So, it's a handy-dandy way in SubmitHub links to to migrate, essentially. So, now that I've given you what I think is the most important information, like Tone Den shutting down, here's how you can migrate, here's a good platform to switch to, here's how to back up your data. Um I want to go over why did this happen? Uh Tone Den has been dying for years. It back in 2020, Tone Den was acquired by Eventbrite, which which is still a platform. Uh and Eventbrite is a is a place where people can go and sell tickets to shows. And when they got Toned In, uh Toned In had this really

6:07cool ad tech where you could make these automated campaigns in the back end that would go and run in meta and all that. And now Eventbrite has those features. So, if you're an artist who's looking to sell tickets to a show, Eventbrite's a cool platform where for no upfront money you can go and sell tickets. They take a commission off of that. And then you can make these automated ad campaigns to promote your event. Pretty cool and all great. The thing is, once Eventbrite acquired Toned In, Toned In didn't ever get updated ever again. They left it to rot entirely. And uh I found a funny example of this. So, what I did is I went to my YouTube channel and I searched for videos titled with Toned In. Uh and you see I have all these videos going back to May 2020. And and Toned In like um it was the one of the first like music

6:53industry companies to ever hit me up. Like now I talk to all these different landing page companies and a lot of I guess I feel super fortunate to be able to have connections with like so many people in the industry. It's it's very cool. But back then, that was not me. That was that would like Toned In was the first company in the space that ever hit me up. And they were like, "Hey, we'd love the videos you're doing. We'd love to give you some a free account to play around with with some of these features that we have." And I was like super thrilled and I made this video called easy ads. Um so, fun fact there. So, what I did is I I opened up this this video or a couple of these videos actually. This is that first one. They ignore the weird hair. Um but look at this, right? This is from

7:392020. This is 6 years ago. This is just their website here. And this is their website today. And I'm going to scroll to the top. Website today. Website 6 years ago. Website today. Website 6 years ago, right? It's the same thing. It has the same image. It's got the same graphic. It's got the same little cards. Um this is just proof of like how the platform just never changed. And if I go here, um like another funny image of me holding my dog who was a puppy at the time. Now now he's a middle-aged boy. Um and look at this interface here, right? Look at it. Memorize it. Internalize it. Now look at this, right? It's the same thing. Nothing has changed

8:27in 6 years. And that's really why ToneDen has been dying. They just left it to rot. And this was most exemplified. I I think it was a 2 years ago, maybe. I think it was 2024 when uh it used to be all your links on ToneDen were fanlink.to. Um this link here, fanlink.tv, used to be fanlink.to. And the platform was in such a state of just being neglected, such a state of neglect, that um the domain for the the like the fanlink.to domain they owned expired. They just forgot to renew it or something, and they never told anyone. So, they never emailed any of their customers to tell them, "Hey,

9:12all of your links are dead." And so, there were people who just had their campaigns that were running for like a long time. I know people who burned thousands of dollars driving people to a dead link on ToneDen because the the fanlink.to domain broke, which means anyone that was using that broke. I knew people who printed their ToneDen link on a QR code and had that put on merch or business cards and stuff like that. And all of that was dead, right? Because they used the actual ToneDen link in the QR codes. When you scan the QR code, it would take you to the fanlink.to link, and the link doesn't work anymore. There's no way to ever make it work again because the the whole domain was wasn't renewed. So, ToneDen didn't have access to it anymore. And they never even bothered to email their customers, and then for a lot of people that was the final straw

9:59with with ToneDen. And um this update here, I haven't gotten an email from ToneDen. Which is which is very unfortunate. And uh no shade to the people like anyone involved. Like one one thing I want to point out is the the guy who originally created ToneDen Alley um super cool dude, brilliant I think. I've talked to him a couple times over the years. Um he's still active. I saw that he has this new platform called Phantom. I don't I haven't talked to him at all recently. I just went to his LinkedIn and found this thing. He has this new thing called All the Radical and this new thing called Phantom for for promoters and people selling tickets. I don't know a damn thing about it, but he's still active. He's he's in my opinion at least couple times I talked to him seems like a brilliant guy. So no shade to him or any people involved in

10:46this, but well a little bit of shade to Eventbrite really because like they acquired it and then they basically didn't let anyone have any resources to keep it going and they haven't been a good maintainer of it. Like they should have either supported it or just killed it off at the beginning um or at least like this weird middle ground is just left it in this limbo state of decay which has caused us a lot of problems. So now for the rest of this video I kind of just want to like rejoice in nostalgia for for ToneDen here. So like if that doesn't interest you check this video here whatever. I'm going to link you to a ad tutorial on how you can run ads to promote your music from scratch using any smart link platform that you want to use. So check this video here if that's interesting you and you don't want to go through this nostalgia train with me here. But one thing that ToneDen

11:32used to do is giveaways. So you could make a giveaway link which you can now do in Feature.fm. And this is a fun thing I found. My first kind of like entry into online digital marketing was me making sample packs and contact libraries. Like a lot of the music gear I have in this room. Um what I did back in the day is I had a hard time justifying spending too much money buying music gear. So I would buy it and then I would make products with with it. So like I would buy um like one of these modular or semi-modular synths and then I would sample it turn into a contact instrument make more money than I spent on it and then go buy more synthesizers. And then this Juno-106 I made some sample samples and loops and stuff, but I also made like a free contact library. Made a YouTube video about it. So, I'll buy

12:17stuff and then like use it to make stuff. Um and this is how I kind of got into online marketing. Um I didn't go to school for it, that's for sure. But, this was an old giveaway that I ran that ended 8 years ago. Which is just wild to see. We're sorry, this contest ended 8 years ago. And this is my old website, not even on the Shopify store, but on sells with a Z. Um and I was doing these contact libraries, which which I you you can still get on generousstudios.com, fun fact. Um I haven't updated them forever. Um but they I believe they still work fine. Um you need the full version of contact if you want to get them. But, anyways, I have all these contact libraries and sample packs and stuff that I I have made. And it's just kind of fun to me to see that I did this

13:03giveaway 8 years ago. So, that was 2018, I guess, uh depending on what time of year, but yeah. And then going back uh to regular ToneDen. Other things you could do on ToneDen were these social unlocks, which was kind of the equivalent of a hyped it download gate. Apparently, the first one I did on here was last updated 6 years ago. I for for my YouTube journey, I used to do like metal vocal tutorials. That was my first several thousand subscribers. Um maybe like 5,000 subscribers was me doing screaming tutorials, fun fact. And then uh I kind of went off and on for a few years while I was in college, and then I got into music production, like electronic music production. And that's when I was making videos on like Ableton and and other electronic music production things and synthesizers. And

13:48so, I did this social unlock as a marketing thing for my YouTube channel, where basically in the video I was playing around um with Ableton operator. Um so, this download includes the Ableton live set I used in the video for a song I made entirely using operator. So, I made a whole song using just operator. Um if I can find that video, I'll link it here. Oh, actually, it's right here. Here's the Here's the video. Um >> Hey, I'm Xander and this is >> Oh my god, look at the hair. Look at the background. Yeah. Um I didn't always know what I was doing. I don't know if I know what I'm doing now, but I certainly didn't know what I was doing back then in terms of in terms of YouTube stuff. But anyways, social unlocks, aka download gates. And this was a huge way that people used ToneDen back in the day. DJs would would

14:35have music downloads, labels would offer music downloads and early access to music. And then what you could do is you could gate these downloads. So, if I go into edit campaign, um get people to unlock a downloadable file, unlock coupon code, get people to unlock a secret link. Um you could set up the unlock and you could make them do stuff, right? Save unreleased track on Spotify, subscribe on YouTube, custom URL visit. Um they had all these cool features and you could even stack multiple of them together and make them do all of them. And a lot of people hated ToneDen because of this. Because you would you know you you'd be engaged with like a an artist or something. And then they'd be like, "Yeah, go to my ToneDen." Like you could go there and and you click like download and you'd have to like do all these things. Be like, "Follow these 15 people. Follow this record label. Subscribe on

15:20YouTube." And then you you it would take you like several minutes to go through it because they were just kind of milking it. Um and people have done that at Hype That Too, but Hype That kind of tries to not get you to do that. But it was it was very annoying back in the day. So, when I posted about ToneDen dying on I think Threads, some people were like, "Good riddance. I'm sick of all the the the social unlocks." But um back in the day a lot of playlists used this as a way to like if you want to submit to my our label's playlist, you have to go through this gate and follow all of our playlists. So, a lot of labels did it as a strategy to grow their playlist following uh dramatically. So, I clicked the view and ads manager button and it actually took me to this old ad account. This is This is an ad account that I have that's disabled.

16:08Um and this was the first time I ever had an ad account restricted on Meta as well. It was terrifying. But [laughter] um so I haven't used this ad of in years, but uh it's business apparently what it actually was. So, I'm wondering if I can open it. And again, this is all just for fun and nostalgia. There's, you know, I don't know if there's any information that's going to matter that's valuable. It's just I feel inclined to document this before it's gone forever. Um they for some reason targeted Gardens and Villa. I don't know what that is. Odesza, which is apparently still targetable. Pretty Lights, Skrillex, Slow Magic, The Glitch Mob. Interesting.

16:55This campaign was run as a traffic campaign. They did a look-alike of data, but they mostly seem to rely on this retargeting, or sorry, this this detailed targeting campaign. They did 16 to 34. So, back in the day, you could target people under 18 and still do interest targeting. You can't do that anymore. They've severely restricted that. Uh and it was USA only, which is also interesting. Come down here, uh it was just Instagram feed, Facebook feed, and then Instagram stories. Instagram Reels didn't exist. So, this was quite a while ago. Click on the ad level. It shows the Facebook page and the Instagram account, but over the years, I have changed my Facebook and Instagram account situation, so that's why it doesn't exist because like my Instagram

17:41that I use for my marketing used to be the one I used for my music, which I now unlinked from everything, so that I would have separate music and whatever. It was complicated, but that's why it's it's broken here. Um this ad is definitely not a good ad. Here's a teaser for my new single, Save Me, coming out everywhere on February 19th. Click the button to pre-save it on Spotify. Wow. And then learn more here. Two shares, three likes. And if I click this, it's a DistroKid HyperFollow link. See if this is still up. It is. Cool. Wow, it's got all the buttons. Usually, it doesn't have all the buttons. So, so this was a a song that I did years ago, obviously, right? Um and this song was um one of my first times getting full

18:27like vocal stems. Um basically on on Splice, I think it was, or maybe it was another site. You could you could download like full like verse and chorus vocal stems. And then I I did the whole instrumental uh from scratch, but then I produced the vocals and edited them and stuff to fit the song. And I remember years later I found a different song using the same chorus because it anyone could use it, right? And that kind of bummed me out. But this was back when I was like very much playing around with doing like EDM and stuff like that. But fun song. Not not not like super proud of it or anything, but uh fun track going through the nostalgia journey. Now, it was really cool seeing that. So, I'm actually going to open this up and show you their Spotify growth campaign. So, this was a different campaign they offered where they were actually trying to optimize for getting you followers. So, what it did is it would track how

19:14many Spotify followers you had before and then try to guesstimate how many followers it was gaining. It wasn't actually forcing people to follow. It would just be like, well, you started with this many followers. You spent this much. Therefore, we got you this cost per follower. It It wouldn't count account for if you were running like multiple campaigns, for example. So, it was a very crude method of tracking follower growth. Um but in this case it was actually like accurate cuz I don't think I was promoting at the time. So, we were getting 12 cents per follower, which was crazy, right? Keep in mind this is in 2020 um where, you know, overall like ads kind of get more expensive over time, but also you have way more competition and like Spotify changes things and like followers used to be much more impactful down there. So, there's a lot of factors here.

20:00Um I don't think you'd ever get 12 cents per follower now. But also you you wouldn't optimize for getting followers now because followers are kind of meaningless now. I don't want to say they're meaningless, but they're the saves are way more important now than followers. Um and also keep in mind this this was a very crude method of getting accounting for followers. But what it did here, um if I recall, I'm kind of going off memory here, is it used this like automatic redirect link. And so if I go into I was going to try to go into the campaign, but there actually isn't a go into the campaign button like there was before, which is interesting. But um the target URL is the Spotify artist profile link, but it did this like redirect thing where it would like track a conversion and then redirect, at

20:46least from memory that's what it did. Um but it would split your targeting into three tiers and it would also show you all these optimization steps. So it would look at your cost per per I think click in all these markets and then it would it would go in and automatically change your budgets for you in each ad set, which was cool for a while, but then eventually Meta came out with campaign budget optimization, which meant that Meta would just do that for you much better. So that kind of stopped being as much of a value add, but back in the day you had to manually say like I want this ad set to have this much money, this ad set to have this much money and they could just do it all for you. So it was actually like super clutch. Um and they had a nice system for showing you all the changes that they would make in your ad account, just listing out all of it.

21:31So I think I actually found the campaign. There's this Toned In campaign uh 179221, which I bet I could just type in Toned In up here and this is going to show me all the yeah, all the different Toned In campaigns that I've ever run in this ad account. Um but there's this socialize small test. If I go in here um you have your tier one, tier two, tier three markets. I think this is where I actually originally even learned about the concept of splitting up country tiers was from from Toned In. Um I might be wrong, but I I think that that might be where I heard it. You got your ad set budgets. Um if we go into tier one for example, we can see what it's all about. And

22:16this was their tier one list. Very different from mine. Um for example, for Brazil and Mexico I generally have in tier two. Um and I'm not going to go through all of them now, but yeah. Now, they had two ads here. So, let's see what these were. Oh, yeah. So, here website URL is this fanlink.to. Now, this link's not going to work because they didn't renew fanlink.to. It took us to a generic like I don't even know what this is. Uh but it's it's some I thought it was a domain purchase site, like they're selling the domain, but it's competition barbell set. Crazy. Um someone else must have bought this and

23:02is using it for some crazy nefarious reason. I don't know. I don't speak Thai. Uh or whatever whatever language it is. Um but essentially this would redirect to the Spotify artist page and it would track with a pixel. And um yeah. So, people would see this ad, listen now, and it would jump them over there. So, this is a video of me back in 2020 performing this song. And then this other ad I'm guessing is probably just a different part of the song. So, if we go over to playbooks, I can do explore playbooks. And you can see all the different things they had. You can create an ad campaign optimized to grow your presence on Instagram, sell more tickets for an event on sale with an Instagram story, promote a contest with an ad campaign, set up a Facebook event,

23:48monitor to launch templated ad campaigns with one click. Very specific. Promote all upcoming events to the people that have visited your event pages. That's it. Get very specific, right? GoFundMe fundraiser growth. Create an ad campaign optimized to find more donors to your GoFundMe. And promote all upcoming events to the potential attendees for each event's markets. That's just the events stuff. If I go to music, there's Spotify, Instagram, Spotify contest, social unlock, SoundCloud, free download SoundCloud. And I'm sure growth has some overlap with the other ones. But it's pretty powerful and and for the most part these these things exist other places now, right? All the streaming stuff. Um you can do it in multiple platforms. For example,

24:34Hypeddit has these automated ads um for for a Spotify. I don't think anyone has SoundCloud now because SoundCloud's kind of dead um for most genres at least. Um and then social unlocks also you can use do on Hypeddit. Um and Smartlink as well can do um Spotify stuff, too. And I'm pretty sure all of the event stuff you can do over at Eventbrite. And I just jumped over and I went to Eventbrite and you can run Facebook and Instagram or or meta ads to do a whole bunch of stuff, drive conversions, sell tickets to shows. There's some details here of like fans of Drake and followers on Facebook and um yeah. So I didn't go through every single one of these, but they they show that you can do things like Instagram growth and promotions, social media, email campaigns, etc. So I know Eventbrite used to have this stuff and I I can't imagine that they would

25:20have stopped, honestly. It seems like it's probably pretty important part of their platform. So anyways, thanks so much for going down this walk down memory lane with me. If you want to see that video that I mentioned earlier on how to run ad campaigns to market your music, then check out this video right here. And make sure you subscribe so you don't miss my next video. Anyways, thanks for watching and I'll see you next one. Bye.