With festival season just around the corner, whether you’re a label who wants to spotlight your artists, a band wanting to send out a few of your best tracks or a promoter that wants to showcase the acts playing – SoundCloud can help. Here’s three things you should think about doing.

This is a great idea for promoters and labels. If you’re putting on a showcase for a bunch of different artists then why not setup a group on SoundCloud and invite artists to submit a track. You can then easily create an embeddable set of all the tracks which you can put on your website, full of songs that are easily streamed on your own site, Facebook page or other music blogs.

Similar to how you would use SoundCloud for Contests, you first need to create a new group for your event and make sure all the information is included in the group description! The next step is to direct bands and artists to submit tracks to your event via the group DropBox. If you’re planning to restrict your group to select artists, you will need to moderate the group. Make sure to uncheck this box:

Once you have a bunch of tracks submitted and have approved the tracks, click ‘share’ and you can create a widget of the group to embed. As the group has tracks from the artists’ own SoundCloud profiles the artists have the choices to include download or buy links. The tracks in the player will look something like this:

2. Create a Promo Sampler
Using the ‘sets’ feature on SoundCloud is a perfect way for artists and labels to create a SXSW promo sampler. You can add as many tracks to a set as you like, either ones that are already in your account or ones you’re about to upload. Make sure to add some nice artwork, and information about your band in the description. Then you have a nice sampler that you can add your Facebook, give out to bloggers or send people you meet a private link to.

Just click ‘share’ on your set and you can being to share this content across the web. If your are privately sharing your set you can use the secret link and widget to reach your specific contacts. Take a look at Nettwerk’s set for SXSW:

• Sharing the group showcase or set on to your artists or label’s facebook news feed or website for fans to check out
• Link to the sampler on flyers to spread the word of your event or artists playing (You can even do what Subdrive did last year, and use QR codes on flyers to link people to the sampler!).
• With all the networking you’ll be doing, it’s easy to instantly share tracks from our iPhone app. (For you Android users out there, don’t fear, we have an Android app as well!)
• Include the link to your public or private sampler on your business cards for any potential new business opportunities
• Embed the widget as part of a promo page so they can find out further information and assets on your act from one place
• Clearly label sets and groups for an event, or include #hashtags if you are sharing on twitter,  to make it easier for users to search for content around the event or festival and find what you are showcasing

Any further questions or ideas on how you can help share and showcase your artists for an event using SoundCloud please feel free to leave your comments below. If you want to learn more about how you can use SoundCloud with Events check out our Events 101 post.