Indie Artists' Top Tools

Peace. What's happening, good people? This GIF here, for Pay Us No Mind. And let's talk about the top tools of 2025 heading into 2026.

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Number one on the list...

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SoundCloud

SoundCloud is here because it is addressing some really crucial pain points that artists have. One of those pain points is Discovery. Getting people to check out your music where you could earn fans, grow a fan base, and establish yourself within the music space. Right now, artists are being cultivated to use social media for that. Consistently post, find a content strategy… But social media does not guarantee you visibility, nor does it guarantee that anybody is going to listen to your music.

Even spending money on advertising doesn't guarantee that anybody's going to listen to your music.

SoundCloud Pro solves the Discovery problem through Amplify. You upload your music, you check a box on the upload, and SoundCloud blasts your song out to 100 listeners. If those 100 listeners respond to the song positively, then it will blast the song out to up to 1000 listeners. That is a springboard. That is a launchpad that gets you the crucial exposure that you need. If you have a song people love, from there, who knows where it can go. Because people playlist it, it gets into the algorithm, and can explode from there.

SoundCloud is a platform that caters to tastemakers. People who become fans before everybody else. People who enjoy discovering music before everybody else. Whereas a lot of the other platforms cater to passive listeners. People who take whatever gets delivered to them by the algorithm, and if you don't infiltrate the algorithm, then it's death. That is not the type of listener that engages on SoundCloud. So, SoundCloud exposing your music to 100 or 1,000 listeners can be very combustible.

SoundCloud Monetization

Monetization on SoundCloud is all about Fan-powered royalties.

Fan-powered royalties pay differently than Spotify and other streaming platforms. They pay based on the consumption of an individual listener. If I’m paying SoundCloud $10 a month and I stream your music 90% of the time, you get $9. Compare that to Spotify, where I can stream your music 100% of the time, but if somebody else generates a million streams, my $10 goes to them, and you see $0.

Now, I did a test where I uploaded a release to SoundCloud, turned on monetization, waited for a few royalty reports and check this out:

In October of 2025, I got 246 plays.

246 plays paid me $4.86.

On Spotify, that would have been less than $1.

When I dissect the Fan-powered royalties model, I see the impact of being valued by a single listener.  One stream from a single paying subscriber earned me 27 cents. On Spotify, due to its monetization threshold, I would have earned nothing from that stream.

SoundCloud and Access

SoundCloud provides access in a multitude of ways.

One is through the comment section. SoundCloud has timed comments, and you can have full-blown conversations with people about the music within these timed comments. Do things like ask for feedback on certain parts of a song. Highlight parts of a music video that connect to a certain part of the song to drive traffic to it. On top of that, you have a messaging feature.

The messaging feature is something that ties back to another feature called Fans, in your SoundCloud dashboard, that allows you to identify who your top fans are. Not just that you have top fans, but who they are, and granting you access to those top fans. You could send them a message and say

“Hey, top fan, thanks for being my top fan. Here's a free t-shirt.” Those are things that you could do on SoundCloud because you know who your fans are.

SoundCloud Tools

SoundCloud provides you with a free Basic feature.fm account. It also offers on-demand vinyl through a partnership with Elastic Stage. This is on-demand, meaning somebody orders a single vinyl record, SoundCloud will press up that single vinyl record and ship it to that fan.

SoundCloud Insights.

Insights are metrics that inform you of your song's performance and where SoundCloud's metrics differ from what you find everywhere else

Is that SoundCloud tells you who.

• You can see who likes
• Who streams
• Who comments
• Who playlists

Get 1 Month Free of SoundCloud Pro

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Feature.FM

Feature.fm gives you advanced release links. If you want to run serious campaigns — Facebook ads, TikTok ads, conversion tracking — you need links that register actions as events. Most smart links can’t do that. Feature.fm can. Connect Facebook pixels, TikTok pixels, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, whatever it is you need. 

Then you have Bio links that they provide as well. Unlike Linktree, which limits you to a single bio link where you have to stuff everything into that one link, you can have multiple Bio links. You could have Bio links for every artist on your label or management roster.

Additionally, your package includes a URL Shortener. This is great for tracking your ability to move traffic around the web, as well as the value of certain properties.

Feature.fm integrates with email platforms like MailChimp, which supports instant follow-ups.

Feature.fm Contest Pages

With Contest pages, you can have fans enter using their email and award points for actions like:

• Subscribe to YouTube
• Save & Follow on Spotify
• Share with friends

Where every act increases their chances of winning.

Get 30% Off Feature.FM's Annual Plan | Read the Full Feature.FM Review

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Music distribution & Venice Music

The top music distribution platform right now is Venice Music. And this is because digital distribution is in a different space heading into 2026. It is a commoditized business where they all basically offer the same service. You're not really getting anything different from using one distributor over another.  A lot of the other features that typical digital distribution companies provide are borderline worthless. They don't help get you exposure. They don't help increase your revenue. They don't do anything.

With Venice, you have community. Venice fosters community through live chat rooms, a community newsfeed where artists can post and engage with each other and their support staff, and Live events. Their community is key because what the community breeds is transparency. You have all of these different distributors that will try to promote themselves as premium distributors with all of this stuff that they say they do that they don't. There's no way for you to verify that they actually do what they say they do because there is no community. You get checkered takes, but no consensus, and that's something that you can get with Venice by going into their community and seeing what kind of conversations are circling in there about it. What people are saying, the responsiveness of its team. Do they have people asking questions and then getting hung where it's been like a month and the question is still unanswered? Those are things that you can see within Venice's community.

Then you have support. They have a highly engaged support staff. Donovan is someone you can access through their Community messaging feature and video chat with. They are doing things in a completely different fashion.

Venice Music Artist Development

With Venice, development is facilitated through things like workshops and feedback sessions. In a sense, Venice Music is operating almost like a label or the type of way that you would envision a premium digital distribution company would work. But instead of playing this whole silly game of:

“Fill out an application, and if we like your music - A.K.A you've got enough streaming activity where our percentage of your revenue will actually put money in our pocket - We'll accept you and do the same thing for you that TuneCore or Distrokid would.”

Venice says, pay us a rate that scales, where we could afford to pay a support staff a respectable wage. Where they can be good at their job and feel good about being good at their job, because they're being paid well, and we can afford to provide the services to you at a high level, offer live events, bring in celebrities for workshops and feedback sessions, and provide you with tools like rollout strategies.

Get 20% Off Venice Music - Discount code: PAYUSNOMIND20  | Read Venice Music Full Review

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Direct to fan.

When it comes to direct-to-fan, you have options. You have Bandcamp, and you have Even. But I've chosen not to go with either of those two and to select Shopify. Why? Because those platforms are restrictive. One, they do not allow you to control Checkout. There’s no conversion tracking where you can run advertising campaigns to get sales. Those things aren't available there.

They take a percentage of sales. This is great if you don’t make any money, but if you make money, it becomes punitive. They take 15 - 20% of every sale:

• 15% for Bandcamp
• 20% for Even

The more money you make, the more money you pay. Shopify caps your losses. You pay $30 a month and no more than that. You make $1,000 a month; instead of paying $150 - $200, you pay $30. On top of that, Shopify comes with expansive features like abandoned cart recovery, customer relationship management tools, and better record keeping. It's extendable. You can add plugins to expand the capabilities of your website. There’s an invoicing feature and integrations.

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Shopify Integrations

Shopify is the exclusive partner of Spotify. You can sell your merchandise, your digital downloads, whatever you want on your Spotify page through Shopify.

They are also partnered with YouTube, so you can sell your merch and your music on YouTube in a visual display underneath your videos through Shopify.

Try Shopify

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PayUsNoMind's Marketing Brainz on Payusnomind.info

On Marketing Brains, there are guides like “The Ultimate Indie Artist’s Guide” and “Ultimate Guide to Monetization.”

We have comparison tables where you can find the best PRO for yourself. Compare ASCAP to BMI or BMI to SESAC. Compare funding options: Business loans to advances, Advances vs. Credit Cards. We have calculators that enable you to break down the impact of Business loans, Credit cards, and advances. See what type of damage they do to cash flow. What you pay in the end after all is said and done. All of that you can see using the calculators.

We have calculators for catalog valuations. You can see what you would get if you were to sell the rights to the streaming royalties of your music.

As well as a return on investment calculator for things like Music distribution.

24 Hour MarketingBrainz Free Trail  20% Discount Code: PUNMGUIDES-PROMO

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QuickBooks

QuickBooks is a tool that is really critical for artists to get organized and take their financial structures seriously. It’s something that impacts your ability to get business loans and properly do your taxes. This year we have the HITS Act. The HITS Act allows you to write off up to $150,000 that you spend on studio time, equipment, tools, and services like Feature.fm.  That is something that QuickBooks simplifies.

You get Profit and Loss statements, Balance sheets, and the ability to track income versus expenses. Send invoices that people can pay directly from the invoice. They give you the ability to upload contracts and accept e-signatures for you to send around agreements to producers and featured artists.

Get 30% Off QuickBooks

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Manny Chat

ManyChat is an automation platform that lets artists turn Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp interactions into structured fan journeys. Content circulates online that people enjoy, but these are people who won’t follow you or join your mailing list, and they’re the majority. That doesn’t mean they won’t buy your album on vinyl, a concert ticket, or merchandise. It just means they don’t care to know what you ate for breakfast this morning.

ManyChat connects to your social accounts and responds automatically when fans:

• Comment on your posts
• DM you specific words
• Reply to Stories
• Click links or buttons

From there, it can:

• Send links (music, videos, Smart Links, tickets)
• Collect emails and phone numbers
• Deliver downloads or bonuses
• Tag fans by interest (song, city, merch, tour)
• Trigger follow-ups days or weeks later
• Sync data to email platforms like Beehiiv, Kit, or Mailchimp

Think of it as a CRM that lives inside social media, where your fans already are.

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Why This Matters for Artists

Social platforms are great at exposure, terrible at ownership. ManyChat bridges that gap.

Instead of:

• “Hope they click the link in bio”
• “Hope they remember me”
• “Hope the algorithm shows them my next post”

You get:

• Direct access to fans
• Measurable actions
• Reusable automation
• Lower ad costs (because engagement converts better than cold traffic)

Get 50% Off your first 2 Months of Mannychat

Get 50% Off ManyChat

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Now, this has been my list of the top tools of 2025/2026. These are tools that will really help you get organized, market better, monetize better, and get more out of the money you’re spending this year.