Optimizing Your Music Tags

[SpinWires]

Hello:

I'm curious if anyone has advice on optimizing music tags. Specifically it seems difficult how to use the tags properly. We get four tags.

Lets say we have a fast tempo, techno song with rock elements and lyrics about running way and a lot of dropping the bass moments.

So how do we best use our tags so that flash developers are able to find this song that's useful? We have fours tags to use.

Do we tag based on genre: "Techno" "Electronic" "Fast" "Rock"

Do we tag based on emotion the song creates: "Stress" "Scared" "Fear" "Epic"

Do we tag based on our thoughts of how it will be used: "Chase" "Running" "Fight" "Boss"

Do we use a mix of the above tags? What have you found the most effective? As developers how do they search when they look for music?

[MetalRenard]

At 7/14/13 09:12 PM, Absilentia wrote: apparently not, because no one responded to this for 2 days, so just fucking quit trying.

Don't be a dick.

My own experience in marketing my work has shown that people like generic ideas and themes. Use terms that encompass your song's theme but that will be searched for often. Maybe your best bet is to use two that fit that criteria, "battle", "soundtrack", something like that. Maybe use one to help specify the genre, and the last to specify the emotion?
I dunno. :)

[Psychopath]

A thing that I like to do is type my username into one of the tags so that anyone who searches my name as a tag will find all of my submissions. Similarly, my work will show up in the related content pod more so than before, funneling users toward my other submissions.

[TheCon-Sept]

When it comes to tagging your submissions, think of how a director or flash animator would use search terms.

Sometimes the best flash movie directors are very shallow when it comes to finding the right music. What do I mean by shallow? They will think of a video game, or another movie where they heard a certain type of mood in music and will search for music that has "Mission Impossible" sounds....

No seriously they are that shallow.

If you made a song that sounds like the mood to a video game or an Anime. POOF all of the sudden people listen to your audio.

But on the other half of the issue..... A million people on this website have already tagged their music using movie or video game title names.

And sometimes if they are a huge nerd they become even more narrowly shallow and search for a composer's name like "Harry Manfredini" who composed the music for Friday the 13th.

So if you are wondering why so many people get misdirected a lot it is because they are tired of all the **** that is saturated in the audio portal. So much so that I have even started to tag my music with Tags that no one else uses.

(Eventually there will be 1 noob for every tag that just ruins it for everyone.)

[Eagleon]

I go with words/synonyms that I could have used in the description, but didn't because they were too obvious or didn't fit well grammatically. There's usually one or two genres, plus some mood or common musical descriptors like 'what' or 'fjord'. It's really not that important, though - the description, song name, genre, and tags are all lumped together in the search you get from the search bar, so as long as it's somewhere, your keywords will show up. In other words, if there are 'tags' that you feel you could use but 4 isn't enough, you can also just pile them into the description at the end like a weird little SEO spammer.

For reference I usually get a few hundred hits each song depending on quality. I don't advertise, so pretty much all of those are coming from searches, or maybe one really creepily devoted fan D:

[Daru925]

Jul 12 , 2013