Everything you need to know as an artist on Facebook – How to upload to Stories and Reels
Learn everything there is to know about using Facebook as an artist, including how to upload music and monetize across Reels and Stories.
Today, with over 3 billion active users, Facebook is the most-popular and well-established social media network, thriving through almost 20 years of growth, decline, competition, skepticism, controversy and so much more.
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How to upload to Facebook Stories, Facebook Reels and more
Fancy getting your music on Facebook’s library, so it’s accessible in Facebook and Instagram Stories and Reels, and to protect your rights on videos uploaded to both Facebook and Instagram? Follow us! We’ll talk you through exactly how to distribute your music to Facebook and start generating revenue across Facebook and Instagram.
While distribution to Facebook is a service that several distributors offer, many charge additional fees, such as TuneCore, Amuse and UnitedMasters.
To get your music on Facebook:
- Sign up for a free RouteNote account
- Head to Distribution – Create New Release
- Input your release metadata, and upload your audio tracks and artwork
- In Manage Stores, tick Facebook
The final step in uploading your release to RouteNote is choosing between Free and Premium distribution. Free Distribution has absolutely zero upfront or recurring fees. You keep 85% of the revenue generated on that release. Premium Distribution costs a small fee upfront and $9.99 annually. You keep 100% of the revenue generated on that release.
RouteNote also offers an All Access plan. Find out more about it here.
You are never locked in with RouteNote. You retain 100% of the rights to your music. You can switch tiers for any release at any time based on how well your release is doing.
Now that you’ve finalized your release, it will be sent to our moderation team, who will check everything is looking and sounding okay, with no formatting errors or copyright-protected material. For an up-to-date look at our moderation times, see this article.
Once everything’s looking perfect, they’ll approve your release and drop you an email. It’ll then be sent to all of your chosen stores and territories. It can take Facebook and Instagram up to 10 days to get your release live.
Now that your release is on all of your chosen stores and is being streamed and purchased by your fans, statistics and earnings will be sent to your RouteNote account. These are published on your account from 45 days after the close of each month. Between the 15-20th of each month, you’ll be able to see exactly how many streams and downloads your release has accrued on each store, in each territory. Funds can be deposited into a PayPal or bank account.
Your release will now be available across Facebook Stories, Facebook Reels, Instagram Stories and Instagram Reels. Facebook also has a content recognition system in place. Much like YouTube’s Content ID, when you distribute your music to Facebook, they’ll scan videos uploaded to both Facebook and Instagram, to ensure you earn the advertising revenue generated from videos that use your music.
What music is NOT eligible for Facebook?
As Facebook scans their library for matches to your music, to ensure no mismatches, you must have created every part of the track. This means you cannot distribute, for example, covers or songs that contain non-exclusive samples to Facebook, as this could lead to mis-identifications.
If any of the following content is found in your release, our moderation team will block YouTube, Facebook/Instagram and TikTok/Resso:
- Samples from RouteNote Create, Splice, Cymatics, Looperman, etc.
- Public domain/creative commons content: Wikipedia, out of copyright speech samples.
- Third party backing tracks, whether leased or Royalty Free.
- Nature sounds and ambience (birdsong, flowing water, etc).
- White noise, static, etc.
- Vocaloids and AI generated speech.
- Remixes of other peoples’ tracks, even if you have the rights to release the remix.
- Compilation albums of already-released tracks (these will match to the already-released songs).
- Covers of public domain songs: traditional folk music, out of copyright tunes (e.g. pre-war jazz/show tunes).
- Soundtracks (these may match to the original media).
- Live performances.
- Classical music.
- Ambient ‘soundscape’ style content.
- ASMR content.
- Meditation releases.
- Chanted mantras and prayers.
If you believe we’ve blocked these stores in error, you can dispute this decision here.
Don’t forget, when you upload to Facebook with RouteNote, your music will be available across both Facebook and Instagram. Find out more about Instagram as an artist here.
What is Facebook?
Understanding Facebook’s history and where they’re at now is important to using the platform as a musician.
How did Facebook start?
Facebook’s history is one of the most well-documented tech stories of all-time, so we’ll speedrun this backstory. Although by no means the first social media platform, Facebook launched against competitors such as MySpace and Friendster.
Co-founded by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg in 2004, Facebook initially limited its user base to university students, before expanding to anyone over the age of 13 in 2006. By 2008, Facebook had overtaken MySpace, as the most-popular social networking service with 100 million registered users. Just two years later, that number had risen to 500 million, leaving other services in their dust.
Come 2012, Facebook’s parent company Facebook, Inc. filed for an IPO, valuing the company at $104 billion. The same year, Facebook, Inc. would acquire square-photo sharing app, Instagram for approximately $1 billion, which would soon become one of the best business transactions they could make. Later acquisitions included WhatsApp and Oculus. Facebook surpassed one billion monthly active users in 2012, continuing to grow until 2018.
In 2021, Facebook, Inc would rebrand, changing its name to Meta Platforms, Inc. as the company focused hard on building VR experiences, such as the metaverse.
In the last five years, Facebook has struggled to maintain its active user base, particularly among younger Americans, thanks in part to Instagram and TikTok. This decline, along with the economic climate, lead to declining profits and layoff in 2022.
Facebook, Meta and Threads today
As of the end of June 2023, Facebook has 3.03 billion monthly active users, placing it as the most-popular social media service, the most downloaded app of the 2010s and the third most-visited website worldwide. The platform is available in 112 languages, worldwide, except in countries that have blocked access, such as North Korea, China, Iran, Myanmar, Russia, Syria, Turkey and Uganda. In the map below, dark blue represents countries that are currently blocking Facebook, while light blue represents countries that formerly blocked Facebook.
Over the last two decades, Facebook has survived numerous controversies, due to privacy, politics, mental health and much more.
Looking forward, Meta are of course focused on building out their VR efforts and the metaverse. At the time of writing, Meta have just launched their text-based Twitter competitor, Threads. Just a couple of weeks in and Threads has already hit 100 million users. Interested in where Threads is heading next, see all of the hidden gems and upcoming features here.
Facebook’s layout
Facebook is available at facebook.com or via apps for smartphones, tablets and more. Facebook’s homepage page is a feed of written and visual content from your friends, people and pages you follow, your groups, suggested posts, and sponsored posts. Content varies between text-based status updates, photos, videos, Stories, Reels and more. By default, posts are ordered based on what Facebook thinks you’ll be most-interested in based on your activity within the app.
From the homepage or your profile, you can share updates with your friends or wider groups, depending on your privacy settings. Messenger, Facebook’s messaging feature, lets you privately contact your friends, groups or businesses. You’ll find Messenger in the top right corner on desktop or as a separate app on mobile.
Artists
How to use Facebook as a musician
When you upload your music to Facebook/Instagram through RouteNote, your music will be available in three key places on Facebook: Stories, Reels and videos.
Facebook Stories are vertical text, image or video posts that live at the top of your friends’ feed for up to 24 hours. Videos can be up to 30 seconds. You can enhance your Stories by placing Stickers on them, including (in many territories) a Music Sticker. When you upload to Facebook, your music will be available for anyone to use on their Facebook Story. You can share tracks from music streaming services to Facebook Stories, such as Spotify, SoundCloud and Deezer.
You may notice that some music tracks on Facebook Stories offer time-synched lyrics. You can upload lyrics to your own tracks for free via Musixmatch. This will also share these lyrics with other platforms, such as Instagram, Spotify and Apple Music.
Since the explosion of TikTok, Meta have been working on building short-form video features in both Facebook and Instagram. Users can upload and edit videos up to 90 seconds to Facebook Reels and attach music to it from Facebook’s music library. Meta regularly updates Reels on Facebook and Instagram, to stay competitive with TikTok. For the top tips on making a good Reel, click here. Reels are available on the main feed or in a dedicated vertically scrollable feed, much like TikTok. This dedicated feed serves up Reels that Facebook thinks you’ll like.
Finally, Facebook also offers a content recognition system similar to YouTube Content ID. When you upload your track to Facebook via RouteNote, Facebook protects your royalties by scanning the videos uploaded for your track, including streams from Facebook Gaming. If your track is used in a video, you will earn the revenue generated by ads placed on that video. You can learn more about how YouTube Content ID works here.
Facebook and Instagram offer creators a number of ways to earn revenue on the social media platforms, such as Stars, Fan Subscriptions and ticketed livestreams. Facebook also recently enabled creators to use certain licensed music and keep a portion of the revenue. Music Revenue Sharing is now available globally. What’s more, Billboard counts streams on Facebook’s licensed music videos towards the charts.
Find the top 10 most-followed musicians on Facebook here.
How to get a verified blue tick on Facebook
To indicate high-profile people and brands, Facebook places small blue ticks beside their names. This way, you can be sure you’re dealing with the real thing. You can request your own blue tick here.
Since February this year, Meta has been rolling out a new service called Meta Verified. This offers a blue tick, as well as other features like proactive account protection, exclusive features and direct account support to those who pay a monthly subscription.
Meta Verified is available in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, the US and the UK.
How to market your music and videos on Facebook with PUSH.fm
Once you’ve created your Facebook account, uploaded your music videos and made your music available through RouteNote, don’t expect the views, likes and money to come rolling in automatically. You’ll need to get the word out there somehow. This is where our friends over at PUSH.fm come in.
PUSH.fm offers free marketing tools to all musicians and creators. There are three features in particular on PUSH.fm that we think all independent musicians on Facebook should know about.
Smart Links
Smart Links are beautiful, customizable landing pages that hold links to all of your music and social profiles. This is especially useful for social media platforms, like Instagram, that only allow for linking to one external site. There are several Smart Link templates that make creating your landing page a breeze. Two in particular are helpful for musicians on Facebook.
Bio Links are a great way to share all of your social media and streaming artist profiles, with just a single URL. Bio Links are fully customizable. You can link to any external website, add custom imagery and even change the URL. With PUSH.fm you can create unlimited Bio Links for free!
Fan Links are for sharing the many stores and social media platforms that your release lives in. Whether that’s the track on Spotify and Apple Music, or the video on YouTube and Facebook, you can link to them all with a single landing page on PUSH.fm. Once again, Fan Links are fully customizable and you can create as many as you like for free with PUSH.fm.
Reward Links
Reward Links are a great way to reward your most loyal fans with digital goods. Fans are prompted or required to complete a social action in order to gain access to any downloadable digital file or secret message. With Facebook, you can ask or require fans to share a post to their Facebook profile in order to download your digital file or access the secret message. Social actions are available across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer and SoundCloud. Digital files can be anything from music downloads to behind-the-scenes videos, while secret messages could be a merch or ticket coupon.
Create unlimited Reward Links, with up to 1GB of storage for free. Upgrade to Premium for $5/month for 50GB of storage.
Competitions
Competitions work in a similar way to Reward Links, with social action actions available across platforms, including Facebook, but instead of all fans gaining access to a digital file, all entries will be added to a spreadsheet, where you can pick a winner. What they win is up to you! Fans may be required to share a message and URL on Facebook in order to earn one entry into your competition.
Competitions are a Premium-only feature. Pay $5/month to create unlimited Competitions on PUSH.fm.
Statistics
As your fans interact with your Smart Links, Reward Links, Competitions and more, PUSH.fm will record these interactions and report them back to you, so you can see exactly how many users opened your link and clicked through to the various platforms. Visits, engagement, conversions and more can be broken down campaign-by-campaign, day-by-day.
Create unlimited marketing campaigns with PUSH.fm. Just sign up to get started!