How to Export a Song Straight to Social Media with Spire

The influence of social media on today’s music industry is something that many artists and industry professionals are scrambling to keep up with. In 2019, streaming music was the leading source of music consumption, while artists and management teams have turned to social media outlets like Twitter and Instagram to engage with fans and sell product. It’s an infinitely more competitive market for artists to be in, but ultimately more controlled by the artist themselves. With such great leaps come a few setbacks. 

In the age of audio/visual streaming, companies like Youtube, Twitter, and Instagram are dominating the field of artist-to-fan engagement. These social platforms have been essential in bolstering the careers of today’s biggest stars—Halsey (Youtube), Kanye West (Twitter), Billie Eilish (SoundCloud), to name a few—and have proven to be the new direction of artist marketing. Because of the macro visibility attached to some of these artists, social media, for better or worse, has become vital in terms of career growth for musicians globally. 

A major key to being successful at managing and growing your artist pages is technical accessibility. In other words, you need to be able to easily take your music from your workstation to your online profiles quickly and professionally. Spire Studio’s exporting process includes a straight-to-social option unlike any other DAW on the market—the simplicity in creating content and delivering directly to your followers with the Spire Studio is simply unprecedented in the field of audio technology. 

When exporting from Spire Studio, you can upload your music directly to SoundCloud, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Vimeo, Messenger, Gmail, iMovie, Dropbox, WhatsApp, and AirDrop. To demonstrate the simple process of posting your song to social media, we’ll take one of our own examples through the process and show you how to create an engaging project for distribution on social media. 

In this case, we’ll be uploading our project to Instagram.

Song preparation 

The first thing you’ll need to do with your project is to prepare it for export. Make sure you’ve trimmed any unwanted noise, and make sure you’ve titled your project correctly. Check out our handy workflow guide to make sure you’ve completed all the necessary steps to export. 

Keep in mind your project length when exporting—it should be noted that some social media platforms only allow a certain amount of time for your song to play. Instagram allows video uploads to be sixty seconds long, while Twitter videos can be 140 seconds long. Facebook allows up to 240 minutes. YouTube videos can be fifteen minutes or more (depending on your verification), and SoundCloud uploads can range from three to six hours of audio. 

The song below is under a minute long, which is well inside the Instagram video limits. 

Mix for your platform

An often overlooked aspect of uploading music to social media is how your audience will be hearing it. The vast majority of people worldwide consume social media on their phones as opposed to their computers. This means that most of your audience will be hearing your music either through headphones or through phone speakers—both entirely different in terms of mix translation. 

Depending on where you want to upload your music, be mindful of how you’re mixing your song. Low frequencies have a hard time cutting through phone speakers while mid-range sounds cut through with ease. 

Generally speaking, you’ll want to mix the best you can, period. A great mix will translate well through any speakers. However, if your goal is to really cater to phone output, keep in mind that your kick drum and bass tracks will appear much less in the phone mix, while guitars might seem much louder. Counteract these factors by slightly reeling back the guitars, or slightly pushing forward your low end tracks. 

Upload the artwork

When you’ve finished your song prep and mix, it’s time to export, but first you’ll need your artwork.

Click the export button in the top right corner of your visual mixer, Enhance your song for a quick master, and then click the “Social Media” button at the bottom of the screen. When selected, this screen will pop up.

Select “Choose from my photos” (you might need to update the Spire app’s photo usage in your settings if prompted). Select the photo of your choosing, crop, and press continue. The Spire app will then prepare your song and artwork for export.

Export to social

When Spire has finished compiling your audio/visual project, you will be taken to the social media export page. You’ll notice several options for export, including “Save to Dropbox,” “Add to Shared Album,” and “Save to Files,” as well as a list of social media icons above. Scroll through your social media channels and select the one of your choice. 

For our project, the Spire app will take us directly to the caption-phase of Instagram, the step just before uploading. Simply write a caption and press share. It doesn’t get any easier than that.

Conclusion

Taking your music from your workstation to the world is only a click away in the Spire app. With just a few easy steps—song prep, mix, uploading artwork, and export—your Spire project can reach all of your followers in less than thirty seconds. From Facebook to Youtube, and nearly every major social media platform in between, you too can share your music and watch your engagement grow with the help of Spire Studio.