Multichannel distribution of auditions
Beyond the institutional website: where professional musicians really look for work
In this article
The problem of limited visibility
Publishing an audition only on the orchestra's institutional website is like pinning a flyer on the notice board of your own office: those who do not enter that office will never see it. It is a gesture that gives the impression of having "communicated the audition", when in fact it has merely filed it in a place that almost none of the right candidates frequent.
Professional musicians do not visit individual orchestra websites every day. They consult specialised databases, follow themed groups, receive tips from colleagues. Your audition does not live in a vacuum: it competes with dozens of other opportunities for an attention that is scarce and distracted. The question, then, is not only whether to publish, but where to make the announcement appear within the flow those musicians already move in.
dbStrings data is unambiguous: auditions promoted across several channels receive, on average, three to four times the views of those published on a single channel. It is not a small optimisation: it is the difference between being seen and not existing.
Publishing an audition only on your own website is like pinning a flyer on the notice board of your own office.
The channels: effectiveness compared
Each channel has a different function, and none is sufficient on its own. The strategy is not to choose "the best", but to combine their complementary roles.
The channels, one by one
- Institutional website: necessary for credibility and official information, but insufficient alone. Musicians visit it only after discovering the audition elsewhere.
- Specialised databases: the reference point for those searching actively. An audition here reaches musicians in 191 countries; on dbStrings, traffic comes mostly from the United States, Italy and Germany.
- Themed Facebook groups: the hidden network of professionals. More than 300 groups by instrument, section and geographic market, where musicians exchange information in real time and generate organic word of mouth.
- LinkedIn: effective for senior roles (principals, concertmasters), followed by experienced professionals with up-to-date profiles who monitor opportunities.
- Industry newsletters: they reach conservatory teachers, who flag the audition to advanced students. dbStrings has around 5,000 teacher contacts.
Active vs passive distribution
The real difference between platforms is not the number of users, but the distribution model. It is a distinction that decides whether the announcement works for you or just sits there waiting.
Passive distribution
You publish the announcement and wait for candidates to find it. The institutional website and some databases work this way. The burden of discovery falls entirely on the musician: if they don't look for you, they don't find you.
Active distribution
The announcement is carried to where the musicians already are: automatic social posts, sharing in themed groups, notifications to subscribers. It is the platform that does the work of reaching the audience, not the other way around.
dbStrings adopts the active model: every audition is published on the Facebook page with 165,598 followers, shared in around 300 themed groups on the first available Monday, and relaunched on LinkedIn. The aggregate result speaks for itself: over 4,416,798 views in the auditions section and 1,712,424 detail pages consulted. Numbers a passive distribution, on its own, does not reach.
How to build a multichannel strategy
Good distribution is not a single launch, but a sequence that accompanies the audition throughout its whole window of life.
The strategy, week by week
- Week 1 — Launch: publish on a specialised database and the institutional website at the same time. With an active-distribution platform, the social channels start automatically.
- Weeks 2-3 — Consolidation: monitor the statistics. If views are below expectations, consider a paid boost (on dbStrings, ADVplus offers packages from 30 to 150 euros for 7,890-114,000 additional users).
- Final week — Reminder: a second post in the groups recalls the imminent deadline. Musicians procrastinate like everyone else.
The rhythm matters as much as the channels: an announcement published and then abandoned loses momentum, while a well-spread sequence keeps attention alive until closing.
The numbers that matter
When you assess the effectiveness of a channel, do not stop at the number of views. The metrics that really matter are four: views of the listing, downloads of the call and attachments, clicks to the official page, geographic origin of visitors. Together they tell not only "how many looked", but "how many were genuinely interested".
dbStrings provides this data at the end of every campaign. And it allows a precise diagnosis: if an audition has 500 views but only 10 downloads of the call, the problem is not visibility — that worked — but the wording of the call itself. It is the theme of the first part: quality beats quantity, and perfect distribution does not save a badly written announcement.
Operational conclusion
There is no single channel that guarantees an audition's success. The winning strategy combines them according to their respective functions:
The multichannel recipe
- Specialised databases to catch those searching actively
- Automatic social distribution to trigger word of mouth
- The institutional website for credibility and official details
- A paid boost for urgent auditions or hard-to-fill roles
The cost of professional promotion — on dbStrings, 90 euros for a single audition, with distribution to 300 groups included — is negligible compared with the real cost of a position left vacant or a second audition to run all over again.
Perfect distribution does not save a badly written announcement; but a perfect announcement, with no distribution, is read by no one.
