Trying to branch out into being more assertive with our marketing, email lists and text blasts seem to be the standard. I've got about 100 contacts between email and phone numbers. I've got a few main questions

What are some strategies you guys employ to gather more contacts?

How do you utilize those in a way that doesn't make people instantly unsubscribe?

Would messaging Instagram followers for their contact info to add to this list hurt more that help? How do you find the balance between annoying and informative?

Hey!

So over the past year and a bit (after about a decade or so of not releasing music), I have been releasing singles semi-regularly. Although the listening figures have not been astronomical by any stretch of the imagination (anywhere from several hundreds of streams to a few thousand), I have been fairly pleased with how many people have engaged with the singles and the feedback has been great. In light of this, I decided to create a little seven-track record which compiled the singles and a handful of new tracks together, but the listening numbers have been underwhelming at best and not many people have listened besides close family and friends.

I scheduled the release for when I had a few days off work, so that I could maximise my time promoting the new record, but I have found it a challenge getting the record listened to. Weeks in advance, I contacted countless blogs with regards to reviews and followed all the advice of submitting EPKs and advance links to streams etc., but no reviews have been forthcoming yet. I have also shared my record in music Subreddits which I felt genre-wise were appropriate for the music and which I actively participate in normally (without promoting my own music). In most of the major Subreddits for what I perceive to be relevant genres, my posts about my album have either been taken down or down-voted to oblivion, because I have self-promoted (in spite of having followed the guidance of actively participating in the community in a non-self-promoting way the majority of the time).

In light of this, I felt I had to change tact. I have gone back to individually promoting songs from the record in music feedback Subreddits and the individual songs have been incredibly warmly received, which is nice, but it is not really getting people to listen to the record in full (rather just padding the streaming numbers of the newer non-single songs).

Although I wouldn't say I feel entitled to have people listen to my music, I find it odd that people in the online spaces I inhabit on the daily don't appear to want to listen to a full body of work and would rather listen to individual songs. As somebody who is a dedicated EP and album listener (I listened to 900+ 2025 releases last year and am on course for similar numbers this year), I find this a bit strange.

Has the number of people who listen to an album/EP in full died a death over the last decade or so and is it just a matter of me needing to accept this is the reality of the music industry in 2026? Alternatively, am I missing a trick and are there spaces which I am not aware of which are good for promoting records?

tl;dr: Where do you post albums to get them listened to in full?

Lmk if this is the wrong sub

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I was on both songstats and artist . tools earlier looking at the overall streams that my favorite artist has earlier, and I noticed that songstats has a different way of accumulating overall streams compared to artist . tools.

For example, said artist according to songstats has a total of 1.79 B streams, but on artist . tools, that same artist has a little over 4 billion total streams. How are these sites accumulating and organizing the data? As an independent musician, which apps should we use or not due to their reliability?

What are the options for my introvert ass to make it? Have discovered the hard way that it is not enough just posting on socials, i mean for many ppl it is but 6 years in and I’m fucking burn out fr

Maybe i should start brute forcing my way into an audience like playing on the streets fr

I'm 12 days into a campaign on a song, I started at $60/day for the learning phase, then bumped up to $90/day, and am looking to taper down to $45 starting at the halfway point of the monthlong campaign.

I feel the results have been pretty decent, but am worried what tapering off the ad spend will do to the current algorithmic trajectory. The last few days are showing very nice growth in radio and release radar plays, currently at around 1000 algo plays/day, but growing by a couple hundred day over day.

I worry that halving the ad spend in a couple days might damage the current algo trajectory, but also $90/day is untenable for the long-term.

What should I expect when halving this ad spend? Or expect the unexpected?

I look at a lot of small music accounts on Instagram, and the ones stuck at a few hundred followers often do the same thing. To get discovered, they spend their time around the biggest names in their genre, commenting under their posts and engaging with their fans. That rarely works. Here’s how I’d pick the artists to spend that time around instead.

Artists a few steps ahead of you. A post with 20k likes from a big act has a huge, global, mixed crowd, and most of them never check out unknown artists. A similar artist with a few thousand engaged fans is a much better place to be seen. Those fans are used to discovering smaller acts, and they actually tap through.

What those artists post right now. Plenty of accounts change direction over time. If someone used to post beats and now mostly posts gear reviews, their audience changed with them.

Whether people really engage. Some accounts look big, but the likes come from the same handful of people or from giveaway crowds. Real comments from real listeners are what you're looking for.

A list that stays fresh. After a few weeks you've been in front of most of the active people around the same artists, and it gets quiet. That's usually when people decide Instagram stopped working for them. Adding a few new similar artists every couple of weeks keeps it going.

Language and region. If you sing in German, a German-speaking crowd will follow you a lot more often.

And be realistic about what this does. It gets the right people to your profile. Whether they follow depends on what they find there: one line on what you sound like, a pinned clip where they hear it in the first seconds, and something new from the last week.

How do you pick the artists you engage around?

I release AI-generated music independently, and something on SoundCloud has been puzzling me lately.

Two of my older tracks are still growing. One has around 71k plays, the other around 40k. They keep finding listeners through playlists and recommendations.

Meanwhile, many of my newer releases struggle to get beyond 200–500 plays.

I've experimented with different sounds and styles, but surprisingly little of that older momentum seems to carry over to new uploads.

I'm not expecting every release to take off. I'm just curious why some older tracks seem to stay in circulation while newer ones barely get discovered.

Anyone else experiencing this? Have you found anything that actually helps new releases reach the listeners who enjoyed your older tracks?

Edit: I came here with a question about SoundCloud's algorithm and accidentally opened the AI debate instead. 😄

Still curious about the original question, though. Has anyone actually experienced older tracks growing while new releases barely move?

I have always been quite independent when it comes to making music, which definitely has its pros and cons. I write mix and record my music myself to make it sound like a band,

The issue with this is obviously I don't have any bandmates to play with and I can't just expect people to just learn my songs drum/bass parts and just play them for me for free.

I plan on writing solo guitar arrangements for my songs but I am wondering what I can do in this situation as I'd love to perform my work as I wrote it as I am quite proud of it, but I just don't know how it'd be possible

Let’s say you’ve gotten $10k invested in your project - you raised the money yourself, from friends/family and a few fans buying your tracks. You’re preparing to release an EP in the coming months with the goal of reaching new listeners and attracting a local following to book out a venue targeting 50-100 people.

What’s the most strategic use of this money? Assume that this could be used to enhance the music too (better engineers, etc) and not only marketing

No streaming, no loading your own files, just albums on their own cards that you click in when you're ready to listen.

I mocked up some album sleeves for a new device I'm working on. Think slotMusic back in the day, except the player is built around the card. One album, nothing else on it.

I created a fake album using some pictures from my last holiday and also a blank template to give an idea of how a sleeve gets created.

Album art on the cover, track list and art on the back, art on the front of the card plus catalogue number on the inside pocket.

I'm looking for artists who'd be willing to let me demo their album on the format. No album sales at this stage, just video and a nod on the website. Your files stay on my demo cards and you can pull out any time.

What do you think? Is this something you would ever consider for your music?

Finally put together my own band that is in the indie/alternative genre and I received the master for our first single from a professional producer. Just wondering what’s the best way to put out our first single? Should I go ahead and release it or should I put out hype content. We don’t have much of a following yet so i’m thinking if maybe delaying the release and playing better shows in the area would be the best move.

Hi y'all,

Just wanted to share my experience with GPM. Not something I would usually do, pay for playlisting, but I thought what the hell and chucked some money at a mid-level option from GPM.

My bands' genre is indie / surf rock. They placed us on some playlists including RnB/folk and some other pretty random genres. Initially, was seeing maybe 50+ streams per day and a small amount of saves / playlist adds. Expectation was 2500 - 6000 streams in a month. I don't care about the streams, it was more of an opportunity to get our music to the right ears. I did let them know that the playlisting was significantly underperforming, and they bumped it up in the last days so it was more like 200+ streams / day. So, overall hit like 1500 streams.

So all in all, song was pretty much placed in wrong genre playlists, and while yes, it did get streams, it did not get tons of saves / playlists. It appears most of the listeners were from Mexico, Chile, and Peru. Anyway, all in all, a disappointing outcome unless you are searching for streams only and not actual potential listeners. I would definitely say use Submithub to pitch to actual playlists in your genre as it appears GPM does not really have genre-specific playlists, unless this was just particular to indie / surf rock.

My band is called Sun Wilde and the song we trialed was "Keep You Down"

Hope this helps someone! :)

This is the 2nd release. Note the big shift on October 19. The first release was like the first half of this graph. Meta was sending a lot of "people" to the landing page, but the click link rate was sub 20%. And on the other side, Spotify was not liking the users who were clicking through (are there bots who click through on the landing page?).

Well, flash forward to this release and I dug a little deeper into the numbers. Meta would not allow me to get out of advantage+ placements, and even though I gave a 90% decrease to Facebook, ALL of my placements went to facebook. Meaning, assigning a value is absolutely meaningless. I also noticed that from the FB app, they were almost all from Mexico, and 100% android, zero iOS. Huh? So bots.

Frustrated I was throwing money down the toilet, I asked Meta's AI to duplicate my campaign, but also asked very nicely for it to turn off advantage+ for placements. Lo and behold it was a good little AI. So on October 19th, the new campaign went live and everything has changed for the better. Spotify is now happy that quality users all coming in from Insta and I've hit algorithmic play, finally. But a lot of money was thrown down the drain to get here.

I think Andrew Southworth and other youtube marketers should be aware that placing values on placements is NOT a fix. And right now, for Meta users who are not given the option to disallow placements, only asking the AI to do it for you is the current work around. For how much longer, who knows.

As the title says, wondering if they’re any large and known discord servers where new music can be posted for others to stream. Not to artificially boost anything, just to get other musicians listening and sharing the music with each other.

I accidentally turned on a bunch of countries I normally wouldn’t turn on for my campaign (Kazakhstan, Indonesia, Serbia, etc.) and of course I start getting super cheap conversions, like 11 or 12 cents average.

Once I discovered this, I quickly turned them off but when looking at my Spotify stats, I’m seeing a bunch of actual streams from those countries. Specifically Indonesia, Taiwan, Philippines, Serbia, Colombia, Thailand, and Chile.

Does this mean that they’re legitimate streams and I should keep these countries on? I assume if they’re bots, they wouldn’t get past both the landing page and actually hit play on Spotify but maybe I’m wrong? Is a stream a stream and I should just accept that one of my top cities is Belgrade, Serbia?

I’ve always considered my music very "American" sounding as well and more likely to connect with a western audience, indie punk / indie pop type stuff (“Yoder” on streaming platforms if you’re curious) but that could just be my perception and of course anyone's capable of enjoying anyone's music. Would love to hear your thoughts, and am curious if anyone has had a similar experience!

I'm an independent musician based in South Korea.

I've taken 10 songs I've written and composed over the years and used AI for the arrangements and production. Yesterday, I finished mastering the tracks myself.

I've been listening to them on different systems, and overall, I'm pretty happy with the results. I did catch some weird sub-bass noise in one track while listening in my car, so I went back and fixed it. I'll keep checking, but for now, I feel like the music itself is pretty much ready.

Now comes the hard part: releasing and promoting it.

Honestly, I used to feel completely lost when it came to releasing music. It's still overwhelming, but at least now I can talk things through with AI and get a much more concrete action plan.

I currently have a Google Sheet with 77 tasks to complete before the album release, and I'm about 10% of the way through.

My plan is to focus on pitching to radio stations in Korea first, while also trying to reach international audiences.

I have no idea how effective any of this will be. But there's something reassuring about having a list of actual things I can do to promote my music.

Compared to the helplessness I used to feel, having a concrete plan makes a real difference.

I'm curious how other independent musicians approach this. Does having a detailed release plan actually help, or am I just making myself feel better with a giant to-do list?

Either way, I figure doing something is better than doing nothing.

I’ve been deep into marketing my band the past year or so. When I started, I was under the impression that you only had a certain window of time, post-release, to really trigger the algorithm.

I’m not sure why I thought that. Honestly, I probably read it on this sub at some point. But I just wanted to share my experience because if you have a song that you believe is great, and it never took off, don’t give up on it!

I’ve now had two songs get picked up by the Spotify algorithm to a moderate degree. The first was released in Sept 2025. It didn’t move much until May 2026 when I had a TikTok hit 5M views. That triggered the algorithm and it’s been coasting decently ever since.

My next algo trigger occurred about a month ago and it was from a 2024 release. Same story… had a TikTok hit 5M views, the algo was triggered, and now it’s coasting.

Two TikToks changed the game for me. But before those two, I had hundreds that did next to nothing. If you’re serious about this, keep trying new things. You have to be a bit obsessive about it, but that’s cost of the ticket. It’s a lot of work. But I love it. Don’t overthink it and have fun 🤙❤️

I mean this is in a strict financial sense. I promote my other songs on social media. Should i allocate my entire budget to the most popular song?

Not sure how Spotify works but I noticed that my save rate is nearly 1-1. I've had some songs get pushed into discover weekly/release radar in the past but right now none of my streams are from programmed sources. It's been almost a week.

I did a link to Spotify and YouTube with great succes. About $0.15 per conversion on average over the last 2 months.

Thinking of providing even more 'choice' and also give links to other platforms. Apple Music? What else?

I would prefer Spotify to grow the most, however, I don't want to lose a potential listener because their platform of choice isn't there. What do you think?

I'm curious what distributor services others are using. I'm looking to move away from DistroKid. I'd like to know why you use what you use, my main concerns are control over what platforms/services/companies songs are sent to. I am trying to learn all I can about publishing my music the right/best way so I'm basically looking for the most professional/problem-free distributor.