I've noticed on occasion posts in this group or others that will lead with something like "How I went from 0 to 60k listeners - the real truth!!" and it consistently includes AI - whether it be cover art, animations, content in general, or even the music itself.

It's easy to see those kinds of posts at face value and think, "Wow, this person has only been doing this for X amount of time, and they're where I've been struggling to get for years." I'll admit, I'm guilty of feeling that way when I come across these. It's hard not to.

We put blood, sweat, genuine tears, awkward open mics or gigs, and unhealthily late nights into the art of bearing our raw soul in front of the world, only to be confronted by the idea that maybe the music just isn't good, or maybe nobody cares. Then there's Johnny-GPT throwing out cookie-cutter prompt-pop, farming algorithmic radio plays, and bragging about how they're a self-taught marketing genius.

I don't mean to tangent; I wanted to address my progress - the highs and lows in my ~3 years of taking this seriously.

I've been producing music for 9 years now. I started not knowing anything about composition, production, mixing and mastering, or even playing an instrument. Long story short, I learned Wonderwall and joined a band.

After a while, the band peacefully fell apart, and I continued on because I found an intense, genuine love for making music and connecting with people through it.

Late 2023, I released my first song that I felt comfortable calling a "song", if that makes sense. A truly finished, polished, proud-of-it song.

At that same time, I happened to be making unrelated short-form videos on YouTube poking fun at how bad I am at guitar, which gained significant traction very quickly. This translated to people clicking on my links on my channel or watching the lyric video for this song. That, in turn, translated to monthly listeners and engagement on streaming platforms.

Unfortunately, I quickly fell victim to a botted playlist.

One of my worst songs from my still-learning days got put on one of those. I saw the numbers blow up overnight, and not knowing anything about botted playlists, I was beyond stoked. I felt like this was the break I needed to make something of this.

Then I found out what happened, contacted Spotify to be removed ASAP from that playlist, then watched the numbers plummet.

During the time on the botted playlist, my followers jumped from 6 to 97, listeners from ~20 to over 1,000. Afterwards, it all dropped back to exactly where it was.

I felt better knowing what actually happened, but also like I was cheated against my will and put back further behind the goalpost.

I took an objective look at my effort, what I felt I was doing right versus wrong, then tried again.

I amped up my social media presence - consistently posting at least twice a day on Instagram, at least one video daily on YouTube, and at least one new release to streaming platforms every single month.

Constant engagement with anyone who showed any interest, commented, or DM'd me, eventually led to climbing those numbers - slowly but honestly.

I began researching and testing ads through Meta, and eventually finally found a format that worked for me (detailed at the bottom the post). I brought my followers back up to ~100, and monthly listeners peaked around the same amount. Some months would be higher depending on what content I released, but it didn't often dip below 100.

Then, as it does, life got in the way and I no longer had leftover disposable income to put towards running any sort of paid campaigns.

I released my first album, then slowly over time my numbers started declining. I felt the burnout, so I slowed down my release schedule. That also caused my numbers to decline, which admittedly led me to feel inadequate and like I was letting down the few people who showed genuine interest in my art.

I started slacking on social media, became scared to post videos on YouTube anymore out of an inexplicable feeling of shame, and felt like I was back to where I started.

The thing is, I know if I go back to being steady and consistent, maintaining a social presence, then I would slowly make progress again.

I know if I started back up posting the same stupid videos on YouTube, I would welcome back the people who kept coming back the first time.

That's where I'm at now. That's what I need to do.

Not pour my paychecks into ads - I need to interact with people. Play open mics, beg for gigs, connect with the scene, and keep making music.

The hardest thing I've ever done was bring my music in front of a crowd, and I avoided that for as long as I could until I realized that was the only thing I hadn't tried.

I played one open mic a few weeks ago, and as bad as I feel it went, I have never felt truly proud of myself until that moment.

If you're hoping you can make it as a digital artist and hoping you'll never have to play in front of a crowd of strangers, please, please just do it.

You need to take that leap.

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I'm sorry for the life-story type post. Here's the actual useful info:

Social Media:

I followed a ton of people who followed similar artists or genres to what I did, and that quickly proved beneficial. I got consistent engagement, "wow this sounds like X artist" comments, and people eventually showing genuine interest. I posted consistently at least twice a day, which led to people being invested in my story and music. I kept that up as much as possible and it continued showing promise. Eventually I fell off, as detailed in the above post, and the progress declined. ,

Ads:

I tested different kinds of ads for a while - Instagram paid ads, YouTube, Meta. I tried visually appealing lyric videos, visualisers, things like that. None of it truly worked that well for me until I tried a different method I was avoiding: putting myself in the videos. I literally just set up some simple lighting: a white screen on my computer monitor, RGB bulbs in my 'studio', and set my phone on my desk and recorded myself singing different parts of this song. I did some minor color grading in the free version of DaVinci Resolve, so it was vibrant and deep, then put some simple text over it, like "SONG NAME - ARTIST /// OUT NOW" or something. For some reason, those videos showed significant engagement. That was also unfortunately the last time I could financially comfortably campaign, so I haven't been able to test it further.

I work with music artists on content and ads for a living. One thing keeps coming up.

Artists film themselves from behind. Walking away from camera, back turned, hood up, face out of frame. It happens constantly.

I get why. Face on camera feels exposed. But it's costing you views.

People connect with faces, not backs. A face on screen builds trust faster than any caption. Viewers stop scrolling for a person, not a jacket.

You don't have to overexpose yourself either. Pick a signature look (a haircut, makeup, a mask, whatever fits the art) and stay consistent with it. That becomes your visual hook. People start recognizing you before they even hear the song.

Simple test: next time you post, count how many seconds your face is actually on screen. If it's close to zero, that's probably part of why the video isn't landing.

Curious if anyone here has tested face-on vs face-hidden and what the numbers looked like.

Let me preface this by saying that the cold hard truth is that you HAVE to spend money if you want to be successful in the music industry, UNLESS you are successful on social media. I'm just not convinced otherwise. The real question is HOW do you spend your money? So let me go over how I did this and how I built an engine for growth on my Spotify.

First off let me say that there are three different strategies that people believe is effective in growing your music. Only two of them give long lasting results:

1) Social Media - Reels, TikToks, YTshorts

2) Meta Ads

3) Playlisting

Now I would highly encourage you to post social media content. Use Trial Reels, gather data, if it's unsuccessful, and repost till you find what works. I'll be honest, I am VERY UNSUCCESSFUL with my social media posts. Social Media had almost 0 impact on my music growth, despite having 6.5k followers. But if you blow up, you can create a snowballing viral account that can get your music known very quickly. So don't knock this. I wont' say much else because I am in no place to say how to do this and how effective it can be because all of my videos flop. Unfortunate.

Playlisting is what a lot of "experts" say is the most impactful way to grow your music. Let me just say this upfront, DO NOT do this. Before I get into this let me explain how Spotify works and why playlisting is the number one way to destroy your Spotify account.

Spotify NEEDS data to push your music. It wants to know what type of listener likes your music, which listeners stream it, stream it one week later, then ultimately add it to their library and stream it from their library. It wants to know listener and repeat listener behavior. So you want to find a way to attract cold listeners to your Spotify and see which ones out of the bunch like your music so Spotify can start pushing your music out to that group of people. What does this mean? This means that 1000 people who listen to your song ALL THE WAY THROUGH, save it, then replay it later, is WAY more impactful than 10,000 people who stream your song but never listen to it again. Also those 10k people may not even listen to your song all the way through. Thus playlisting, especially users who use bots, completely destroys your Spotify. The signal that it sends to Spotify is, "this user listened to your song for 30s then skipped it. This song is no good." This also negatively impacts your Track Popularity Score, which ultimately affects your Artist Popularity score. Your goal should be to get as many tracks to 30 popularity score as possible as this is when it starts receiving a strong algorithmic push from Spotify. You can actually see track #10 on my Popularity score screenshot that shows my song "Death of Me" with 80k streams and a 15 popularity score. This is a song from my last project that I used playlisting from Groover and Submithub to get it streams. This song gets very little streams now and has a popularity score of 15 because once it was removed from the playlist, streams and engagement stopped and now the track is pretty much dead. It will take a lot of work and money to recoup all of that. This is what you want to avoid. *Side note, I'm sad because that was actually one of the strongest songs on the project and one of my more successful Social Media vids. Oh well.

So now the question is, how do you get Spotify the data that it needs? Well I used Meta Ads. Honestly it started with Andrew Southworth's videos on YouTube and even me paying for the course he offers (forgot what it's called). I'm sure a lot of you have done this or have heard of it. Very simple to do (watch the free video on YouTube to set it up), but very briefly I'll explain it: Get a landing page for your release, create an engagement campaign and optimize for conversions, create a video or multiple videos with your song playing (I just get stock videos from pexels), send them to your landing page. Now if someone watches your ad, they like the song, they click the link, it takes them to your landing page, then they click on the landing page to get to your song, they had to click through twice before ultimately listening to your song. This shows intent and interest. Then if they like your song, they save it and maybe stream your other stuff. This is the basic gist of it. But I leveled this up thanks to some advice from a good friend of mine who is pretty well established in the music industry. What's the secret sauce? Well let me move to the next paragraph to keep things clean.

Create a Playlist

So what I did is I created a playlist with a very easy to search for term and threw all of my music in there. I paid someone on Fiverr to create an eye catching cover art for the playlist, and I set THAT playlist as the landing page instead of my song. So now the idea is: someone sees my ad, they like the song. The click on the link. It takes them to my landing page. They click the link again. Now it takes them to my PLAYLIST with the song they heard at the number 1 position. They listen to the song. They like it. Now they don't have to look for me. They just either let it autoplay to the next song or they choose a song and listen to another song on my catalog. If they like multiple songs, they may click on my artist name and follow me, etc. Also your other songs get streams too, not just the song you're promoting. Now you are sending Spotify data. "This user likes 3 of this artist's songs. Okay let's find more listeners like him and show one of these 3 songs to that listener." Spotify then begins actively testing your music. You ever check your Spotify for Artists and see random plays from "Mixes" or just see unexplained algorithmic streams or see that you are on a bunch of playlists but you can't see them? Yeah that's Spotify "testing" your song by placing it in a mix or a Spotify generated playlist to see if the listener likes your song. If they do you get a converted listener. Spotify has so much data of listener's profiles, tastes, tendencies, etc. If this is happening, your popularity score will go up. This signal tells Spotify, "People like this song or artist. Let's test it some more." Another test, successful, score goes up, more testing, etc. THIS is how you build a LISTENER base, which is exactly what you want to do.

Now I took this another step. I was creating ad creatives for each release (the best strategy is still to just release a new single every 4-6 weeks). So for example, my first track was No Good At Love. I ran meta ads for 5 weeks and it got to 30 popularity score. Then my second song came out. I ran ads for that second song then put NGAL second on my playlist so that it would still get exposure even though I'm not directly promoting it. If people liked my second song, they would then stream NGAL. But my 4th release, In Another Life, I found was EXTEMELY successful in meta ads. I think my CPC for the other releases was around .7-.8 which is not too good. But for In Another Life it was .3-.4. Literally HALF, which meant DOUBLE the audience. I eventually found that In Another Life was my "WINNER." Now every new release, I do not directly promote it with meta ads. I leave In Another Life at #1 on my Playlist, then my new release is #2. I KNOW people like In Another Life. So I want people to listen to it, then if they like it, they will stream my new song and I found that this was the most effective way to compound my growth.

Now you can see the results. Over 60% of my streams come from the Spotify Algorithm. You can see that just from Radio, I am getting 67k streams a month. That is a 1240% more streams than the playlist that I'm sending people to discover my music (my Emotional Pop playlist). It took 9 months of compounding. In the beginning stage, the playlist will carry you. But as you get more listeners converted, the Spotify algorithm will take over and and do the rest. Also, added tip: If you have the budget, use showcase campaign on each new release to give Spotify some raw data. Target countries that have found your music appealing. For example: US, Brazil, and Germany are my highest % of active listeners. So when a new release drops, I use a showcase campaign to target those 3 countries. Just use the data and target what makes sense. Anyways, the post is getting long so let's end here. I hope this was helpful. If you have any questions, I'll do my best to answer. Good luck guys!

Over the last few months, I had a budget set aside for launching my new EDM project. I very quickly decided that the best use of that money would be to learn the game from the top tier of the EDM industry.

We're not talking some producer with one big remix on Spotify, I've been working with guys directly in the circles of Armin, Garrix, Hardwell, deadmau5, labels like Drumcode, Insomniac, A&Rs that worked for Spinning, etc. For social media I talked to the guy who runs Diplo and The Chainsmoker's socials.

Best investment I could have made, it's like going to EDM Harvard lol.

Point is - if anyone has anyone questions, I'd love to share what I've learnt. Art is about sharing and I think there's so many talented artists that are just missing the right knowledge and direction.

This is all I see on Spotify too, big names only, almost no indie artists. I listen to a lot of Indie artist and are almost never suggested to me. It doesn’t matter if someone listens to you a hundreds time a day. Spotify still won’t suggest it over Sony, Warner, and other big labels, even if your music is better. Spotify doesn’t care at all

Ici radio associative en place depuis plus de 8 ans, et média sur Groover depuis 2020.

On constate que beaucoup d'artiste veulent notre avis sur leur musique, mais assez peu sont prêt à entendre des remarques négatives du type :

- l'enregistrement n' est pas bon

- la voix mérite un travail supplémentaire

- le titre est brouillon

Du coup, pourquoi demander notre avis si vous ne pouvez/voulez pas entendre ce qu'on a à dire ? 😊

I keep seeing artists at roughly my level with a board up for a single and I can't work out the mechanics. Every board seems to be owned by a different company, so I don't know if you find the owner of a specific one and email them or go through something that covers a lot at once. Lead time relative to a release date is the other unknown. What was the process for you?

Hi,

I run an account for my local band, and lastly I've unlocked trial reels feature. I've uploaded five so far, and they don't go really well (140 views max) but that's not the issue.

I posted a reel when I am just playing one of my songs, with a bit of introduction to the song etc etc. Usual format. With the "if you liked it, save a reel and share it" CTA.

And this reel somehow gained 18 shares, without any other interactions. 0 likes, 0 comments, 0 saves.

It's nice, but I am confused. What type of person shares the reel, assuming they liked the content, but without any other interactions?

Has anyone ever had something similar? And, what does it mean and what does it says about these reels?

I recently discovered something I think every artist should know. First let me clarify: I'm not saying you shouldn't use Groover, as there are plenty of expert curators and influencers there who are passionate about music and offer high-value opportunities for your music. This post is simply to warn you against submitting to "Groover Obsessions" playlists / profiles.

Groover Obsessions playlists are created and managed by the platform itself, spanning almost every genre and vibe out there: Pop, Christian, Gospel, Rock,  Folk, Grunge, Funk, House, K-Pop, and more. 

What's the problem then? Groover places misleading badges on these playlists, such as "Top Curator/Pro" or "Very impactful" and charge 6€ per submission even though most of them provide less than 100 monthly listeners, with many ranging around 10-30. What makes this worse is that you find these playlists very often at the top of search results, which seems to suggest that the platform's algorithm favors its internal low-impact profiles rather than objectively highlighting profiles who actually move the needle for artists.

You can check it out for yourself. For example, search in Spotify a playlist called "Indie Therapy" by Groover Obsessions. If you run it through SubmitHub's playlist checker it shows it provides only 10 monthly listeners.  

This isn't just an isolated case. If you run other playlists under that same Spotify profile through any playlist analytical tool, you'll see there's a clear pattern here. 

The problem is that the only way to identify them is by opening their full profile page and looking at their description, where they disclose that it's a Groover Obsessions playlist. So my advice is to only submit to "Top Curators" on Groover if those profiles belong to independent curators, as indie curators are required to show proof of a real, engaged audience to earn those badges or have a similar earnings per submission. Avoid Groover Obsessions profiles at all costs.