There are SO many voices telling you that as an independent musician you MUST promote your work on every freakin’ social media platform. So I gave it a shot for once when I released my Dante 1981 Purgatorio album back in December 2021. It was tiring to keep everything updated! Here are the rough results for anyone curious:
- Soundcloud: Nothing but bots and spammers.
- Facebook: Absolute ghost town.
- Twitter: Almost nothing.
- Bandcamp: Dead quiet.
- Numerous playlist submissions: Zilch
- Website: Nothing.
- Instagram: Some activity!
- YouTube: Some activity!
- Newsletter: About 50% looked.
Verdict from my small personal experience:
- YouTube is the easiest way to reliably share new stuff. It doesn’t require a streaming service.
- Instagram seems by far the best way to get your stuff in front of strangers, at least in a fleeting way.
- A newsletter with an email list of personal friends is by far the best, BUT even then, expect a lot of people to just be too flooded with information to actually read it or click through. Also, despite people personally subscribing, several reported it still ended up in their spam folder.
I can see why an artists would want to sign to a label, even if they lost a big chunk of revenue, just so they could outsource all the hype-machine stuff to someone else.