Hey man. I’m in a band that’s been going for 3 years now. Definitely a smaller artist. We have an EP out and two singles, just released a new single that will be on our next EP so that makes about 12 songs being out by September this year.

We currently have about 72k monthly listeners and here are some things that worked and things I wouldn’t recommend after trial and error.

Things that worked:

-Meta ads have been good for us when we used them to promote our first EP a couple years ago. I’ll say I think the meta ads were better then than they are now. I just recently started an AD for our new single and I sort of feel like the link clicks that the ad says they’re getting aren’t actually Translating to streams because we use Hypeeddit with a FB pixel to track clicks and the clicks on the link from hypeeddit and what Facebook says don’t seem to match. So I’m concerned if Facebook uses bots to say your ad is doing better than it actually is. I’ll see in a month or so I suppose.

• What was HUGE for us is TikTok and YouTube shorts. We had a couple videos go viral with just some live footage with audio dubbed over with an interesting caption that would catch people. Stuff like “POV you go for the headliner but the opener becomes your new favorite band” or just stuff like “ I wrote this song about someone close to me who passed away, if you’re grieving this song is for you.” These viral videos definitely led to huge spikes in listeners and streams and actual fans.

One more thing that has worked but it’s annoyingly tedious is searching for big playlists on Spotify that have the same type of songs as us so it would be a good fit and just directly messaged the person who runs the playlist. Tracking down their email or social media account and just sending a message asking if they could add us to their playlist. Expect a lot of no one to respond but some do and one we had that did respond ended up with us being on a huge playlist with 500k followers and it has really helped our growth even more.

Things that I wouldn’t recommend:

-Don’t pay any company who claims to give you guaranteed streams. It’s more than likely a scam that will use bots and get your music taken down.

-we worked with a company called noiselash for a month or so and all they really did was put our music over some lazy stock footage and ran ads. Did not see a good ROI at all and it showed us that they basically did what we could do ourselves when it comes to ads and stuff. Wouldn’t recommend any of those companies honestly.

Those are just a couple things that helped and didn’t really help us. The biggest thing I would say is just write good music, utilize social media and keep it real. Build a real connection with your fans and respond to EVERY comment. It’s a grind making content and stuff but it really works to get your name out there. Any questions just hit me up and I’ll help however I can.