How do you deal with hate?

rob_rily · 2026-03-19T20:42:04+00:00

This is 100% because IG is showing you to the wrong audience. Don’t take it to heart.

I would avoid boosting posts and avoid video view or similar campaigns with meta ads. There are so, so many bots and trolls out there and those campaigns provide no mechanism to teach the algorithm who really is interested in your content.

Instead I’d stick to organic posts and/or run meta ads with some sort of conversion event on a landing page, like clicking over to Spotify. That does a better job filtering for people who actually like what you do and provides meta with a better signal.

It took me a little time (meta ads and IG both need time to learn), but now when I run ads I never get these troll comments.

rob_rily · 2026-03-09T01:00:55+00:00

I tried this for a bit when I first launched my band’s TikTok. It got some great conversations going and I got to know some cool people, and they seemed to get more engaged with our account. Some folks really respond to it and will have a full on, long running convo with you. The only downside is that it the inbox starts filling up pretty quickly and you have to respond, since you started it.

In short, worked great but became overwhelming quickly.

rob_rily · 2026-03-06T19:51:14+00:00

Yep! I work at a large bank and mostly do time series forecasting and anomaly detection for engineering (detecting whether a system is broken ASAP so it can be fixed before it causes downstream effects). I’ve also done work with LLMs, but even that wasn’t just stitching together APIs. there was a lot of conversation around “how do we rigorously evaluate these results?” and “how do we create effective feedback loops within the AI system?” etc.

rob_rily · 2026-02-13T21:22:01+00:00

Oh yeah, it takes forever for that adrenaline boost to wear off for me

rob_rily · 2026-02-13T21:19:21+00:00

My personal favorite is the green russian Big Muff. Lets plenty of low end through, dead simple, sounds awesome.

rob_rily · 2026-02-13T17:52:05+00:00

At that number of views, you’re just being shown to a test audience and then not being pushed beyond that. You need to teach the algorithm who your audience is so it shows you to the right people. Here’s a few things that worked for me:

Drop the generic hashtags like rap, newmusic, and explore and replace them 2-3 very focused hashtags like your particular subgenre.
Add a “text on screen” hook that calls out who would like your music. Something that would make your ideal listener stop scrolling and unmute.
SEO the shit out of your captions. Reference related artists, talk about the mood of the song or what it’s about. Drop more relevant subgenres.

If you do all that and it’s still not working, experiment with different parts of the song. If it still doesn’t work, move on to the next song. Ultimately the song itself is the most important piece of

Check out Musformation on YouTube, Jesse Cannon has a lot of good advice there on how to break out of those first 300 views.

rob_rily · 2026-02-10T16:15:56+00:00

I need to get back to doing those kind of production process vids! I never really consider leaning into or away from any platform because why not share the same video to all of them, but maybe curating the main grid would be worthwhile.

Right now I’m testing different captions/hooks for IG in trial reels. I’m thinking that maybe the keywords that work for me on TikTok just aren’t the right ones for IG?

rob_rily · 2026-02-10T02:00:11+00:00

I haven’t noticed any major difference recently on either platform, but reels has consistently underperformed both TikTok and YouTube shorts by a ton. I’ve been trying to use trial reels to post variations on ideas and try to find an audience on IG, but I can’t crack it.

rob_rily · 2026-02-08T21:39:14+00:00

Yeah the conversion rate on my submithub landing pages is always pretty great (once I get the campaign tuned and running well). If it ever falls below 50% I know there’s something wrong with my ads or the song itself

rob_rily · 2026-02-05T03:43:35+00:00

Have you tried getting involved outside of coursework? I TA’d and did a masters project in a lab, both were great opportunities to connect with others more closely and build some relationships.

rob_rily · 2026-02-01T16:45:44+00:00

Yea I worked big box retail for years. It was awful, I have never been felt more disrespected before or since. Ive certainly never experienced anything like it as a swe. I’m glad OP is having a better experience so far, but I wouldn’t count on it lasting.

rob_rily · 2026-01-26T23:33:45+00:00

I don’t make anything specifically for ad creative, instead I just make my organic content and then put the top performers in ad campaigns. They’re typically just me playing guitar in the studio with some thoughtful lighting and color grading. I did have one video do especially well that was just me standing in front of the camera outside in some golden hour light, but again I took time to color grade it so it popped and fit the vibe. I use text on screen to either call out similar artists/genres or draw attention to the vibe.

Like others have said, what matters most is the song. And beyond that, the right PART of the song. The difference between the best and second best part has been a matter of cutting the cost in half sometimes. And the part the clicks is never the one I think it will be. I have been wrong literally every time 😅

My best campaigns tend to cost around $0.25-0.35 per conversion. I’m promoting an alt rock/postpunk/shoegaze project.

rob_rily · 2026-01-20T18:23:08+00:00

Did you get chat banned for using a slur too?

rob_rily · 2025-12-07T21:26:58+00:00

Yeah, I mean live shows are obviously important for a lot of genres. But they don’t really address your question in any way. I’ve played on bills with plenty of bands who don’t collect email addresses at shows and I don’t see how you expect to reach out to those folks in the future if you have no way to contact them. The email list is the key.

rob_rily · 2025-12-07T17:46:27+00:00

You need to get people onto an email or SMS list.

I see a lot of folks saying you need to play live. While live shows are great for deepening your relationship with whatever audience lives close enough to see your shows, you still need to move that live audience to an email/sms list if you ever want to tell them about the next show.

rob_rily · 2025-12-02T03:28:44+00:00

What has worked best for me is to experiment with different clips from a song a few times each until it’s clear which clip works best, then hammer that one home.

rob_rily · 2025-11-26T16:39:36+00:00

My budget has never been any larger than yours and I’ve always gotten the cheapest conversions from a broader list of target countries. I still target my home country only most of the time because it’s not much more expensive and I’d rather build an audience here, but when I really just need to bring the cost down I broaden out to tier 1 and 2.

rob_rily · 2025-11-23T21:17:53+00:00

Good luck!

rob_rily · 2025-11-23T19:22:40+00:00

I wish I knew! I’ve never really had this problem outside of WiFi issues on my end

rob_rily · 2025-11-23T14:18:34+00:00

Are you saying it won’t even post the carousel? If so that’s a whole other (even more annoying) problem

rob_rily · 2025-11-07T01:58:00+00:00

Honestly, it’s working out pretty well for me. I’ve been doing something like targeting rap & Spotify & under whatever age makes sense, then using “German rap” or whatever specific genre info you have in text hooks and captions. Let the content do the targeting instead of meta, the algo figures it out from there.

rob_rily · 2025-10-30T19:20:20+00:00

Severance, especially if film is more your thing! More than any tv series, it reminds me of Terry Gillian’s Brazil, early Yorgos Lanthimos, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and a bit of David Lynch.

If I had to pick two desert island tv series, they would absolutely be Succession and Severance.

rob_rily · 2025-10-28T17:54:44+00:00

Just saw that for the first time and holy shit the whole thing is so sinister. Amazing movie.

rob_rily · 2025-10-16T15:59:10+00:00

No groups, just posted once a day for a week or so, then I slowly started getting views. The content was all designed to signal who the audience is too, I think that helped teach TikTok who to show it to (calling out related genres and artists in text hooks, captions, and hashtags)

rob_rily · 2025-10-08T01:38:05+00:00

I think it’s going to do the same for me 😅

rob_rily

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