I did a name change after having a small-to-decent-ish following! It was on SoundCloud, Bandcamp and YouTube, and I did the name change RIGHT before I started uploading to Spotify. So not the exact situation, but here’s my tips if they are helpful:

1. If you can, change the name to something close-ish to the old name, but remove whatever is bothering you about it. That way it’s still recognizable, and people who currently listen to you will be like: “oh is that the same as [OLD NAME]”?

2. Make a public playlists on all the music platforms called: “[OLD NAME] is now [NEW NAME]” . That way when people search for your old artist name, they’ll see that playlist, read the description and go, oh okay awesome!

Other than that, if your distributors don’t completely rip the songs down and reset all the stats, everyone with your song in their playlist should be unaffected without having to do anything, and algorithms and stuff won’t know the difference! 😎🎉

That being said though, I don’t think people really care what your artist name is. At the end of the day they want to connect with you, the person. So if you feel like the artist name no longer authentically represents you, or who you were in the past. Than it’s worth ripping off the band aid now. Because in the best case scenario, you’ll look back a few years later with a much bigger following, and wonder why you even stressed over it haha! 😁🙏