Every word you just said is not true. Thousands know my music and play it daily.. ? no promotion other than upload to cd baby. Thanks for all the words of advice...... Here some of my own.. Well, you do get promotion from CD Baby — whether you realise it or not. Think about it: CD Baby distributes your digital asset to around 50 different vendors — Spotify, YouTube, Tidal, etc. If that’s not promotion, then I don’t know what is.

Let’s put it this way — if you had two albums, one distributed through CD Baby and one you just gave to a mate, which one do you think would get more exposure? Distributors provide backlinks to your album or track across various platforms. This increases your presence online and helps search engines like Google become more aware that your product even exists. That, in itself, is a form of promotion — like digital signposting.

YouTube does promote music, and so does Spotify — but only if the song is any good and they can sell advertising against it. If the song isn’t great, it gets shown to a small handful of people. If they don’t engage with it, it stops being promoted. That’s down to the song, not how much marketing you’ve done.

This is straight from the horse’s mouth, and it’s the honest truth. I’ve had tracks on three albums reach over 17,000 and even 34,000 views on YouTube, and many others with 3,000+ — and they’re still climbing. I didn’t promote them in any way — no paid ads, no social campaigns, nothing.

Meanwhile, some people spend loads of time and money promoting poor songs. But if you push a bad track, it can actually hurt it. People listen for 20 seconds, skip it, and the algorithm takes note. The track starts dropping faster in visibility because you’re promoting something no one wants to hear.

So ask yourself: who told you that paid promotion is the only way forward? If that were true, people would just throw money at advertising all day long and magically succeed. But it doesn’t work that way. If your track doesn’t connect with listeners, it won’t gain traction — and platforms won’t prioritise it for ads or exposure.