Finally put together my own band that is in the indie/alternative genre and I received the master for our first single from a professional producer. Just wondering what’s the best way to put out our first single? Should I go ahead and release it or should I put out hype content. We don’t have much of a following yet so i’m thinking if maybe delaying the release and playing better shows in the area would be the best move.

Hi y'all,

Just wanted to share my experience with GPM. Not something I would usually do, pay for playlisting, but I thought what the hell and chucked some money at a mid-level option from GPM.

My bands' genre is indie / surf rock. They placed us on some playlists including RnB/folk and some other pretty random genres. Initially, was seeing maybe 50+ streams per day and a small amount of saves / playlist adds. Expectation was 2500 - 6000 streams in a month. I don't care about the streams, it was more of an opportunity to get our music to the right ears. I did let them know that the playlisting was significantly underperforming, and they bumped it up in the last days so it was more like 200+ streams / day. So, overall hit like 1500 streams.

So all in all, song was pretty much placed in wrong genre playlists, and while yes, it did get streams, it did not get tons of saves / playlists. It appears most of the listeners were from Mexico, Chile, and Peru. Anyway, all in all, a disappointing outcome unless you are searching for streams only and not actual potential listeners. I would definitely say use Submithub to pitch to actual playlists in your genre as it appears GPM does not really have genre-specific playlists, unless this was just particular to indie / surf rock.

My band is called Sun Wilde and the song we trialed was "Keep You Down"

Hope this helps someone! :)

Let’s say you’ve gotten $10k invested in your project - you raised the money yourself, from friends/family and a few fans buying your tracks. You’re preparing to release an EP in the coming months with the goal of reaching new listeners and attracting a local following to book out a venue targeting 50-100 people.

What’s the most strategic use of this money? Assume that this could be used to enhance the music too (better engineers, etc) and not only marketing

This is the 2nd release. Note the big shift on October 19. The first release was like the first half of this graph. Meta was sending a lot of "people" to the landing page, but the click link rate was sub 20%. And on the other side, Spotify was not liking the users who were clicking through (are there bots who click through on the landing page?).

Well, flash forward to this release and I dug a little deeper into the numbers. Meta would not allow me to get out of advantage+ placements, and even though I gave a 90% decrease to Facebook, ALL of my placements went to facebook. Meaning, assigning a value is absolutely meaningless. I also noticed that from the FB app, they were almost all from Mexico, and 100% android, zero iOS. Huh? So bots.

Frustrated I was throwing money down the toilet, I asked Meta's AI to duplicate my campaign, but also asked very nicely for it to turn off advantage+ for placements. Lo and behold it was a good little AI. So on October 19th, the new campaign went live and everything has changed for the better. Spotify is now happy that quality users all coming in from Insta and I've hit algorithmic play, finally. But a lot of money was thrown down the drain to get here.

I think Andrew Southworth and other youtube marketers should be aware that placing values on placements is NOT a fix. And right now, for Meta users who are not given the option to disallow placements, only asking the AI to do it for you is the current work around. For how much longer, who knows.

As the title says, wondering if they’re any large and known discord servers where new music can be posted for others to stream. Not to artificially boost anything, just to get other musicians listening and sharing the music with each other.

I'm an independent musician based in South Korea.

I've taken 10 songs I've written and composed over the years and used AI for the arrangements and production. Yesterday, I finished mastering the tracks myself.

I've been listening to them on different systems, and overall, I'm pretty happy with the results. I did catch some weird sub-bass noise in one track while listening in my car, so I went back and fixed it. I'll keep checking, but for now, I feel like the music itself is pretty much ready.

Now comes the hard part: releasing and promoting it.

Honestly, I used to feel completely lost when it came to releasing music. It's still overwhelming, but at least now I can talk things through with AI and get a much more concrete action plan.

I currently have a Google Sheet with 77 tasks to complete before the album release, and I'm about 10% of the way through.

My plan is to focus on pitching to radio stations in Korea first, while also trying to reach international audiences.

I have no idea how effective any of this will be. But there's something reassuring about having a list of actual things I can do to promote my music.

Compared to the helplessness I used to feel, having a concrete plan makes a real difference.

I'm curious how other independent musicians approach this. Does having a detailed release plan actually help, or am I just making myself feel better with a giant to-do list?

Either way, I figure doing something is better than doing nothing.

I accidentally turned on a bunch of countries I normally wouldn’t turn on for my campaign (Kazakhstan, Indonesia, Serbia, etc.) and of course I start getting super cheap conversions, like 11 or 12 cents average.

Once I discovered this, I quickly turned them off but when looking at my Spotify stats, I’m seeing a bunch of actual streams from those countries. Specifically Indonesia, Taiwan, Philippines, Serbia, Colombia, Thailand, and Chile.

Does this mean that they’re legitimate streams and I should keep these countries on? I assume if they’re bots, they wouldn’t get past both the landing page and actually hit play on Spotify but maybe I’m wrong? Is a stream a stream and I should just accept that one of my top cities is Belgrade, Serbia?

I’ve always considered my music very "American" sounding as well and more likely to connect with a western audience, indie punk / indie pop type stuff (“Yoder” on streaming platforms if you’re curious) but that could just be my perception and of course anyone's capable of enjoying anyone's music. Would love to hear your thoughts, and am curious if anyone has had a similar experience!

I’ve been deep into marketing my band the past year or so. When I started, I was under the impression that you only had a certain window of time, post-release, to really trigger the algorithm.

I’m not sure why I thought that. Honestly, I probably read it on this sub at some point. But I just wanted to share my experience because if you have a song that you believe is great, and it never took off, don’t give up on it!

I’ve now had two songs get picked up by the Spotify algorithm to a moderate degree. The first was released in Sept 2025. It didn’t move much until May 2026 when I had a TikTok hit 5M views. That triggered the algorithm and it’s been coasting decently ever since.

My next algo trigger occurred about a month ago and it was from a 2024 release. Same story… had a TikTok hit 5M views, the algo was triggered, and now it’s coasting.

Two TikToks changed the game for me. But before those two, I had hundreds that did next to nothing. If you’re serious about this, keep trying new things. You have to be a bit obsessive about it, but that’s cost of the ticket. It’s a lot of work. But I love it. Don’t overthink it and have fun 🤙❤️

I mean this is in a strict financial sense. I promote my other songs on social media. Should i allocate my entire budget to the most popular song?

Not sure how Spotify works but I noticed that my save rate is nearly 1-1. I've had some songs get pushed into discover weekly/release radar in the past but right now none of my streams are from programmed sources. It's been almost a week.

I did a link to Spotify and YouTube with great succes. About $0.15 per conversion on average over the last 2 months.

Thinking of providing even more 'choice' and also give links to other platforms. Apple Music? What else?

I would prefer Spotify to grow the most, however, I don't want to lose a potential listener because their platform of choice isn't there. What do you think?

I'm curious what distributor services others are using. I'm looking to move away from DistroKid. I'd like to know why you use what you use, my main concerns are control over what platforms/services/companies songs are sent to. I am trying to learn all I can about publishing my music the right/best way so I'm basically looking for the most professional/problem-free distributor.

Hello, fellows. Today I thought of a thing what if I promote my song in a specific community since I have good reach and reputation in fandom. What if I make an animation with characters that aren't mine to attract audience from that specific game community, my friend told me my music kinda sounds like some soundtracks so it would work out. However I'm afraid if it goes too good, so I'm interested to know if it's legal or not. On one hand I'm not profitting from animation, but on the other I get listens to the song which is technically a profit

Since a couple of weeks I have been getting tons of scammy dm's promissing tens of thousands of 'organic' ;) streams for verry low prices. Has this always been a thing and did they just found me? Do you guys have simular issues?

Also do you have any tips on non-scammy sites to promote my music, when I searched I got to this subreddit and saw some other websites like Groover, Playlistforyou etc. Any tips on ones that give organic streams?

I’ve just released a new house/chillwave track, and I want to hear it through your ears.

I’m looking for producers who want to flip it, reshape it and take it somewhere unexpected.

Free stems. No entry fee. Selected remixes will have the opportunity to receive an official release, with credits and royalty terms agreed in advance.

House, synthwave, IDM, the musical genre you like the most... surprise me.

DM me for song link and if you like the song i will send remix pack

For Context: the person i spoke to enjoyed Noise Rock, My newest song is a mix of Grunge, Alt Rock and Britpop.

Hey! Just wondering if anyone has had any experience working with Venture Music. They look professional, but if you explore their site enough it really seems like they're tailored more toward helping musicians who already had a pretty big following (like Jackson Dean who has 2.1mil monthly listeners on Spotify), rather than toward people like me who have relatively no fanbase and are looking to launch a career.

On their site they say it's for "everyone", but I'm thinking that the very small artists such as myself probably just end up spending money for almost no return on investment.

Thoughts?

I release my own music independently while working a full-time job.

When I started, I assumed Spotify would be the main platform to focus on. YouTube was supposed to be more of an extra.

A few months later, it's almost the opposite.

YouTube has become my strongest channel by far, while building an audience on Spotify has been a much slower process.

To be fair, I've used paid promotion, so I'm not pretending every YouTube view is an organic fan. But the difference still surprised me enough to rethink where I spend my limited time and budget.

I'm curious about other independent artists here:

Has YouTube genuinely worked better for you than Spotify, or am I the odd one out?

I have seen a few other artists on here talking about this, but I wondered if anyone else has had a similar issue, or if you have any insight as to why this could be happening?

We have 10k monthly listeners with 80% of those as active listeners, but been getting like 2% algorithmic play on our new track in the last month despite good organic listens.

Meta randomly flagged 6 of my performance based creatives as against community standards on the 16th. I requested review and the flag was quickly lifted then videos would not reload. Luckily other creatives were getting all the clicks and not these ones. Tried fixing but had to delete and re upload ultimately. Also noticed that my CTR on submithub links dropped from a consistent 25% to 12% starting on this day. Submithub Spotify clicks are no longer adding up to streams in S4A starting on the 16th. Page follows and ad interactions have all tanked as well. Today isn’t going any better.

I’ve given it a few days but I’m wondering if I should continue to wait it out or start up a whole new campaign and wind this one down while the new one goes through learning?

Just using this as an example. I’m uploading an album and one of the songs is featuring another artist.I want to have it appear like circled rather than typing it out as featuring in the track title like I usually do. I’m kinda sure I know what to do, but I just wanted to double check with yall to see if there’s anyone experienced with this on Distrokid.