In today’s blog post, my music promotion experiments have led me to some very philosophical questions. It’s been an interesting experience.
TL;DR As a round up, I tried out SoundCloud Artist Pro, slammed Reddit, X and BlueSky with posts, followed the Facebook content creator weekly targets including created my first Facebook reels and then mirroring with YouTube shorts and… tracking numbers left me feeling a little bit empty and depleted. The end result, involved me reflecting on who I am and what I actually want. My conclusion was meaningful connection through music rather than watching numbers pour in. While it was nice and quite exhilarating at first, it gets quite exhausting and I don’t think it’s something that I want to keep doing, or at least, not at that pace. It’s a funny old game. Algorithms will scatter gun my music across a range of different people which means I will spend a chunk of time bothering people who I would never choose to get in contact with in the first place.
Making connections, not numbers
My conclusions were that I enjoyed making connections more than getting the numbers. A good question is whether you need numbers to make connections?
Thankfully, along with my own music making, writing the editors, sharing and making music with the editors is a lot of fun for me and it’s where I get to chat music with people. I get to meet people passionate about the same type of gear, share goals, and hear gear it in action inside a mix. It is a lot slower but also rewarding.
SoundCloud: Seven songs with seven amplifies
In relation to the metrics, I used SoundCloud Artist Pro to promote seven sends over seven days. I had total play of 16 tracks in its entirety. This rocketed up to 770ish on day one with 11 likes, Fade Away getting 6 (which mirrors Youtube), a further 180 by days two with a loss of one like and by day three, about 25 plays. After a really nice dopamine hit of getting my music out there, it fizzled out for me. For context, you may argue my music is just not that great. For that, you are welcome to check it out and make up your mind because that could be a completely valid arguement.
The positives are that I did build up plays, likes and a handful of followers which means if I finish after the trial, there may be a couple more people out there who appreciate my music. I also felt that the algorithms were pretty good in that, although brief, the metrics (particularly likes) mirrored the same type of feedback from YouTube. It felt pretty accurate and authentic in that respect. It got there a lot faster and with a second boost, would most likely increase visibility further. However, I’m not going to continue (for now at least). I can see that it could potentially be a good tool for exposure but I’m not willing to pay.
Facebook Reels and Weekly Activity
Interesting one this, my Facebook page has the least presence with only four followers. I have no idea why this is. My guess is that I do not post from within Facebook and maybe Facebook does not push content that goes outside of Facebook. I could be wrong (these re just thoughts) but if I were to build a platform like that, I would angle it to make internal promotion would go a lot further. Anyhow, completed the weekly activities, learned how to make 2160 x 3840, 4K reels and posted. I gained a good number of views, likes (views rocketed) and it was a fun process. In fact, through this and posting on forums, I had a huge spike in activity with about 2.2k views and two new followers. I think where I went wrong would be using AI videos under my authentic, human made music. People may associated the two and something I would do differently. I also like strange videos, the obviously unauthentic use of AI laughing – a bit like canned humour because I find it has a kind of funny but unsettling quality about it.
YouTube Shorts
I learnt how to create YouTube shorts. It was fun. I wanted to create teasers for upcoming music and I attempted this before but did not realise it had to be a vertical format. This time, I succeeded. I released a few different types of shorts. Oddly, the one that did well had very obviously, almost casrtoonish AI visuals slightly adjusted to be in time with the music. Even now, that one is still going despite receiving the mos downvotes. It’s really odd how it’s being pushed by the algorithm. It states clearly in the title – NO AI MUSIC. The net result of the YouTube shorts led to the loss of one subscriber. Not a big deal in the scheme of things and I have learned a lot. I enjoyed creating the shorts can can see this will be a useful format for the future.
Substack
For Substack, I up’d my posting a lot but felt that I just contributed to making more noise. I didn’t really see that much more engagement but like with all of this, you could argue that I just wasn’t posting engaging content and spent more time keeping things warm.
Substack is a funny place and a bit of a mixed bag. I like to hear from a good number of people but it often gets crowded withs lots of meaningless posts to keep things ticking over and maintaining visibility. I get it, I know why it’s done and understand it. It can also feel quite noisy though and I felt like I added to the noise. If some of the people there stopped posting, even if a bit meaningless, I’d miss it but then it seems to encourage everyone to do it and that’s where the noise comes from. So maybe it does work in some way and I do like it. Engagement with people can be very good. I felt like to get the numbers, I had to be that person constantly posting and I feel like I am bugging people.
Music Promotion Experiments – May 2026
I feel disillusioned with X because I feel that nearly all of my pushed feeds are now suspect AI videos. This may just be my experience based upon who I follow. I posted a few times but rarely get anything back. I personally feel that X has changed a lot since AI and the change from Twitter. I rarely get meaningful engagement in relation to the things that interest me.
An interesting one this. I thought I was posting genuinely useful content in places such as in the guitar pedals forum for editors like the X70 for the Boss SE-70 and Lexicon LSP series for the 1, 5 and Reflex. I had a lot of downvotes but also, a lot of upvotes leaving everything slightly ahead. Met some need people which was really nice. My conclusions here were that lots of forums are now being flooded with vibe coding. I wasn’t sure what this meant and looked it up. Seems like people are using AI to write plugins and release it. As many of you know to your frustration, it takes me a while to really make things work but that’s not down to skill, it’s down to well thought out applications that work with a good workflow. Seems like a number of people are skipping ahead, releasing bog standard products without the skills to check for memory management, efficiency and longevity and it’s causing a bit of a backlash. It’s fair. Definitely not something I have encountered before and for those who don’t know me – then people may assume it’s vibe coded. So sadly, this is a new thing I’m going to have to deal with. I would argue that at the level of depth I write for – I just cannot see how this could be vibe coded but for a non programmer – it’s hard to make that judgment.
Conclusions
Fun to experiment and fun to learn more about all of this. No chance of a viral video but then, do I actually need the numbers when I’m getting more meaning out of engaging with people? I will play some more but that will be towards the end of summer.