After doing some research these past four to five months, I have began to take a more pro active approach to promoting myself.
I’ve had a bad experience using certain promotion services when I released my debut album in 2019.
When I came out of hiatus in 2014, I had to make some choices about myself as an artist, as I began to recommit myself to pursuing music. The choices, caused me to be unsure and my confidence in my choice was lacking.
Once I began to establish myself on some of the popular music service websites, I began to do some promoting.
But before I made the decision to promote or distribute, I began to receive followers and positive and encouraging feedback for artist that were well established. That gave me the confidence to began promoting.
I began working with a couple of companies, which were very reputable for promotion; focusing on establishing
myself on soundcloud, I would pay low end campaigns to get familiar with how it worked.
The campaigns were designed to give you followers, streams, and comments; set in with incremental levels of possible statistical outcomes for various prices. Ex: a package for $20.00 offers 5,000 streams, and so many followers and 10,000 comments.
Whatever the package offered, I would always surpass the threshold each time, and I mean substantially. After receiving the results on soundcloud, I decided to distribute my 1st album.
Each track chosen for the 1st album, were the songs that performed the best on soundcloud.
At the time I had a song “Dispensary” that did extremely well on soundcloud. I decided to test the waters on “Dispensary” and invest in a higher level package which offered 100,000 streams and all the other features for $45.00. The campaign promised 100,000 streams and the song received over a million streams during that campaign. So I released on the streaming platforms, and began promoting.
Because the song performed the way it did with the promotion and being released in such a short time, I was accused of artificial streaming.
Before the investigation was complete, my catalog was removed from the stores and my membership was revoked.
After the investigation, it was proven that those streams were not artificial and they had to pay me.
They never reinstated my membership, but they did pay me.
Years later’ right now today, I’m back with that distributor, and the relationship is good.
I have learned some things about promotion and playlist placements, and now I'm anxious to move forward on investing in myself and began to make a statement, announcement, and put myself on the map and my existence in this game.
