The case for surprise, the case against hype building
As a tiny little independent artist/creator/maker/whatever I am, I am no longer convinced that a large marketing campaign to tease then promote a release is worth the trouble.
This might be quite different if you are established. But if you are small, I don’t think it’s an effective tactic, and I question whether it’s worth the effort at all. Instead, I think I am going to just start announcing/promoting things when they are out.
I just had my first music release of 2026, a collaboration with Unit of the band Combover Beethoven. We discussed the idea of some promo before release, and we did it, and a few people liked the promo content. Unit wrote up a nice backstory of how the collaboration came together. We got 40 people to listen to it and 4 people bought it! But I’m not convinced that the small hype we built before its release made much, if any, difference.
It feels often that promotion is just “something you do” as a music artist. Maybe I’m just really short on free time and I loathe the idea of spending it thinking of different ways to convince people to listen to my stuff; maybe I’m yearning to be a true artist in the sense that my work is purely an act of self-expression and I don’t care about how many people patronize it satisfies me enough just to have it experienced by others. It also just feels completely unnatural to talk so much about something you’re intentionally keeping to yourself. (Maybe I’m a terrible tease and you need to be a good tease in order to be successful in the music industry?)
Regardless, I don’t think it’s worth the effort in the current social media landscape, unless you are willing to pay lots of money to advertising platforms (ie. those same social media platforms) in order to get views.
Instead, I want to lean all-in on surprise. Just dropping something once it happens. When I’ve done this, if anything it’s fun! And the idea of the surprise seems to be worthy of word-of-mouth engagement in and of itself, especially if the music that was surprise-released meets a certain quality bar.
Plus, the benefit of having the music already out there is it’s now part of your catalog (eg. on Bandcamp or some other music store). It can now be experienced alongside the rest of your stuff. If you’re hype-building, you’re so dead focused on the one song that there’s almost no reason for a listener to go check out your other stuff – the single release is what matters. I’ve found (again personally) that, the more I talk about music after it’s out, the more likely I am to get people playing the other things in my discography.
I am completely basing this on personal, anecdotal experience, but there is quite a bit of precedent for this idea. So many great albums were dropped on society as a total surprise: Beyonce’s self-titled 2013 album, Radiohead’s In Rainbows, Taylor Swift’s folklore. Enough that there is a Wikipedia article about the concept of a surprise release.
I think it’s worth questioning all the work an artist puts into promotion. What might happen if you just didn’t do that work, and just talked about your stuff once it’s out?
