Zero-stress marketing

or, goodbye streaming ecosystem

I’ve never really enjoyed marketing myself until I figured out my vibe on Threads. I used to find it daunting and frustrating – years ago, I’d assumed that nobody cares about what I have to put out there, and most of those who do market themselves are full of themselves.

I know now that both of these things are enormously untrue. I’ve come to enjoy being in my little corner of Threads for the little community I’ve built (despite the online spaces often being cesspools in other ways), and the idea of casually promoting my music as a byproduct of simply being there is fun without being daunting or disingenuous. It’s gotten me over a hump of promoting myself elsewhere - on other networks, even a little bit IRL. I may finally start thinking about playing a show!

I never want marketing my music (or anything I work on, for that matter) to be a huge point of stress. I don’t even mind when marketing takes up a lot of my time, but when it does, it should be fun and nature, not tedious or stressful. The minute it does, I’m not setting myself up well.

The streaming platforms (let’s be honest, Spotify and perhaps YouTube are the only players here that matter from a marketing perspective) are bizarrely marketing channels in their own right. If we think about them less as music players and more as radio, they essentially function as unreliable and easily-gamed marketing channels for independent artists: you strategically time releases to optimize Release Radar placement, you submit to (and often pay!) specific curators to feature your using in a playlist rotation, you hope the algorithm gods pick up your song and take it for a ride on the Discover Weekly train.

Playing this game is becoming a point of stress for me. If anything, it feels like anytime streaming comes up I get frustrated about something, whether it’s

• Fellow artists sharing a horror story about their streaming distributor inexplicably removing all their music from the internet, seemingly without recourse
• The many frustrating realities about Spotify, its business decisions, its complex & frustrating relationship with major record labels, its exec leadership and their own financial decisions
• The streaming model in general being hostile to all small artists
• The lack of listeners willing to go deeper than the one song they played (or was played for them by a shuffled playlist)

But also I am reasonably convinced that nothing I’ve done to market Kid Lightbulbs on streaming services has been worthwhile. I haven’t spent a ton of time or money on this, but I’ve spent more than, say, $200 in the past 2 years. And I know I should realistically spend more to have any reasonable return, but I have no budget for or interest in doing this. I have a family and a mortgage and it’s increasingly expensive to just live.

I also have come to realize all the incentives of the streaming ecosystem which are stacked against the artist, ultimately making it an unreliable and easily gamed marketing channel:

• Spotify actively makes it harder for independent music to get played, because it’s in their interest to entertain its customers with the cheapest audio content possible (eg. podcasts & AI-generated, perhaps even procedurally-generated audio).
• Playlist curators have figured out that they can build a reputation for themselves & a small income stream accepting submissions from artists, and therefore are incentivized only to make a playlist that gets a lot of numbers, even if that comes with nonsensical & rushed reasons for rejection, demanding that the artists follow the playlists to juice the numbers, or all meaningfully-played playlists largely sounding the same.
• The algorithm is decreasingly checked with human curation, and therefore easy to exploit with automated (bot) services, effectively meaning that algorithm placement, and thus plays & listeners, can be bought with the right budget.

This does not apply to every streaming platform – but the other streaming services don’t really have any pull here: Apple Music is great, but its discovery features aren’t; Amazon Music has a similar incentives problem with getting music played via Alexa, a service I have no interest in doing business with; YouTube is interesting but I can self-publish to YouTube. The other players are too small/niche^[1].

And therefore, Spotify, despite having only 36% market share of streaming music, which in itself is only how roughly 12% of the US listens to music, seems to command the attention of everyone with any sort of music industry clout because that’s where the music industry money is.

I don’t want to be a part of such industry. I’ve already talked about this ad nauseum on my blog.

I do, however, want my music to be available anywhere someone might want to listen to it. But I’ve also come to realize that virtually every streaming service that people use is either a similarly cruel capitalistic enterprise, or owned by a megacorporation. They’re also not doing anything to help my music get in the ears of potential listeners.

Bandcamp doesn’t even technically escape this definition (it’s owned by Songtradr which itself has Tencent & others as investors), but at least they let me build a music store I like, foster community & good music journalism, and allow patrons to support me directly in a few ways.

This all takes me back to a rant I posted late last year: the thing that’s working best is when I build community & an audience myself. If I’m going to do this work, it’s going to be on my terms.

This is why I made all my music free / pay-what-you-want earlier this year. And I realized that, by doing this, there is no longer a self-imposed barrier to my music on Bandcamp. Originally I was concerned that exclusively releasing music on a single platform would alienate potential listeners – but in practice, interested folks seem to listen as long as I make clear where to listen, and make it easy to do so. Bandcamp is that place for now, and for now it’s working even more effectively than the streaming services are for me.

This has led me to the following conclusion: I think I am going to exit the streaming game entirely after my next single.

Not just Spotify, the whole thing. Apple Music, Amazon Music, Deezer, Qobuz, whatever. I’m not going to worry about any of these services anymore. I am not going to pay for a streaming music distribution service at all.

Kid Lightbulbs material, moving forward, will exclusively be on specific platforms I choose. For now, that will be Bandcamp (and by extension kidlightbulbs.com).

I may also self-publish to YouTube – but I need to get my act together with regard to visual accompaniments to the music.

I’m not going to take down what I’ve released (yet, at least). LANDR allows me to keep the music up in perpetuity as long as I give them a 15% cut of streaming revenue (lol I make almost zero streaming revenue). I have a few singles and one album available on Spotify “for marketing purposes” (though we’ll see how long that lasts); most of my discography is still available on other services like Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube.