Today I’d like to talk about “pay for my sins,” but first, I want to reflect on my initial impressions of the music promotion market. When I started pitching music three months ago, I was optimistic. I thought the songs weren’t bad and that the main job was to find someone who could get them to as many people as possible, and I still think that way. The hard part is finding reliable people or sites, and it’s genuinely difficult. Everyone offers organic promotion, real followers, real views, but then you discover that reality is more complex, and scams are around every corner.

Spotify removed the first song I released for suspected artificial streaming; they’ll probably remove subsequent ones too because Spotify doesn’t tolerate anomalous listening spikes—those where you go from 5 daily listens to 2000, then back to 8, then back to 3000. I’m ready to re-upload them, but the loss of time, money, and health is heavy, and it’s hard to stay optimistic. However, for the first two songs, I made the mistake of trusting people without doing my research. For “Apocalypse Now,” they used bots, and for “Against the Grain,” they bought clicks, comments, and views. I remember seeing a job ad some time ago that said “work from home,” and basically, you’d get an email with links and instructions on what to do: “like these links,” “comment on this video after watching X seconds,” “subscribe to the channel,” etc., and for each action, you’d get a few cents. That’s how they do it. It’s a fake world.

It’s a fake world that kills artists because when I publish a video and get only 5 comments with 1000 followers, either the followers are fake, or what I’m offering is so uninteresting that even the followers I have can’t be bothered to comment. I think it’s more likely the former because a true follower, if surprised or disappointed, almost always tends to let you know.

Anyway, you almost always grow from experience… almost always, because then you look for accepted organic promotion sites, you sign up for Groover, send your song to various curators and promoters who promise to put your song on their Spotify playlists, and you end up with choppy spikes: Day 1 = 3000 views, Day 2 = 8, Day 3 = 2000 views, Day 4 = 5… in a month, Spotify will delete it. And this is Groover… a site described as reliable. It’s tough to keep going like this.

I’ve found a couple of sites that work well, but in terms of results, they give you very little. For example, with exposure of the song to a maximum of 250,000 users and 10,000 views, you get a maximum of 5 or 6 followers on average, which is almost 75 euros per follower. The road is uphill and full of crap and potholes (full of crap). I hope I can keep having the strength to go on, but it’s not a given.

I’ll talk about “pay for my sins” next Tuesday.

I want to be calm, and I’ve already gotten worked up. The other day I punched a fan because, among other things, I also have to deal with singers who refuse to sing, who sing badly, or who mess up their vocal entrances, and that’s something I don’t tolerate because first, I’m paying them what they asked, and second, they didn’t mess up a live performance; they messed up the vocal attack in the recording studio. That’s enough to make me want to send them to cut grass with a brushcutter on the highways under the sun; then you’d see them find the humility and professionalism to record properly.

I can only imagine their live performances, Jesus Christ…