r/musicmarketing

I don't remember interacting with such site and so now I get two emails from a person claiming to be art of YouGrowPromo.

I have a hard time to figure out if it's legit or not.

Can this be trusted?

Is it legit?

Quotes from the email:

"

Hey Mellified Man ,

Just wanted to quickly follow up on my previous message in case you haven’t had the chance to check it yet.

Best regards,

YouGrowPromo

"

And

"Hey Mellified Man ,

Just wanted to send one last follow-up regarding my previous message.

No worries at all if now isn’t the right time, but if promotion support for your music is something you may be interested in exploring in the future, I’d be happy to share more information about how we work.

Best regards,

YouGrowPromo"

Hi all,

I make music and thought I’d try tiktok for once a few days ago, I was reading up on the algorithm and tips etc and thought why not try it so I posted a techno remix of quite a popular track at the moment and managed to get a significant amount of attention. 150k+ views, 30k likes, loads of messages / follows about the release of the song but now im stuck and don’t know the best way to attack.

I want to keep it unreleased for a few weeks whilst I send it out to DJs as it does have a good potential in my opinion but I have 0 social media background. At the moment I’m just posting rave clips with the track over it and a cringey caption eg this is the closing track at a rave” but I feel like posting these constantly is going to die off, I had another couple that reached 1k + 2k likes but now they seem to be only getting a few hundred and I feel like it’s because they are the same and the algorithm isn’t really pushing them.

Does anyone have any advice or could help me with this? I don’t mind paying a fee if it’s someone with experience too. Thanks

ey everyone,

I just put out a new ambient track called Still Nebula on SoundCloud.

For this one, I really wanted to capture that feeling of being frozen in space, completely still in front of a massive cosmic cloud. It starts with very deep, evolving analog-style pads, and then a slow, hypnotic beat kicks in alongside an introspective piano melody.

I put a lot of work into the soundscape and the overall texture. I'd love to know what you think of the mix, the atmosphere, or just how it makes you feel!

Thanks for listening, hope it helps you relax or focus today. ✨

I love making stickers for my band and especially in Portland, you can put them everywhere. The thing is, so can everyone else. Bars, street poles, walls, stickers are everywhere.

So my question is, what would make a sticker stand out to you enough for you to actually look it up? Seems like people don't like being "sold to," so QR codes kinda get an eye roll. Do you go funny? Aesthetically pleasing? Or just make what you want and hope for the best?

​

So a friend of mine withaybe 450 IG followers posts a really bad video of him lip syncing to a really awful white boy hip hop song he sung.

Somehow within a day and zero promotion afaik he is at 50k views and 500 likes.

Another friend in reggae and pop/rock subgenres roughly scraps at 1k and 50 likes after a week. With way better music, lyrics and video production value.

Trying to figure out what is happening on the algorithm as these results don't make sense to me.

What gives?

Does anyone have any music podcast recommendations? Interviews, insights, stories behind the music. It can be focused on large/small acts, all genres of music.

Having a time finding new podcasts, any recommendations would be helpful!

So after exhausting every other marketing channel, I've finally decided to start testing paid promotion/ads to see what the results look like.

However, the music I make (Jungle) isn't a listed option within Instagram targeting. I can target Drum and Bass, which is the closest, but it's still pretty different than that.

Is there a way to better target? Or do I just have to run it with a metric as close as possible, and then retarget people that interacted with it before on a new ad?

If it's the latter, how exactly do I do that within Instagram? Do I have to install a pixel and then upload the data instead, or does Instagram allow for a built in retargeting option to people that engaged on a previous ad?

I want to talk about how incredibly successful Hypeddit used to be for independent musicians versus the frustrating reality of how it operates today.

For reference and context my soundcloud username is morrill_music

When I first started running ads on Hypeddit back in 2023, they were a massive catalyst for me as a smaller artist. They allowed me to reach a genuine fanbase and get actual engagement from real people. I still remember my very first ad campaign: it pulled in 15 downloads and over 500 plays in a single day. For context, a $100 ad today can barely reach 500 plays total, even with the SoundCloud algorithm supposedly pushing the track.

Backed by the momentum of those early ads, I became incredibly consistent, dropping one remix or original track every single month. Hypeddit was the engine driving my music to a real crowd. My issue was never the quality or production level of my music; it was simply getting it in front of the right people. Once I had that visibility, everything clicked.

Because of that reach, one of my remixes went semi-viral. It racked up over 3,000 downloads and charted in the Top 5 of the platform's Top 100 downloads. Shortly after, another remix popped off, gaining thousands of downloads and eventually landing in the hands of Dom Dolla. He tested it out with smaller crowds in Denver before unleashing it on the Circuit Grounds stage at EDC 2024.

My music went from zero listeners to being played on one of the biggest festival stages in the world, a milestone I credit entirely to the traction built through Hypeddit ads. That same remix went on to be played at Coachella by Amelie Lens, supported by Tiësto on his radio show, and dropped worldwide by Dom Dolla. None of this would have been possible without the platform's initial power.

"My music went from zero listeners to being played on one of the biggest festival stages in the world... None of this would have been possible without the platform's initial power."

Fast-forward two years, and the reality of Hypeddit ads is completely different. They feel utterly useless.

Over the lifetime of my account, I gained over 12,000 downloads via Hypeddit. My SoundCloud managed to retain about 9,000 of those followers (the rest downloaded the tracks and immediately unfollowed). Yet today, not a single one of those 9,000 followers actively engages with my new releases. It feels as though my profile has been artificially inflated with dead accounts that simply don't care about my current music.

Right now, spending $100 on a Hypeddit ad feels like being completely shadowbanned. I am seeing maybe five views and two to three downloads a day.

What happened? A platform that was once an invaluable tool for new artists to break into the scene and truly be heard feels entirely overhauled and broken. Even with the massive real-world success my songs have achieved, I find myself completely discouraged from releasing new music. Without a viable pathway to get tracks in front of a large, genuinely interested pool of people, independent creators are left in the dark.

I got an email last night saying that a track of mine has been put on a big (4m followers) Spotify editorial playlist, but I can't see it on the playlist. The playlist is one of those personalised made for you playlists so I'm not sure if that changes things.

Has anyone had experience of this? How long after you received the email did you actually end up on the playlist?

Welcome everyone,
I’ve been writing music for a few years now. But i finally found my niche which is Conscious hip-hop. I’m looking for the next steps, i know i need a beat and a few other things.

im currently posting every week mostly covers and some original songs but nothing too crazy. i’m working on my first single and it’s not ready to release yet, im thinking in one or two months i’ll get it done. when is it a good time to start promoting before release? i want to post short videos of the song to gather some attention but i don’t know if it’s worth doing it now or if i should wait till i get the song ready to release

I've been running 5 creatives in my campaign for almost a week, with 10 more ready to go. After the 4th day, I replaced the lowest converting ad and the highest cpc ad for two new ones. Now after a couple more days one of the new ones is getting the most conversions but VERY expensive. The others are sitting around 20-40 cents but now only getting a few conversions.

And to top it off, my best performing ad dropped like a stone when I added the two new ones and doesn't get any spend at all anymore.

Very confusing and frustrating.

What's the strategy for culling/replacing ads so meta keeps pushing the winners (i.e. most conversions and lowest cpc) and not have it sink money into the ones that aren't working or abandoning good performers altogether?

After its nazi rents of 2025, i figured it would be a nice idea for a parody to make the opposite version of him. I should mention that it's a real artistic project ! I did a lot a researches finding communist propaganda music from the 20th century, did some beats, i wrote the lyrics using the communist and the kanye west lores, I did the rap and only after that i converted my vocal into kanye west voice using an a non-generative website, and you have to work really hard on your flow and your accent if you wanna sound realistic ! So the AI represent 20 seconds in hours and hours of work

Spotify rolled out “Verified by Spotify” with real human review and it's supposed to show who is not AI.

Initially they published articles saying we need 10k monthly active listeners, but a few days ago they updated it and I got the verification on my music profile which only has 1.7k monthly listeners.

It could be because I'm a pre-AI artist (I released music before AI got good), but independent artists can still take steps to improve their chance of getting verification!

A quick checklist is:

- Increase social media posting and run meta ads to increase external traffic to Spotify

- Make sure profile images have your face!

- Avoid AI generated cover art

- Make a website if you can

- Use playlisting to drive listener volume (MusicMinutes, SubmitHub)

- Report any suspicious spikes you get where it's from a single playlist and looks like bots

- Add your social links to your Spotify for Artists (you can only do it on the web platform)

...and more

This is most of the info but to see how it meets their published guidance and extra checklist points, I posted a blog on our MusicMinutes site 😊

Good luck!!

I tried promoting my music on twitter but everyone on there seems so mean.

I get my music isn’t amazing but no need to attack it so badly.

I feel like the only thing I accomplished was getting haters and trolls. But I don’t think anyone hate listens to music so it’s pointless

I have been posting for a year now. TikTok, IG, and YouTube. TikTok is growing well for me. IG is okay, but YouTube is flatlining.

I post the same content on all 3 exposures carousels are what do well on TikTok, but only get shown to followers on IG and can’t post them on YouTube.

It seems like no one on YouTube shorts wants to see reels of my performing my music for 30 seconds with some text on screen. On TikTok and IG I get much more traction with that same content.

So I am thinking of trying something new on YouTube… but what? I want it to be adjacent to my music so subscribers also go over to Spotify.

Ideas are: covers and how my songs are built. I haven’t tried either of those yet, but I’m thinking of it. Any other ideas?

I used the “Promote” feature with small budgets of $5-$15 per video and targeting different countries just to experiment.

I used videos of my original songs, which to be honest are just lo fi folk songs without mass appeal, and titles like “Emotional Nostalgic Song | Song title | Artist name” and some photography of landscapes and the song title in the thumbnail itself

But honestly, I don’t know what to make of it. A certain small subset of viewers according to studio analytics actually sat through my songs, but I never really get any comments and likes are pretty few and far in between.

I guess I expect an occasional comment like “cool song” but nothing.

It’s a really strange change in behavior because between 2006-19 or so I could post (non music) videos of like workouts, me speaking other languages etc and I’d always get comments. My assumption was that music is more interesting.

Well, you live and learn.