[ephaeton]

As a small artist living in quite a tiny niche - didgeridoo music - I have to say that the requirement for having your music on spotify is a no-go. Artists like myself don't benefit from spotify, I don't think, it's a net loss and you join the ranks of people with questionable actions (cf., e.g., spotify-AI-generated content). BC and/or YT would be viable alternatives for those who actually need discovery IMO.

E.g., here's some unexpected percussive organic trance for you that my collaborators and I put on BC: https://dojorich.bandcamp.com/album/tubecolab (I'm Freddie Veggie, btw). Music of that scope doesn't "perform" on spotify, so I won't invest in having it there.

[mg]

Hey, I run two somewhat popular music recommendation websites, the Music-Map and Gnoosic. I currently experiment with the ability to feature the music of artists, so I have put your music up on Gnoosic:

https://www.gnoosic.com/artist/freddie+veggie

And put you on the map next to some other didgeridoo artists:

https://www.music-map.com/freddie+veggie

I'm not yet sure when I will turn the signup into a public feature. Currently, I'm interested in feedback from artists. If you like, shoot me an email. The two sites have a pretty big audience, and I would like to find out how I can use it to help small artists.

[ephaeton]

awesome, thanks! And thank you for the invitation to a conversation, I'll take it up!

[ewhicher]

I love your music! Thanks for sharing your insight. I'm happy to say that verifying and posting from other services is coming... we just chose to start with Spotify. We are a small team of two working on this as a passion project so have to build little by little. We will keep you updated :)

[ephaeton]

Thank you! And I absolutely understand you gotta start somewhere.

Music recommendation is HARD. A lot of people don't think they like didgeridoo (which is where my expertise lies) until they hear a live performance of contemporary didge over a PA and they're in tears of joy (seriously, if you got the chance, give it a try - the stack of vibrations from this single, simple tube is amazing). IME, that wouldn't work for your average ear-buds or "smilie curve"-tuned over-ears. So, say, a friend convinces you to go to some concert with them - that would be a proper, healthy, sustainable music recommendation service. But of course that doesn't scale in any direction.

Best of luck with your project - I'll be checking back :-)

[ewhicher]

Thank you! If ever I get a chance I’ll be coming to a live show for sure!

[bploetz]

I'm not trying to tell you how to market your music, you do you, but with services like Tune Core, Distro Kid, etc that allow you to submit your music to every single music service in existence with one click, why wouldn't you just put your music everywhere? You may be surprised at just how big of a community there is for your niche genre on Spotify and elsewhere!

https://open.spotify.com/search/didgeridoo/playlists

Anyways, I agree that the Spotify requirement is artificially limiting, especially if this is targeting up and coming artists. They should probably support all of the biggies (Spotify, Apple Music, Youtube, etc) as well as indies like Sound Cloud, Band Camp, etc.

[ephaeton]

Thanks for your input!

I've pondered on and off about distrokid (or the like), and thankfully one of my peers has done just that. Mind you, he is more established and "successful" (as in, gets more paying gigs, more audience, ...). So I've talked to him about it. During the past half year, he's "earned" 4€ from Spotify (in other words, one song made the cut of 1k listens over a year), and 180€ from Bandcamp.

I see Distrokid as helpful marketing investment for discovery, so I was still inclined to burn some money (one teaching session will likely cover my loss, so whatever), but then he went on how he put a video of a performance of a published song of his (published via Distrokid) on YT - et voila - he's got challenged by Distrokid for it. Uh, yeah. I understand you gotta relinquish rights to let DK do their thing, but that's the sort of headache I wouldn't ever want. Maybe he was doing something wrong, of course, but I'll likely fall into the same trap. More reading required ...

I'll keep in touch with him about it, maybe the discovery on spotify led to the BC throughput, but we'll have to dig deeper. There's a lot of us small artists in different stages of our development (say, performance, entertainment, composition wise), I'd love to exchange experiences on what works and what doesn't for the ailing musician. There's platforms which contains a lot of us, but everybody seems to be struggling and there seems to be a strong sense of competition among many of my peers, so it's hard to get unfiltered (subjective) truths there. And the internet is filled with horror stories as well as "from dishwasher to millionaire" survivorship biased fairy tales. Oooph.

[bploetz]

Ha ha, yeah I hear you. Don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not marketing my music to make money (because I know there won't be any LOL). I do it because I spend hundreds of hours writing, producing, mixing, and mastering my music, and if I spend that much time on it, then damnit I want someone other than me to hear it! :)

If you have any presence on Sound Cloud, then definitely check out Repost Exchange. It's a peer to peer site where fellow artists like and repost each other's work. It's great for discovery.

Keep grinding!

[jerrygoyal]

youtube's music discovery algorithm ia shit.

[vinceguidry]

ALL music discovery algorithms are shit. The only thing good at recommending music to humans is other humans. But AI features are so much easier to build than social features, smh. Spotify's social features are worse than abysmal.

[ewhicher]

This is my opinion, hopefully this product helps fill that gap a little :)