How to Promote Your Music Without Social Media

I just… can’t.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t! You really should. I mean, it would probably be better if you did. After all, social media is where the majority of music discovery occurs.

My advice is to record yourself lipsyncing your track the whole way through in 4-6 different locales, chop those into 60-ish 15-30 second clips, and share one every day on TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts. When one of them hits, share it again and put some ad money behind it.

Am I going to do that myself? No way. I simply can’t be bothered. For one, I don’t do video.

Instead, I tried doing social media my own way.

I put classic synthpop album anniversaries and artists’ birthdays in my calendar, along with my own release anniversaries, so I’d have something to post about. I also did a series of posts featuring classic synthpop albums asking “what’s the worst song on this album?”

They generated lots of likes, shares, and comments, to which I dutifully replied. Sometimes for weeks. It was a lot of work!

Did it expand my organic reach? Not that I can tell.

I’ve got several friends who are happy just being “Spotify artists.” They’ll announce new releases on socials, and that’s it.

Which is perfectly legit! They can grow their audience with ads and/or collabs, and if they release a truly great song, it might take off in the algorithm.

The odds of ever returning a profit are slim to none, and they’re fine with that.

I’m not willing to go that far (yet), so here’s what I’ve settled on:

I send out 1-2 emails a week to my 3000 subscribers. The following day, I share those emails as social media posts, minus any exclusive or overly personal bits.

A few days after that, I’ll promote the posts on Facebook and Instagram with my ongoing reach ad campaign. I’m spending $4 per day total, $2 to each platform.

Here’s an average day:

Placements are simple: Facebook News Feed for the FB ad set, and Instagram News Feed for the IG one.

My targeting for both ad sets looks like this:

I’m targeting my followers plus anyone who engaged with me on Facebook or Instagram.

Obviously you have to create custom audiences first, like so:

Whenever I have a new post, I just duplicate the ad, select the new post, save, and turn off the old ad.

I don’t want to get too deep into the mechanics of the campaign, as I’m sure there’s plenty of room for improvement.

In fact, looking at the IG 30D custom audience above, I can see that the audience is too large to effectively reach if I’m only hitting 400-ish people per day.

The point is that I’m able to compensate for my lack of organic reach through ads, so that my posts have enough engagement as to not be embarrassing.

That’s it for social media, but not for my engagement with fans.

I also share more personal updates with my supporters on Patreon, for their eyes only. And of course they also get exclusive tracks twice a month.

The net result is that I devote the most attention to my biggest supporters and the least to strangers. Isn’t that how it should be?

Of course, that’s not all I’m doing to promote my music!

I’ve also got:

Meta Ads to promote my Vocal Synthwave Retrowave playlist

Meta Ads to promote my This Is Color Theory playlist

Meta Ads to promote my free + shipping/handling offer

Google Ads to promote a video of my entire latest album

A Rise conversions campaign to grow my Spotify following

Can you see why this blog is called Passive Promotion? These campaigns are continuously operating in the background 24/7 while I focus on making the best music I can, both for myself and for my production clients.

One marketing component that may be suspicious in its absence is playlist promotion.

I’m talking about paid playlisting campaigns, not SubmitHub. I just don’t think they’re worth it at this point in my career. That said, I do get playlist placements through Rise.

Speaking of which, for six months or so, I dropped Rise and all playlist promotion, just to see what would happen. The answer? Not much. It didn’t supercharge the algorithm the way I hoped it might.

But I did notice that my release engagement dropped dramatically, from around 8% down to 4%. That tells me that a decent chunk of the 11K automatic Rise saves I get with every release actually result in streams.

In case you’re not familiar, Rise runs Meta ads to their discovery site Tout, where users create a taste profile by sampling artists in their chosen genre (here’s me).

When a user “likes” an artist, they opt in to following them on Spotify and having new releases added to their library automatically. I’ve got a full review and discount code here.

I also run Spotify Marquee and/or Showcase campaigns when a track is particularly promising, though if you read the linked posts, you’ll see I’ve somewhat soured on both.

And that’s the full playbook!

I don’t have a lot of money, but I do have more money than time, which is better spent on things other than social media.

What’s your approach to social media? Share your thoughts and strategies in the comments!