The Indie Music Con

This month I have had a Spotify ad campaign running for the song "Amusement Park". I paid about £25 for it. It's the second or third time I've tried one of these ad campaigns, reluctantly I might add. I convinced myself by accepting that in the mainstream music industry they spend thousands, if not millions, on promotional campaigns. It's probably not known to the average listener that their favourite songs and artists don't just appear out of nowhere and get where they are based solely on their talent. Behind the scenes there are all sorts of tricks and dealings going on to make sure certain songs are hits and certain artists hit the big-time. I've read countless music biographies from various artists ever since I've been into music and I've watched many music documentaries. After some time you get to understand these things but even for me, as an artist, it's still shocking just how many gatekeepers and filters there are to get through.

So, in understanding all of that, as reluctant as I am to join in, if nobody comes to help and support grassroots music away from the mainstream system then I have no option but to use these things. In the SoulJahm days in Europe we tried this place called Jango Radio, which we found out about through a marketing email from the distribution service we were using. It's like a kind of paid radio system. There is a bunch of listeners who get a tailor-made radio service made up of known artists they enjoy. The indie artists sign up and submit their songs with a list of similar known artists and it mixes them into the personal radio stations so these listeners can discover new music that is similar in taste to what they already enjoy. The indie artists have to select a package, which is paid monthly, each package giving a different amount of play credits. The indie artist uses these play credits for their songs and they go into the system and get used up each time your song is played in a station. The listeners can give the songs a popscore and can also become a fan of the indie artist.

In the days of SoulJahm when we used it, listeners could attach their Facebook page, so that the artist could connect with them on Facebook. Nowadays, they have removed that feature but you can still get the listeners email if they allow. We never had enough spare money to use it regularly, just £5 or £10 here and there we'd put on for some of the SoulJahm songs. I hadn't used it since those days but a year ago we tried again and stuck with it for a full year, on their most common mid-range package. My songs get good popscores and I have currently 48 fans, but only 3 have shared their email, so not much to use in building a mailing list. In all the time I've been using it I haven't seen any REAL progress. No increase in sales, no significant increase in subscribers, likes, views on any of my social media channels. There is absolutely nothing to suggest any of the fans I make there are doing anything outside of that Jango system. It is now called Radio Airplay by the way.

Alongside this, using a different company, I have tried a few Spotify and YouTube ad campaigns, where you select a song and create a little banner ad that gets places on various websites.... last.fm, discogs.com, Rolling Stone, Daily Mail, etc... Despite it showing click-throughs for these ads I have never seen any real, tangible results there either. I was about to move over to this Spotify ad campaign and stick with it for a while, giving up the Radio Airplay one, to see if it was any better but after seeing what has happened this month I doubt I will.

As I said, the song I tried this month is "Amusement Park". It shows there has been click-throughs on the ad itself but when I look at the Spotify stats this song has no plays. The ad has been running for several weeks and Spotify stats are meant to be updated within days. On investigating this further I discovered that the way Spotify is set-up means that on many occasions, when someone clicks through it will play several songs by KNOWN artists that are pushed on Spotify PLUS ad breaks before it even plays my song. Who is going to listen through all of that to get to an indie artist's song they have not heard before? On top of that, Spotify only counts a play if the listener listens to at least 30 seconds. In this day and age of Tik-Tok where people have the attention span of a fish, who is going to listen to 30 seconds of a song they've never heard before?

This is just a glimpse of the kind of obstacles facing indie musicians and it's why the whole idea of these times never being better for indie artists is bullshit. Yes, we can record at home now. Yes, we can distribute worldwide and even digitally so there are no manufacturing costs but after that it's the same old music business with the same gatekeepers and filters to make sure only those who are system whores get through. They want to make sure you are easily controllable so that if you make it big you can't have a message that goes against their agendas. The big labels do these deals with Spotify and YouTube to make sure their artists and songs are getting all the promotion. The algorithms are set-up in such a way to frustrate the indie artist and try to force them down the set out paths. You can clearly see this with all the successful YouTube indie artists or Instagram artists... they aren't actually indie at all, they just appear to be. Their channels all have the same look and feel, they post the same kind of videos. Almost all of them have to supplement their actual music content with talking videos promoting brands, products or discussing popular current affairs. Nothing has changed from the old system - it's the same old same old.