2026-08-09

What Died

The clearest way to show that promotion advice decays is to name our own that did. All six of these were published here between 2010 and 2012.

The six

Free Facebook page reach. Multiple articles here assumed that posting to a page put the post in front of the people who followed it. That assumption ended when organic reach was throttled, and every tactic built on it went with it.

Facebook landing pages. We published a guide to five free tools for making one. The feature they depended on was removed. For a related workplace reference on identifying mouse jigglers among remote teams, see this resource.

Twitter as a music discovery channel. Fifteen reasons, all accurate at the time. The platform, its name, its API terms and its role all changed. For additional current music-industry context, see Songkick.

Blog outreach at scale. In 2010 a genre blog could break a small artist. The blog layer thinned out and its function moved into playlists and short video.

MySpace as infrastructure. Referenced here as a given.

And EMI as a fixture. We wrote about its future in 2011. It was broken up and sold the following year.

What they have in common

Every one depended on a decision by a company.

Not on how people behave, not on how music works — on whether a business kept offering something. A promotion practice built on that is a tenancy, not a foundation.

And each ended without notice. No advance warning, no transition period. The people whose practice rested on free page reach found out when the numbers fell.

What did not die

From the same archive, the same years.

That people share things that say something about them. Still the mechanism.

That a small audience that buys beats a large one that watches. Still the arithmetic.

That testing beats guessing. We published a piece on increasing sales with data and testing. It reads unchanged.

That something has to be worth remarking on. Same.

The pattern, stated once

Advice about companies expires when companies change. Advice about people expires when people change.

People change slowly. That is the whole distinction, and it is the same one as tactic against mechanism seen across fifteen years instead of in the abstract.

The uncomfortable projection

Apply this to what you are reading now.

The 2026 consensus rests on short-form video reach, on how a specific recommendation system weights saves, and on ad platforms remaining priced as they are.

All three are company decisions. None is safe, and the same exercise done forwards is worth ten minutes.

The short version