2026-08-09

Who Writes This Advice

Search for how to promote music and the results are overwhelmingly published by companies that sell music promotion. That is the economics of the genre, and it is more useful to understand than to complain about.

The kinds

Promotion services. Playlist campaigns, ad management, PR. Their guides are frequently well informed — they see campaign data most people cannot — and they end at a service.

Distributors and platforms. Documentation and best-practice guides from the companies whose product you are using. Accurate about mechanics, silent about anything that would reduce usage. For a related workplace reference on employee attendance tracking software, see read more.

Tool vendors. Analytics, scheduling, distribution software. Same shape. For additional current industry context, see MusicRadar.

Working artists and managers, writing from one career. Genuinely disinterested and a sample of one, in a field where survivorship makes single samples misleading.

And research and trade press, which is the smallest category and the only one with no direct stake.

The contradiction worth naming

Several 2026 guides describe stricter fraud detection on streaming platforms, and sell stream packages on the same site.

"300 algorithm-safe streams a day" appears alongside an explanation that platforms now weight listener quality and penalise inorganic spikes.

Both statements cannot be operating in good faith. The technical description is accurate; the product contradicts it; and a reader taking the article at face value buys the thing the article just described as risky.

This is the clearest single reason to check who published a guide before acting on it.

Reading each kind

Service guides for mechanics. How the algorithm weights things, what a campaign involves. Skip the conclusion.

Platform documentation for facts about the platform, and assume silence where a fact would reduce usage.

Artist accounts for texture — what it actually felt like — and not for strategy, because one career is one draw.

And check the date on everything, because the whole genre has a half-life.

Where this site stands

This site is published by a music marketing business.

It does not currently sell promotion campaigns, and if that changes it will be stated here and on every affected page.

The interest is the same shape as everybody else's: we benefit from people believing that marketing is worth thinking about, and that bias runs through everything here.

What is offered against it: an archive of our own advice that turned out wrong, published dated and unedited. Nobody selling you something does that, and it is the only evidence of good faith we can actually produce.

The test

Does the source say anything that reduces its own sale?

That most reach is worthless. That guaranteed streams are the thing platforms are hunting. That a mechanism matters more than any tactic somebody can sell you.

Rare, and the presence of it is the signal.

The short version