It seems a contradiction but, as it’s never been as easy to produce music by oneself, at home, with little investment in gear etc., promoting one’s music has never been so daunting.
In the old times, you would mail your mixtape to a record company or a local radio station, play in local venues and and gain traction (or get discovered by a recording company) and if you worked hard enough, you might have a chance to break through.
But record companies today are no more, social media usually has mechanisms in place to avoid self-promotion (trying to cater artists to their advertising platforms) and there’s a lot of scammers posing as music promoters (and their “work” may even ruin an artist’s career for good).
Of course, in the old days there were already things like payola (paying to be played in radio and TV, or for sync placements) but usually the artists themselves were shielded from dealing with this because the labels were usually in control of all marketing and promotion tasks.
There are also new types of social media like TikTok and Instagram that allow for your music to be picked up by an influencer and get viral, but you are usually competing against a catalog of millions of songs, and all the major artists’ songs are also available, making it even harder for an indie artist to compete.
What are your strategies, today, as a musician, to break through? Post success stories. Fail stories as a warning. Let’s collectively educate one another on this very important topic for any musician!