Creating and releasing music has never been easier, but promoting your work has never been more confusing. Should you focus on TikTok or tour? And when you don’t have many followers, is online promotion even worth your time?

To crack the code we talked to indie musicians, marketers, tastemakers, and even a professor. While there’s no guaranteed formula for success, we found a wealth of tips and tricks for all kinds of musicians. Let’s dive in.

Streaming is by far the most popular way people consume music today, and getting on the right playlists can make your music career. Although anyone can create a playlist on Spotify or Apple Music, only a small percentage have large amounts of followers. If you don’t have your own popular playlists, how can you get on the big ones?

Services like SubmitHub and Playlist Push allow you to submit to playlist creators, music blogs, and social media influencers. SubmitHub has free and paid submission options, but Playlist Push is paid only. Playlisters like IndieMono and Alexrainbirdmusic have free submissions in a variety of genres. Although Spotify does not allow playlist owners to charge for inclusion, it appears to allow (or at least tolerate) submission fees.

Do these strategies work? Yes, but artists should prepare “to go through a lot of rejections,” says Jonathan Teeter, frontman of Charlottesville, Virginia, indie band Films on Song. A single add from playlister BIRP.FM led to over 10,000 streams for his band’s single “Ritual Day.” “It’s not ideal to have to pay $1-3 to submit through SubmitHub, but if you get to know which blogs and influencers like what, it can be helpful.”

Rejection is part of the game, and it’s important to keep your chin up. “Music is art. Art is hard,” says KCRW radio DJ Jason Kramer, who was one of the first tastemakers to discover Billie Eilish and Finneas. “Artists just need to be them. Play something that they need to play,” he continues, “Take chances, don’t be afraid.”

You don’t have to rely on someone else’s playlist for listens. On both Spotify and Apple Music, if a playlist is public, anyone can find it and follow it. The exact algorithms are not public, but playlists with names based on iconic lyrics, new albums, places, or feelings (“New York Autumn Vibes,” for example) seem to occasionally do well on Spotify even for users with no existing following. Seemingly without trying, some users have created playlists that gain thousands of listeners. Artists can post their favorite playlists to their artist profile, gaining new followers and showing off their favorite tracks. Apple Music doesn’t display playlist follower counts, making it harder to judge which strategies work there.

Which playlists are you on? The Apple Music for Artists and Spotify for Artists apps will give you song play counts, information about playlists you’ve been added to, and other helpful information.

Apple Music for Artists has a page with tips and tools to promote your work. You can even create your own QR code that links to your song or album. Spotify has a similar resource called a code maker, and they even explain how you can submit songs for playlist inclusion. SoundCloud also has a page with tips to help creators monetize and promote their music. QR codes that link to streaming or social are great to put on stickers, posters, or other promotional materials.

Features and collaborative songs are perhaps most common in hip hop, but can be a great way to expand your audience no matter the genre. For example, indie rock band Surfer Blood released an EP called Hardboiled, which featured other artists covering their songs. The tracks showed up on Surfer Blood's page in addition to the pages of the artists who did the covers, maximizing exposure for everyone.

Covering a well-known song can be another good way to get new listeners. This article is not legal advice, but remember, if you cover a song you’ll have to pay royalties to whoever wrote the song. Luckily, services like DistroKid can handle that for you.

Social media has become so essential for music promotion that even artists who died decades ago have an active Instagram presence. Although it is a powerful tool for artists, music influencer Ari Elkins cautions artists not to neglect their music. “Gaining thousands of followers on TikTok is exciting but it's crucial that these followers are there for your music and not just because of unrelated viral videos which had nothing to do with you as an artist.”

While social media can lead to success, the game is always changing. Cehryl, an indie pop artist based in Hong Kong, started by uploading self-recorded tracks on to SoundCloud, and now has a record deal and over 100,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. But she cautioned that what worked before might not work now. “If I were to start from scratch today, I wouldn’t start on SoundCloud. I’d just distribute it to all streaming platforms and promote it mostly on Instagram.”

When you’re on TikTok or Instagram, what strategies should you use? “It’s more than just likes,” says Kas Robinson, a social media strategist in Sydney, Australia, who notes that social media algorithms look at various factors like “time spent on your content, engagement rate, and the number of shares and saves.” If you’re unsure what to do, Kas recommends you just get started. “Give yourself a starting position and work on improving your content over time.”

Liking and following accounts that follow artists in your genre is one good way to find new fans—but be sure you don’t resort to spam. Whatever you do, make sure that you stick to it. “Consistency, consistency, consistency,” says Elkins, “Whether you commit to posting three times a day, once a day, or even every other day. Pick a schedule that works for you and stick with it.”

Not confident about your style? Apps like Temply and Unfold have premade templates that let you add a professional sheen to your photos or videos. With both paid and free options, there is something for every budget. If you’re on Instagram, using a link extender like LinkTree, LinkFire, or SongWhip is a great way to direct users to multiple websites, songs, or social pages.

Some artists go beyond just having a standard social media account. Senegalese singer-songwriter Marieme created her own app with exclusive content and livestreams. “I love it because it’s my true fans on there, I get to know them and they get to know me better and they engage with each other,“ she says. Marieme sees digital engagement through social media and streaming as a key tool for many artists. “During the pandemic, I did a lot of digital concerts,” she said. Reflecting on the experience, Marieme notes, “People loved it and were very engaged the whole time.”

WIRED founding editor Kevin Kelly famously claimed that artists needed 1,000 true fans to survive. The logic was simple. If each fan spends $100 on your art each year, you’d have revenue of $100,000 and could make a good living doing what you love. From Patreon to Ko-fi to cryptocurrency donation QR codes, today’s artists have a wealth of ways to make money off their work. Despite its reputation for adult content, some musicians even use OnlyFans to connect to their listeners.

Although streaming is a great way to find listeners, only a tiny percentage of artists can live off of streaming royalties. My music project, Lonely Singles, has earned around $125 from about 40,000 streams on Spotify. That equates to roughly $3,200 per million streams, roughly in line with what streamingcalculator.com predicts. Apple Music and Tidal seem to pay artists more per stream, but the harsh reality is that only millions of streams per month can earn indie artists enough money to live on streaming alone. And if an artist has to share that money with a record label, they might need even more streams to make a living.

When asked how most artists make a living off music today, Cehryl is blunt; “Working other jobs.” She adds, “Merch is definitely good but it is best when it’s brought on tour.”

Although merchandise is a mainstay of touring acts, you can also promote it directly from streaming services. Spotify has a merch integration with Shopify, allowing you to promote merch on your artist page. Integrations with print-on-demand services like Printful mean that printing, packing, and shipping can be totally automated, although this will cut down on your profit margins. Instagram offers shopping directly from the app, providing another way to promote what you sell.

Although fewer people are buying digital downloads of songs, many artists are turning to Bandcamp to sell downloads, merch, and even cassettes (which have undergone a surprising revival) directly to fans. The site explicitly markets itself as giving artists a greater cut of revenues while giving fans closer access to artists. Some streaming services also allow users to support their favorite artists: Tidal Hi-Fi subscribers, for example, can have 10 percent of their subscription fee sent to their most listened-to artist every month.

We live in a world of algorithms, and there are always ways to game them. Some artists have released songs named after an even more famous artist. These would show up near results for that artist, and sometimes they’d go viral. The Chainsmokers have a song named “Kanye.” Jack Harlow has a song called “Dua Lipa.” Are these just musical tributes, or clever ways of gaming the system? I don’t know. But the last time I uploaded music to Spotify through Distrokid, I was warned not to name a song after a famous artist without their permission.

Will you get sued if you do it anyway? I have no idea, but it seems like labels have caught on. Still the game continues. A host of artists have named their songs “Lorem,” likely in hopes of showing up next to the famous Spotify playlist.

No matter how you promote your music, it’s important to be persistent. Lizzo’s 2017 single “Truth Hurts” became a hit two years after it was released. A-ha’s classic song “Take On Me” was a flop in 1984, was rerecorded and rereleased in 1985, flopped again, then was released a third time–becoming a huge hit.

Is there a formula? Does the best song always become popular? One researcher says song quality is only part of the equation. “There is a huge amount of luck involved,” says Matthew J. Salganik, a professor at Princeton who has published studies on what makes songs popular. Research that he coauthored studied how over 12,000 people reacted to songs by unknown artists. Perhaps unsurprisingly, subjects gravitated toward songs with higher download counts, even when these counts were manipulated.

“Our research is both optimistic and pessimistic. In our experiment, we found that better songs did better on average, so I guess that’s the optimistic part. But we also found that there was a big range of possible outcomes, even for the same song. So sometimes a good song could get unlucky.” Professor Salganik believes social media has only amplified this effect, saying that “luck would have a bigger role” in a song’s success or failure today.

While every musician wants a hit, what’s ultimately most important is creating work you are proud of. “It’s not gonna happen overnight,” says Kramer, who urges artists to lean into their doubts and keep creating. As an artist, “you second-guess yourself all the time, but that is not a bad thing–you grow that way.”