How To Recognize Music Promotion Services That You Should Absolutely Avoid
The music industry is one of the most competitive industries in the world. Music promotion services, such as DaimoonMedia, can greatly help you increase your possibilities of success. With a successful career plan to back it up, you will have endless possibilities within your reach. The good news is, you will actually have some very good companies to choose from.
However, in this article and study we don’t want to dive too deep into the value of a music promotion company. Instead, we want to help all artists and music industry professionals correctly identify the snakes in the grass. We want to lay the foundation on recognizing the companies that you should stay far away from. To teach you how to know if the deal you’re getting is reliable and real.
We’re making this extremely important information accessible because we want you to win and we want a transparent and healthy music industry for everyone.
Before we dive into the topic of filtering out the “fake” music promotion services, let’s first zoom out and discuss the problem itself and why these music promotion services exist.
Where Does The Problem Come From?
With the rise of the internet and the loss of human- transparency, a lot of smart people have found their way marketing and selling services that seem like an amazing deal but will never deliver the communicated value once a purchase takes place. Like the rest of the internet, the music industry has its own presence of fraudulent advertising companies that, in exchange for poor and illegitimate marketing campaigns, receive hard-earned money from artists on the rise.
With the pressure of social media and the challenges the accessibility of the internet brought to us, starting and upcoming talent tend to choose the shortcut to gain popularity and fame. There’s a desire to gain followers, likes, comments, views, and streams at a fast pace and become popular rather this afternoon than tomorrow.
A Look through the artists’s perspective
We seem to constantly see break-through artists growing like bamboo. The ‘overnight success’. The one 90’s cover on TikTok that blew up and landed someone a record deal. That street singer who got uploaded to YouTube and was touring major festivals later that year. You get it. The dream.
How perfect would it be to find a company that can deliver you exactly all those results for a no-brainer price. A hundred thousand Spotify streams for a hundred bucks? “Delivered” in 2 days? Yes I do want to be famous. Where do I sign up? (This is sarcastic, obviously.)
This mindset is the main reason such services exist. They know that musicians lack education and awareness on these subjects. And frankly, in a perfect world artists shouldn’t have to worry about this in the first place.
However, in this day and age, as someone working in the music business, you should know that there is no proven shortcut to success. Even when someone tries to sell you on that story, it can never be true. And even if it will in the short term, every shortcut will bring negative effects in the long term.
We want to help you understand that success and recognition takes time and it does not come easy. With persistence, skills, experience, a good project, the right knowledge and a (marketing) team, you can become a successful artist. No matter your desired destination! What we believe you should do is to consistently increase your chances of success as much as possible with every action you take.
This is why we believe in the value of our music marketing and promotion. You build your project and we help you get it into the right ears and eyes across the internet. Maximizing your opportunity to gain new fans and find your breakthrough moment.
Deep Dive: Types Of Scams Within the Music Promotion Business
Let’s dive into these companies, generally known as “scams”, and show you how to recognize offers that you should totally avoid.
To start, it’s good to repeat that no matter the shady business that will take place, these illegitimate music promotion services usually have a real online presence and can look and function like a real business. They can have many followers, engagement, a good looking website and the most trust-worthy quotes and motivations. They will know all the right things to say to get your attention.
Let’s investigate the different offers that are usually available and what about them should signal you to question the legitimacy of a service.
1. Fake Numbers On Streaming Services
As discussed, artists generally value indicators of appreciation of their work and artist project, such as followers and music streams. While such numbers are usually good indicators for your growth, they should never be the goal by itself. Instead, they should always be the result of marketing and exposure.
You want to keep an eye out for these companies that directly communicate a guaranteed number of streams, followers, saves, likes or monthly listeners. Nine out of ten times these results will be generated with bots and fake accounts, because when you think about it, there’s no other way to guarantee these numbers. In marketing, results are always completely based on the response of an audience. In campaign A, two out of ten listeners might save your song, while in campaign B, three out of ten listeners might save your song. For this reason, your music promotion campaigns should be based around targets and estimations.
Another big indicator you should consider is the delivery time of your results. Reaching the right audience takes time and a successful marketing campaign requires strategy, communication and processes. Getting your music to playlist curators, running advertisements and optimising them, or getting other sorts of real exposure is going to take time. You can count for a minimum of 1 to 2 days. When it’s promised to be faster, you can only translate it to one right conclusion: quick results usually mean that you will enter the queue of a bot farm to deliver your fake streams.
It brings you highly condensed spikes of activity. No repeat listeners. A ruined algorithm. And it is completely against streaming services’ terms of service, risking your profile to be flagged and your music to be removed.
EXTRA: If you’re doubting whether illegitimate streaming activity has taken place on your account, consider reading the article we wrote about how Spotify detects fake streams.
Knowing the above, companies offering such black on white deals are most likely not only a waste of your money but also your time, as they don’t connect you with real fans who can follow your work, spread the word, buy merchandise and visit your shows.
You might still believe quickly buying a number of followers will be useful for making your profile look more representative of you as an artist, but simply increasing a number is far from where your true focus should be. Illegitimate results harm your algorithms and mess with your data, which makes it hard for yourself to understand where your project stands and which actions you should take next.
When you’re looking for a reputable company, look at two things. Whether the company’s website has proper testimonials and reviews, and whether there is a clear explanation about what they will do to work for your results.
2. Social Media Promotion Scams
Buying your presence on social media has been around for a longer time and this concept might be more familiar to you. However, we’re not going to talk about why buying your social media followers is a bad idea (which it really is), but rather how you can spot other accounts that have bought their presence.
Why is this relevant? Artists tend to partner up with Instagram pages more and more. This happens through contacting these pages directly, as well as working with “services” that offer a wide variety of arrangements, for example posting Instagram stories or news feeds.
They might have an impressive number of followers and their account(s) will feature many other up-and-coming artists like you to provide the social proof that others have. However, if you do a little more research, you can easily see different red flags.
The problem is that most of their followers are bots, so having a placement on such a social media account doesn’t help at all with your growth as an artist. While this is a very solid strategy to promote music, we think you should know these couple things that you can research to see if this service is reliable.
- Followers – Who are they? Do they have profile pictures? Are they real people? Most fake followers do not have an active Instagram profile and rarely have a profile picture. They have out of proportion follower rates (e.g. following 6000, followed by 350).
- Post engagement – Do they have 1m followers but 100 likes on their posts? That is a red flag.
- Website – Do they have a website? Do they have testimonials on it? As discussed before, having a website does not guarantee that it’s a legit company. Not having one however should raise some suspicion and awareness for sure, because they’re likely trying to remain more anonymous.
- Cold approach – They provide you with their services. Whether it’s a comment on a post or a direct message, a scammer may approach you to buy a “promotional” pack. This can be easily automated with the help of bots; it is usually a very general message.
3. Playlist Placement Scams
In line with the services that guarantee a specific amount of streams through computer generated activity, there are services that guarantee spots on playlists and streams promise streams from these lists.
Similar to our story before, there is no real way to promise a placement on a list. You will at all times be dependent on playlist curators who will have to love your song enough to add it. Next to that, you could question the relevancy and quality of a playlist when the service approves additions beforehand.
Even though it’s harder to differentiate, you might be smarter not to work with guaranteed playlist placements. Such playlists might be programmed with bots to generate your streams. A bot listens to music anywhere on the map in terms of musical style and genre. In other words, it can follow unnatural listening patterns.
As we explained in our previous articles, platforms like Spotify track your listening habits and make recommendations to others. If the song is mixed with a random bunch of songs in the playlist and the bot is listening to all kinds of music, the algorithm will have a hard time recommending the music to real potential users.
Another playlist scam to watch out for is a promise to put your song on an editorial playlist curated by the streaming service team, such as New Music Friday. You can’t be guaranteed placement on those playlists. The only way to reach such opportunities is when you pitch your unreleased music and the editorial teams might review them and decide if they are worth it to be on Spotify playlists.
It is very important to also know that Spotify’s Terms of Service state that you cannot charge or pay for a placement in any playlist on the platform. For this reason, you always want your music to be pitched to playlist curators.
As we mentioned in the beginning of this article, you do have options for great playlist services that can help you introduce your songs to real music curators. And they can really move your project.
We have helped over 7000 artists reach these independent curators through our great relationships, across almost any genre. We get quick responses, and curators love it when we send them music. You set your targets and we’ll pitch as many relevant curators as we need to help you.
Why Should I Work With Music Promotion Services?
Trying to promote your music without a budget is almost impossible. Yes, you might get friends, family, existing fans and the algorithm to slightly push your music. But if you want to increase the effect of your releases and marketing you have to think about having a budget to invest when effectively growing your project.
Music marketing should make up a large part of your total budget. If you want to run solid promotions, you should be prepared to invest in your career.
Paid promotions are the best way to get your name out and monetize your music. It helps you reach new listeners who have never heard of you. This is your moment to convince them about your project.
How Is DaimoonMedia Different?
Promoting your music alone can be quite challenging when you don’t have the right knowledge, time or skills.
Within DaimoonMedia, we focus on authentic and organically grown playlists with real and active listeners since our start, which led to having helped over 6500+ individual artists with their journey to a successful career.
Moreover, the music business is all about networking, and when you did not spend your time networking or know people within the industry, it can be quite hard to get your music heard out there. In DaimoonMedia, we have a solid network pitching to playlist curators.
If you are trying to grow your music’s visibility and want to further grow your career and be taken seriously, we have one of the biggest reach when it comes to SoundCloud, Spotify, YouTube.
To Wrap It Up
By implementing a strategy to put the song on more platforms, you’re more likely to become someone’s new favorite band and start a chain reaction of awareness that could lead to your next gig. Reaching more viewers through music promotion means not only getting more fans, but also better fans.
You now know how to recognise the best promotion companies that will help you get actual results, and which ones will totally not.
So in short, you might have started reading this blog with a vague idea about what music promotion company scams are and the different types of services involved. Curious if you can use more help in properly growing your artist career and expanding your knowledge? Make sure to read our next blog and follow us on our social media channels. Moreover, feel free to ask us your questions on our Instagram (@daimoonmedia)!
