Promoting my debut EP, a report

It’s been 2 weeks since the release of Transit Habitat EP.

I thought it would be a good idea to loop back and share how the release is going. It might be a bit inside baseball, but one of the goals of this newsletter is to bring people behind the curtain as I develop my craft and build my career. Part of that is finding and building an audience, so marketing is vital even if it's a bit boring.

The strategy

My longer term goal is to play festivals with a set of original music and AV production. I have a loose vision for what I want to do with that, which I am keen to write more about soon. But I am not quite there yet with my craft, and I need to build an audience to make that viable. But I don't think it does me any good to hide away develop that in private. I have made plenty of music that I am happy with, and I should put it into the world and trust that the creative well won't run dry.

So I have decided to spend this year focused on consistently releasing music with the goal of hitting 10K monthly listeners on Spotify by the end of the year. Through consistent releases I hope to continue developing my craft and finding an audience would help demonstrate the viability of the whole thing.

If I release something every 4-6 weeks, so the theory goes, each release builds on the momentum of the previous release and trigger various thresholds for Spotify to begin recommending your music to more people. Growing my audience and providing a bit of necessary encouragement that I am moving along the correct path.

If all goes to plan, by the end of the year I will have a catalogue of music, an audience and a bit of momentum that I can leverage towards more ambitious goals.

The numbers

So, how did this first release of 2026 go?

• Spotify Streams: 2,266
• Spotify Listeners: 1,186
• Apple Music Streams: 673
• YouTube Streams: 538

I think these numbers are great. I now have 1,323 monthly listeners on Spotify, which is already significant progress towards my 10k goal and a massive jump from my previous releases.

Streams are a bit of a vanity metric, since someone just passively being exposed to your music is a long way from being a fan. But saves and playlist ads are quite high too, with about 20% of the listeners saving or adding the songs to playlists.

Obviously streaming pays basically nothing (and in Spotify’s case, sometimes literally nothing). But it’s where the audience is and ultimately the goal here is to build an audience. If I wanted to get rich I would have made a lot of different choices in my life.

How I promoted it

Spotify considers the speed that your track gains streams an important metric in judging its popularity and potential for wider promotion. So the first couple of days after the release are vital and those early streams are super important.

The first thing I did was email all of you. This isn’t a massive list (40 people at the moment), but a good portion of you clicked the link to listen on the day of release. You are also some of the people most likely to save the EP to your library or add it to a playlist, all of this helps a lot in sending the signal to streaming services.

But the main tactic has been Meta (Facebook and Instagram) ads. I’ve spent about $350 on ads in the days since release, with the bulk of that spent in the first couple of days. These ads aren’t super complicated, they are just viby videos that match the mood of the cover art mostly made using free stock footage. But they have been effective at finding new listeners.

These ads performed reasonably well (not great, so there is room for improvement with future releases) and about a week after the release I noticed a sudden increase in streams, which were coming from Spotify radio and algorithmic playlists. So the theory of triggering algorithmic support with early streams worked. While I have dramatically slowed down the ad spend, streams are still steadily rolling in.

I feel pretty confident that Meta ads are the most effective promotion strategy for my music. In the past I have experimented with playlist promotion through Boost Collective and found it to be more or less useless. It did result in streams, but these were passive listeners who rarely added the song to their library or their own playlists meaning that as soon as the campaign ended, the streams dropped off.

With Meta ads I have noticed that even after the campaign ends, streams continue because it is finding more active listeners and potential longer term fans.

Organic posting on Instagram or TikTok has also been a massive time suck with very little benefit. As I’ve already discussed, I hate posting on Instagram. Maybe a track could go viral on TikTok if I decided I wanted to make entirely different music and worked hard enough at it, but that’s a crapshoot and I will take steady, reliable growth over that any day.

Next steps

I’m putting the finishing touches on the next release, tentatively planned for 12th March. It’s a bit of a wobbly lofi thing with a garage groove. Simpler than the stuff on the Transit Habitat EP, but I’ve played it in a few DJ sets now and it’s got a good response.

Keeping up a regular release schedule means always thinking a release or two ahead, which is definitely demanding. I don’t want to be releasing slop either, so I may not be able to keep up this release schedule for the whole year (I have tentatively mapped my releases to the middle of the year with tracks I have already written, but I will need to write new material before then to keep up this schedule).

But for now, I’m on track to get a bunch more music out into the world this year and well on the way to meeting my 10k monthly listener goal.

Thanks for coming on this journey with me. I promise I will write about music instead of marketing more in the future.

Onwards,