Given that there are 100,000 songs uploaded to streaming services every day, a new release is doing incredibly well (statistically speaking) if it gets any listens at all. There are several albums that I consider masterpieces that have a criminally low listener counts like LS Underground’s The Grape Prophet or Dear Absentee Creator by Astral Cloud Ashes. It’s cold comfort, but in this context I can hardly take it personally if my releases disappear into obscurity.

On some level it’s freeing to just make art for art’s sake and feel no pressure to be commercial (since that’s, you know…futile). Besides, who’s to say that someday the music won’t find an audience, even if it’s years, decades or centuries from now, right? Even so, it seems like a red flag to require existential thinking to justify your new album.

Well my friends, this is where a seldom-discussed group of business come in to offer their services to artists desperate for their music to avoid the abyss. I’m conflicted about this industry, and figured I’d share what I’ve learned.

Exhibit A: Music Reviews. If you go on Fiverr you can find music blogs offering to review your music…for a fee. Some of these blogs seem to be total cash grabs-propped up sites that exist solely to publish these paid reviews, gushing over every single submission, of any genre, with no other published content at all. I mean what are the odds that every single local band willing to pay $30 just so happened to make a great album? Of course, on Fiverr, the bands are able to read the album review before they give their star rating for the job. It’s in everyone’s interest to play nice. The band gets a nice quote from legit looking (if obscure) source, and the website gets paid.

And yes, I used Fiverr to pay for reviews. I don’t know that there’s any ethical way to do it, but I only chose sites that seemed to specialize in my genre (suggesting that they would actually take an interest in the music). I looked for listings that mentioned “honest” reviews that didn’t allow for “revisions” (where I could attempt to influence the piece before it was published). Finally, when I got the reviews I looked for signs that showed they actually thoroughly listened to the album rather than just writing hazy platitudes. Still, I’m still ambivalent about it.

For me, the purpose of getting these reviews was to collect some quotes to use on flyers for promotion, like this:

I wanted to give people a sense of what the album was like/build interest, which is hard to do when you are starting from obscurity. Are these the honest opinions “Broken 8 Records,” “Sleeping Bag Studios,” “Be About it Press” and “Disrupt Weekly”? I hope so. Here I go getting existential again.

On to Exhibit B of business helping/preying on desperate artists in my next post: the Spotify Playlist game.