There is a point in the life of almost every independent musician when you realise that writing songs is only part of the job.
Quite a small part of the job, sometimes.
You may have started because you liked writing. Perhaps you enjoyed the strange moment when a melody appeared from nowhere, or the satisfaction of finding the right line for a verse. Maybe you liked sitting with a guitar, opening Cubase, recording an idea and slowly turning it into something real. None of that necessarily came with dreams of becoming a full-time marketer.
And yet here we are.
Once the song is finished, another world appears. You need artwork. You need a release date. You need a description. You need social media posts. You need links. You need to tell people it exists. Then you need to tell them again because the first post vanished in about six minutes beneath photographs of lunches, dogs, holidays, political arguments and people announcing that they are delighted to share some personal news.
For musicians who are not chasing fame and fortune, this can feel especially strange. You are not trying to build an empire. You are simply trying to get people to listen to something you made.
That should be easy. It isn’t.
The modern independent musician is expected to be creator and promoter at the same time. You write the song, perform it, record it, arrange it, perhaps create the artwork, upload it, then somehow find the energy to behave as though the real work has only just begun.
That can be difficult because promotion requires a very different mindset from songwriting.
Writing is inward. Promotion is outward. Writing asks, “What am I trying to say?”
Promotion asks, “How do I get anyone to notice?”
Those two things do not always sit comfortably together.
When I am writing a song, I am not thinking about reach, engagement or whether the opening line will perform well on social media. At least I hope I’m not. I am thinking about the song. Does the lyric work? Does the melody feel right? Is the chorus saying what I want it to say? Does the arrangement support the idea?
That process can be personal, private and instinctive.
Then, once the track is finished, the tone changes completely. Suddenly I am thinking about headlines, images, links and how to describe the song without sounding either boastful or apologetic. There is a peculiar balancing act involved in promoting your own music. You need enough confidence to say, “This is worth hearing,” while avoiding the impression that you believe the entire internet has been waiting anxiously for your latest release.
That is harder than it sounds.
A lot of independent musicians are uncomfortable with self-promotion. We may be perfectly happy playing a song in front of people, but repeatedly posting about ourselves can feel unnatural. There is always the fear of overdoing it. You do not want friends and followers to see your name and think, “Oh no, not him again.”
At the same time, if you only mention a new song once, there is a good chance most people will never see it.
This is one of the awkward truths of social media. Repetition is necessary. A post disappears quickly. People are online at different times. Algorithms decide what gets shown and what does not. Something that feels repetitive to you may only have been seen once by someone else, or not seen at all.
Knowing that does not necessarily make posting any less uncomfortable.
There is also a deeper pressure at work. Social media encourages comparison. You see musicians with large followings, polished videos, carefully staged content, constant releases and impressive-looking statistics. You see advice telling you to post more often, create reels, build a brand, optimise your profile, engage with your audience, study analytics, grow your mailing list, make short-form video, tell stories, use calls to action and apparently become a minor media company before breakfast.
At some point you may reasonably ask: when am I supposed to write the next song? That, for me, is the real tension.
Promotion can support music, but it can also start to consume it. If you are not careful, you spend more time talking about being a musician than actually making music. The work that was supposed to help people discover the songs begins taking time away from creating them.
That is not a particularly good trade.
I have come to think that promotion works best when it feels connected to the music rather than separate from it. This is one reason I use my website as more than a place to list songs. I write about recording, songwriting, streaming, home studios, live performance and the strange little pressures that come with making music independently.
That gives me something more natural to share.
Instead of every post saying, “Listen to this song,” I can talk about the experience around it. Why I still write. Why home recording matters. What happens when I send stems to Jermaine Nelson-Williams for mixing and production. Why playing original songs live still matters. Why streaming is both wonderful and frustrating.
Those stories are part of the music too. They also make promotion feel less like selling and more like conversation.
That distinction is important. I do not want every interaction to be transactional. I do not want every post to be a demand for attention. I would rather create a trail that people can follow if they are interested. An article may lead someone to a song. A live performance may lead someone to the website. A social post may lead someone to Spotify. A CD or vinyl record may lead someone back to another part of the catalogue.
That feels healthier than shouting into the void. Still, the pressure does not disappear.
When you release something, you want it to be heard. That is natural. You have spent time on it. You care about it. You know the work that went into getting from the first idea to the finished track. It is difficult not to feel disappointed when the response is quiet.
This is where perspective matters.
For an independent musician not chasing fame, the goal does not have to be domination. It can be connection. The right listener matters more than an abstract number. A genuine message can matter more than a spike in impressions. Someone listening closely can matter more than hundreds of people scrolling past.
That does not mean statistics are irrelevant. It simply means they are incomplete.
The danger is allowing promotion to become a judgement on the value of the song. A poorly performing post does not necessarily mean the music failed. It may simply mean the post failed. Or the timing failed. Or the algorithm ignored it. Or everyone was watching football.
Songs and social media operate by different rules. That is worth remembering.
There is also something important about accepting that you do not have to promote in exactly the same way as everyone else. You do not have to become louder, more theatrical or more artificial than you are. If thoughtful writing suits you better than constant video, use thoughtful writing. If live performance works better than endless posting, play live. If your website gives you a place to explain the music properly, invest in that.
Promotion should serve the artist, not erase them.
For me, the best approach is probably a mixture. Keep making the songs. Keep talking about them. Keep writing about the process. Keep performing where possible. Use social media as a signpost rather than allowing it to become the destination.
And accept that some posts will disappear without trace. That is part of the deal.
The difficult thing is not to let that silence change why you make music in the first place. The song existed before the post. Its value was not created by the number of likes underneath it. Promotion may help it travel, but promotion is not the reason it was written.
That is something I need to remind myself of. I wanted to write songs. Everything else came afterwards.
The websites, the streaming platforms, the images, the posts, the links, the statistics and the mild anxiety about whether I have mentioned the latest release too often — they are all part of the modern musical world.
But they are not the heart of it. The heart is still the moment when an idea becomes a song.
Perhaps the trick is to promote enough to give that song a chance, without allowing promotion to become the thing that drains the joy out of making the next one.
That balance is not easy.
But then neither is songwriting.
And somehow, we keep doing both.