Why the Algorithm Isn't Promoting You (And How to Fix It)

The musicians making short-form videos are almost always making one or at most three mistakes that are super easy to correct. Once they fix them, they go from 300 or 1,000 views a video to regularly getting 10 times that — not because some mysterious algorithmic force finally blessed them, but because the mistakes were simple all along. The problem is that this stuff is scattered across a thousand TikToks and reels and YouTube Shorts that nobody's actually watching, and a lot of you are still out here wondering if you've been shadow-banned or wronged by God. So here's everything in one place — the same easy tweaks I make on consulting calls all the time that get musicians out of algorithmic jail, and for those already getting views, how to blow them up even more on a consistent, sustainable basis.

Stop Playing the Wrong Game

First, a reality check, because most of you can't even figure out what the goal is.

I still talk to musicians who say things like, "No one's liking my videos, I'm so sad." When you're focused on likes, you're playing the wrong game entirely. If there's one metric — and only one metric — you should care about, it's shares.

Shares are what spread in the algorithm. Shares are what get you on the For You page. When a friend sends a video to another friend, they're essentially saying, "I know you — you'd like this." That's a signal the algorithm loves, because it brings people into the platform. And if one person shared something, the algorithm figures someone else probably will too, so it keeps pushing it. When you make short-form videos from the mindset of "would someone share this," you're creating content that gets sent to the right people — people who would actually listen to your music. Win-win.

So how do you actually do that? It's simpler than people make it out to be. Start by noticing what makes you share other musicians' videos. Keep a running note in your phone's Notes app and track the patterns. I'll be real — different genres behave very differently here. Goth fans will gleefully send something twisted and evil. Taylor Swift fans want cute, fuzzy, and emotionally validating content about being let down by everyone they date. Pop punk fans love a goofy in-joke that only they'd get. A metal dude will spam a whole group chat with some beard-grooming meme. Knowing your niche and observing what spreads within it is crucial.

Here's a practical way to study this: find the musicians who do well on social media in your genre and look them up on TikTok. Hit the Popular tab, and you can see which videos perform best for them. Click into one, and you can see how many shares it got. Watch it a few times and try to understand why people share it. Then ask yourself the best question you can ask every time you see great content: if I made this same video, how would I adapt it to who I am as an artist? Put in an hour or two of this kind of study over a week or two, and you'll have a much clearer sense of what to actually make.

Enjoying this? Forward it to a music friend you’d like to be closer to and start a discussion!

You're Not Posting Enough

One of the most common reasons God appears to have forsaken you is that you don't post enough. Instagram, TikTok, and Spotify all love to publish guidelines on how to perform well — and when actual third-party studies get done, most of that guidance turns out to be pretty disconnected from reality. I've stopped quoting Adam Mosseri's videos because what he says and what we actually observe in the data just don't line up.

What data-focused companies like Metricool consistently find — and what I've personally observed studying hundreds of viral artists — is that posting two to three times a week is the minimum you need to start getting in front of strangers. The average for artists who are actually growing is five to seven times a week.

If you haven't hit 16 posts since you started and you're not posting at least three times a week, there's no way to even tell if your content is trash or not. You're just not giving the algorithm enough to push. So before you blame God, check the posting frequency.

This is exactly the kind of thing I dig into every week in my membership newsletters — for $5 a month.

Thumb Stop: Make Them Actually Pause

Now let's get into what happens when you're actually making videos.

Thumb stop is what happens when someone who's been mindlessly scrolling sees something interesting enough to stop. You've got about a third of a second for each thing that crosses their screen — that's the window. So what gets people to stop?

Show them something they don't see all day. A lot of us have been scrolling these apps for six years now. We've all seen a thousand bedroom videos with a cheeky text overlay, and probably hundreds of thousands of someone in their pajamas doing a talking-head thing. It's starting to go pretty mid, and all those viral prompt lists you see floating around are starting to feel the same way.

The sweet spot is a Venn diagram: show clues that you're part of the culture the viewer likes — your music is audible, you're dressed a certain way, there's a poster in the background — but open the video with something they don't see every time they open the app. That combination tends to trigger thumb stop.

Ben Lapidus is one of the best examples of someone who executes this consistently. In one of his most viral videos, the thumb stop alone is one of the best I've seen.

He opens with a loud, striking "Yo!" paired with an intense hit. Behind him is a room full of suits and a caption that reads "You weren't supposed to see this." That's genuinely curiosity-inducing. People don't know what they're about to see, and that's exactly what makes them watch longer.

@benlapidus

WE WILL GET ANSWERS… 3.4.26 #punk #metal #musicalcomedy

Your song might not have that exact kind of opener, but you can manufacture a similar effect. Drop a glitch before your song starts. Come into frame upside down. Flash the most interesting visual from halfway through the video, then cut back to the beginning. Pull a piece of paper off the lens and crunch it up. Do a fast camera spin and use it as a transition back to the start. There was a whole trend of people throwing a paper airplane at the top of the video — same principle. The point is to show the viewer in the first fraction of a second that this isn't the kind of video they've seen a thousand times already.

Keep Them Watching: "And Then" vs. "But Then"

Getting the thumb stop is just the first step. Now you have to keep them locked in long enough to actually hear your song.

One of the best ways to extend watch time and average view duration is for something unexpected to enter the scenario. In Ben's video, the moment where the office erupts into a mosh pit, and papers go flying everywhere, works precisely because nobody expected that from the calm office scene a second before. New elements entering the frame — a camera pull-back that reveals something that was out of shot, a new instrument player walking in, an outfit change — all of that serves the same function.

@benlapidus

WE WILL GET ANSWERS… 3.4.26 #punk #metal #musicalcomedy

Here's how I think about it. Imagine a friend who's telling you a long, rambling story, and they keep saying "and then… and then… and then…"

Most of you make videos that don't even have an "and then." You do one thing, and nothing changes. But what actually keeps people locked in — what pushes your average view duration up and keeps people from wishing they were anywhere else — is what I call "but then." Not "and then," where things slowly build on themselves. But then, something you genuinely didn't expect shows up. That's good storytelling, and it's what keeps people watching on social media. Build it into how you plan your videos.