Did you recently see an ad for Roku Ads Manager in a newsletter? We’re running a short brand lift survey to understand what’s actually breaking through (and what’s not).

It takes about 20 seconds, the questions are super easy, and your feedback directly helps us improve how we show up in the newsletters you read and love.

If you’ve got a few moments, we’d really appreciate your insight.

Take the survey.

Let me get something out of the way first: money cannot buy attention like it once could. Look at how far Lil Nas X got with "Old Town Road" before a label got involved. Smart strategy and creativity beat huge budgets every single time. A good idea with no money will outperform a bad idea with hundreds of thousands of dollars in boosted posts.

Here are the growth tactics that actually work right now.

Instagram is where fans go to build relationships with musicians. Here's how to turn casual followers into super fans:

When someone comments on your post, interact with them to keep the conversation going. Then add them to your Instagram close friends list. Yes, all of them.

The close friends bubble shows up at the top of people's story feeds, especially if you've recently interacted in comments. This is how you get around Instagram killing the reach of posts with links.

Set up calendar reminders: Every Wednesday, post the funniest picture on your phone to close friends. Every Friday, share something behind the scenes you wouldn't normally post on grid—a laptop screen with a song you're working on, a vulnerable thought, whatever feels right.

The key is regularly giving these fans a peek that others don't get, so they feel special. When fans feel valued, they tell their friends about you, interact more, and convert into super fans.

On Tuesday or Thursday, create a post for Tribly or Laylo. These platforms let you exchange track downloads for emails or texts.

What makes the download special? Post an alternate version of your song—sang an octave lower, recorded acoustically, and added an alternate verse. Or cover a song with a new twist, especially one you keep exclusive to this list. Covers of songs outside your genre but familiar to people tend to do really well.

Doja Cat gave away downloads the day before her song dropped to her most passionate fans. She knows those fans couldn't wait to hear it and take pride in telling others they got it first.

Keep this link in your close friends’ stories weekly or monthly, and in your link in bio. When you drop a new song at midnight, email and text your fans immediately. This gets the people most likely to stream it streaming faster, which signals to the algorithm that it should prioritize your song.

Email is opened by 25% to 45% of fans. Texts often triple what emails get. You own these addresses and can take them with you. This is why artists promote pre-saves—music marketing teams love them for getting email addresses.

Discord is infinitely cheaper than a mailing list. For most artists, it's $10 per month to boost the server.

Share your Discord link regularly on close friends. When you post a banger TikTok, immediately share it in Discord with language like "run it up." As you get more Discord users, this becomes more likely to help you blow up posts.

TikTok loves inbound links from other platforms. Put a Discord link in your TikTok link in bio to bring in people likely to engage.

Collaborate with an artist who gets listed as a primary artist on Spotify or as a collaborator on YouTube (you can go back and tag past collaborators on YouTube now for algorithmic juice).

Whether it's remixes, adding a featured artist to sing on a verse, or doing alternate versions like Charli XCX did on her Brat accompaniment album, this gets your song to the algorithmic recommendations of the other artist's fan base. Your name lives on their artist page forever. When a fan falls in love with that artist, they see your name there with a big co-sign.

As that musician grows, often you do too. Many labels have shifted huge budgets into these collaborations because they don't see a better way to spend money.

"But I have 2,000 monthly listeners, who's gonna collab with me?" Find that artist you think is talented who also has 2,000 monthly listeners. You two grow to 10,000 from the collab. Then you can convince somebody with 20,000 to collab. Keep going up the ladder. I've seen countless artists blow up from doing exactly this.

You probably need to make more videos. Music videos, minimum viable videos, lyric videos, behind the scenes, unboxing your DAW session, playthroughs, vlogs—whatever entertains your fans.

Multiple videos per release is becoming a proven strategy. K-Pop figured this out early. LE SSERAFIM leveraged 15 different video formats for "Crazy"—trailers, dance practices, behind-the-scenes, and fan reaction features.

Lady Gaga pushed "Disease" by making different versions on YouTube—acoustic with piano, then a music video, till it popped off.

You're dual-purposing your time. A photo shoot for your album cover becomes a slideshow on short form, a minimum viable video, a dance rehearsal video, a live performance, plus short-form clips. That's not dual-purpose, that's quadruple-purpose.

If you need to learn a new synthesizer for your song, that becomes a YouTube video. That solo you wrote has content to promote it. Work smarter, not harder.

Songs are one of the biggest growth mechanisms. When you drop a new song, it usually raises the numbers on your old songs. When new fans come because the song is good, they check out your old songs, get recommended on Spotify Radio or YouTube, and convert into bigger fans.

When I managed Man Overboard, people couldn't believe how fast they grew. One trick: they'd written so many songs before releasing material. It was easy to put out 75 songs fans loved in 18 months. 2hollis put out around 50 songs in a similar time with incredibly high quality, resulting in absolutely insane growth.

One common release strategy: a month or two after you release an album, start dumping bonus tracks as singles, reminding people of the album and putting them on a deluxe version.

There are artists with a million monthly listeners who've never played live, but you're chopping off a limb trying to run a marathon.

Hearing songs very loudly gets us excited. Singing with others or dancing in a group feels like community. It's science. Playing live has a very good chance of converting those who hear you and see you into fans. Plus, people buy merch.

The number one way live shows grow is that most people don't get: when you're getting tagged in stories next to other artists whose fans could be into you, when your name is on tour posters getting tagged by local venues, this boosts algorithmic bonds for Instagram to suggest you to fans of those other artists.

If you're smart enough to mail posters to venues preprinted with a blank space to fill in show info a month before the show, you have free advertisement wherever fans of that style of music congregate.

Cheer on artists you sound like. Repost their stuff, comment, like. Those artists often see it and endear you to them. Their fans see it and wonder who you are.

Liking and following other artists similar to you, dropping comments—it's a low time commitment and helps you grow.

On TikTok specifically, the algorithm looks at who you follow and interact with to send your videos to those people. If you comment and like videos of artists similar to you, they often test you on those people's fans if you post right afterwards. Posting live after you post a short-form video is one of people's favorite hacks for growing on TikTok.

Using trending audio is a bad idea for musicians. It may work for influencers, but not for you.

2025 showed us that going mega viral doesn't do much good long-term. If you're just doing trends and dances, you'll reach a broad audience, but they're not people who'll like your music. I've profiled groups with hundreds of millions of views and nearly no streams to show for it.

The goal is mid viral, not mega viral. Artists blowing up effectively go viral to tens or hundreds of thousands of people who are really likely to like their music and see it repeatedly.

If you hear trending audio and think, "Oh my god, that's so me," use it to show off your personality. The test: would you use it if it wasn't trending? If yes, great sign. If you're only doing it because it's trending, bad sign.

Julia Wolf going viral with Twilight content for her song "In My Room" was perfect—the audience would like a song like that. Artemas hijacked The Weeknd's fan base with similar-sounding music to fill the void. They went viral to the right people.

A video with 250,000 views of "the best fifth-wave emo songs you've never heard" can trigger millions of streams. The audiences you go viral to matter.

If you made an extremely mid video with a mid song and mid pictures, you're gonna burn the money you paid for publicity.

A lot of publicity doesn't move the needle in numbers, but it can move the needle in influential people curating your music—managers, other influencers, people who adopt music early. These are important for getting your algorithm going.

If we imagine fame as a ladder, publicity rarely moves you more than one rung up. When you're paying $10,000 and above for campaigns, consider the ROI. Unless you made amazing videos to call attention to, it won't work out well.

For indie or metal artists, video or radio promotion can help level you up since there are more gates to open. For pop artists with 30,000 monthly listeners, radio promo is basically setting money on fire.

The best promotion companies won't take your money unless they know they can get results. If they're banging your email inbox or posting meta ads targeting you, don't get tempted.

Albums are a moment to reflect on what an artist has done. Many outlets that'll skip covering your singles will cover you once you have an album.

Calling attention to yourself when you release an album is the most effective way to get a bigger pool of attention and get audiences to think deeper about you. When we're listening to an album, we consider an artist more and understand them better.

Pre-orders for vinyl and t-shirt bundles, selling at live shows or in stores—this can help fund what you do.

Most of this section is things you do all at once, as they make sense for you and when you're ready. When you start to fly a plane, you don't just pull all the levers down at once. You slowly pull levers as the right time comes and figure out which makes sense each time.