It's not a criticism. It's just math.

One person can only recruit, vet, contract, manage, and pay so many creators before growth stalls.

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Now we can finally start releasing music. And yes, the streaming sites are flooded with AI music and tracks people shit out in an hour. I don't think it matters. We've had this for 17 years. Even back on iTunes, around 85% of songs never got a single play. We've always had an oversupply of music, and artists still break through.

So what makes you stand out beyond a great song? There are plenty of great songs we've heard once and never gone deeper on. That is what this section is about.

The two steps before this, artist development and finding your community, are the soil and the foundation. This is the frame of the house.

About six years ago, I made the first video and the first article, explaining how artists were releasing singles every four to eight weeks. The ones doing it were blowing up faster than the ones dropping songs at random. I was covering tiny, obscure artists at the time, like Billie Eilish and Kim Petras, before anyone knew them. People called me an idiot. Now it's industry standard.

Why every four to eight weeks? Because that pace stimulates the part of human psychology that gets people to pay attention. The people who ignore it make one of two mistakes: they release so much that they never promote any of it (and it's usually low-quality, since it's not fully cooked), or they wait three to six months between songs, and no one finds them exciting.

At its core, no matter the genre, music is a mood-altering drug that makes you feel a way you'd rather feel.

The people who drop a song every two weeks usually aren't delivering a strong enough emotion. They shit it out in a few hours. The people who take three to six months make something good, but the audience can't depend on them for a hit often enough, so they get bored and find someone who delivers more consistently. Ever been around drug addicts? It's why fans lash out when you don't put out a song after they loved the last one. They want that hit, and when you don't deliver, they get pissed the same way an addict does.

Now, your favorite artists take a year or two between albums and don't lose all their fans. True. But Doechii puts it into a phrase that’s perfect from her interview with Zane Lowe:

Once you've delivered a drug that sticks, people forgive you while you cook the next one in the lab.

While you're still delivering mid or slightly-above-mid tracks, which is a lot of you, your value is being more consistent than the bigger artists. You give their fans a good enough hit of the drug they already love, for when their faves are away on tour or in the lab.

I broke this down with Artemas. His viral hit "I Like the Way You Kiss Me" hijacked The Weeknd's fanbase, and the brilliant part was that The Weeknd was the biggest artist in the world at the time and wasn't releasing.

This is what I call consistent sustained promotion, or CSP, the backbone of everything I teach. Most musicians go dark on their fans for no good reason, and that inconsistency kills momentum. CSP means releasing regularly for a sustained stretch and consistently taking action on it.

Spotify and YouTube. Depending on the artist, 80 to 90% of listening comes from those two. Your uncle can yap about Tidal, but it won't even hit 1% of most artists' royalties. They also happen to have the best promo tools.

Most people assume fans go to Spotify after a short-form video, but studies show it's usually YouTube, with Spotify behind it. Both are where people do repeated listens and go deeper. And the place relationships actually get built, where fans get invested, is YouTube with a little Instagram. Interviews, playthroughs, vlogs, behind-the-scenes, and livestreams are how you give an audience the lore that gets fans talking.

Every release should maximize four things: appeal to algorithms, give fans a reason to talk, constantly call attention, and increase relationships.

Algorithms aren't evil. They're built on what makes humans pay attention, so appealing to them is, in effect, appealing to human nature. There's a concept I call attention propensity: fans are wired to pay attention to artists they're reminded of regularly, especially ones doing things that are exciting, different, or what I call eventful.

I have a tattoo of The 1975. When I first heard them I thought they were awful, but everyone was talking about them, so I stayed invested, kept checking in, and they became my favorite band. If you disappear and don't seem like someone worth knowing about, you get ignored. We're specifically hunting the people who look for new artists before everyone else.

Charli XCX's Brat rollout was a masterclass. If you were a fan, you never knew what was coming next: a pop-up concert, the Brat Wall billboard, constant next-day announcements. Even at a fraction of her size, the feeling of "stay tuned, something's coming" is what gets followers talking.

A 2024 YouTube study found 8% of Gen Z consider themselves professional fans and 65% consider themselves creators. Unless your music feels like something people need to know to bond with their group, you won't get discussed. And when you pop in only every month or two, you feel bored, like the thousands of other musicians not worth following.

The artists who grow fastest do something eventful at least every week or two, meaning something one friend would send another. The typical musician does forgettable stuff, goes dark, then posts "stream our music, bro" and "big things coming" over a picture for weeks. People read that as an annoying clown and mute you, and yes, muted is real. When you're doing eventful things, fans keep turning to you and deepen the relationship.

You bring people in by giving them a narrative to follow, what we call a meta-narrative. It doesn't have to be trauma. It can be playthroughs, vlogs, behind-the-scenes, or narratives inside your videos. Charli XCX is a party girl weighing pop stardom against family. Dillon Francis is always doing something silly with other artists. Sleep Token sings about strange rituals. You're allowed contradictions, but you have to show people something to follow. Instagram stories and grid posts are for staying in touch: the forest stop on tour, the bad fast food obsession, the candle hobby. They remind fans of you and pull them back to your music.

"I have 25 amazing songs" only works for artists who've already proven they have great material and are meeting demand. Music isn't a lottery ticket. A song is an emotion, and you usually haven't made it as powerful as it could be, which is exactly why you think all of them are great. The practical problem: a song often takes until the 30-day mark to gain momentum on short-form video. Release every 14 days and it never gets the chance. Spotify also only lets you submit one song at a time for editorial consideration, 28 days in advance, so going faster is a fool's game. And editorial playlists still matter, because they feed the algorithmic playlists where your big numbers come from.

The every-three-to-six-months people who are usually telling me their songs are masterpieces. For some genres, that's real. If so, bank a bunch and release them in a row over 12 to 18 months, which is only eight or nine songs. Otherwise your word of mouth dies and your monthly listeners drop even when people liked the last song, because they need a new hit.

The optimal zone is every four to eight weeks. Here's a plan you can improvise off:

Keeping a hot song alive with alt versions even 7 to 16 weeks later beats dropping a remix album 18 months too late. When a song performs, that's your cue to flip it, not move on. Even slowed-down versions pull tens of millions of streams. Then do it all over with the next single.

Songs are our greatest promotion and growth tool, even for your back catalog, since the best promotion for an old song is a new one that points back to it. Should you still release albums? Yes. An album starts a conversation and is an inflection point, and a lot of outlets only cover you when you have one. On pre-saves: they matter for big artists, but not for the reason you think. What they're actually good for is capturing your fans' emails, which is how you make money. And music videos are one of your biggest growth levers, so I believe in an MVV for every song, plus a lyric video and a music video for anything you really want to push.

Most artists happy with their growth have been sustaining this for 9 to 18 months. It takes six songs a year to fill a calendar, twelve to cover two years. None of it works if you're not consistent, which usually means banking two to three songs ahead so you're always working on something coming out months later. The planning pays off when things blow up. I'm often the emergency call an artist makes when they say, "Jesse, this is finally working, but I'm totally overwhelmed, everyone ignored me for years, and now it's all coming at once." When you've banked content, that's a lot more manageable.

Once you understand all this, the next job is getting it heard, which is where we'll pick up.