Spotify is the devil. This is, more or less, the premise of Liz Pelly’s recent book Mood Machine. The book made a few waves in advance of its January publication, thanks to a pre-released excerpt in Harper’s Magazine that disclosed Spotify’s “Perfect Fit Content” program: a scheme to seed Spotify playlists with “fake” artists

I’ve run ads for 36 playlists over the past couple of months. You may remember that I launched this as a service around the end of January. The premise is that artists send me a playlist they’ve created, and I run Meta ads to it to drive streams and saves. Ideally, the

Let’s be real: releasing a song in 2025 can feel like throwing it into the digital void and hoping the algorithm gods take mercy. You’ve put your heart and soul into this track — only for it to rack up 37 streams, most of which came from your mom and

The people have spoken. Last week, on the heels of promoting my email-list-building challenge, I asked this list a simple question: What should I write about? Well, you guys came through, as you so often do. You sent in a solid volume of responses, and your two most common answers

I wrote a bunch of words about email marketing last week. Some people might say I wrote too many words about email marketing last week. To that I’d reply: You’re probably right. Honestly, I always feel a little burned out after sending a week’s worth of promotional emails; I think

We often make marketing wickedly abstract. I, for instance, am running Meta ads for my music right now, with the general idea that someone somewhere in the world will see an ad for my music, listen to it, like it, and then love me forever. The process is somewhat concrete,