What are good ways for a new artist to spread their music?

Lots of local shows looking for performers, you could literally travel the country booking shows and building your following, taking videos behind the scenes along the way. Building contacts in the industry will get you more bookings, which will get you more followers. If you're lucky, itll snowball from there. I feel like this is half talent, half luck. You have to shine, and you have to be in the right place at the right time.

post it a bunch of times. worked for lil nas x he posted old town road everywhere til it blew up

If you have recordings, put them on Bandcamp. You can also try a service like Distrokid or Tunecore, which distributes your music to streaming services.

Try the U2 thing where you talk to apple and get them to install it on everyone’s iphones and you can’t delete it.

If there's a local college or community radio station in your area, find a program that seems like it fits your style and reach out to them. Maybe they play your stuff, maybe you get to go in as a guest.

fwiw I keep a list of services and apps that allow artists to stream music, and sell downloads and merch, directly to their fans at https://totalsonic.net/direct.html This list includes artist run coops, FOSS, and Fediverse sites & apps, so I figure could be of interest to musicians on Lemmy.

For one, you could post it here.

Is it AI?

Start by putting together an EPK, then send it to event organizers and music companies.

You can look at these examples to figure out the EPK structure that fits you best — different situations call for different designs:

https://www.encorespot.com/examples

back when i was on reddit people would DM me their songs to add to my spotify playlists. not promoting spotify, but the concept still checks out: get the song to people/influencers who can bring it to wider audiences

Ask people you meet "would you like to hear my music?"

As a music fan i like to search for musicians performing their music live, as it helps me weed out the ai spam. I also love to see stuff like their discography, read their lyrics, see if there is a concept or cohesion to a musician's work.

I really hate those instagram reels with phrases like "you find your new therapy-core band." and only 13 seconds of music.

I also avoid albums with AI images in the cover like the plague, or projects that seem to have little thought, concept or presence of Humanity behind them.

Also saying you make music without showing it around sounds... odd?

TikTok