Best Websites to self promote or ways to self promote?

[GoldenEars22]

Where are the best websites to promote music? Also alternatives for SoundCloud and Reddit? Ways to promote music? 

[MikeRobinson]

I candidly think that "it's a numbers game," and that it always will be.

 

Produce a lot of music that you genuinely enjoy – that you, yourself would be happy to listen to – then look for communities of people (online and otherwise) who might also be interested in it.

 

The actual odds of anyone even knowing that your music exists(!) are "astronomically small," however there are also hundreds of millions of "encounters," each and every day.  Put lots of hooks into the water, and attach each one to a "trot line" of other music – "also by you" – which they might also enjoy.  Having by pure random chance "stumbled into" you, they are much more likely to buy something else from you than to continue stumbling.

 

Be careful of sites which are primarily targeted at "fishermen, such as yourself," rather than "fish."  At the end of a long work-day on a boat, a fisherman is most-likely to chow down on a good hamburger, and in any case he has nothing to do with the restaurant where his catch will ultimately be served.  

 

Although these sites are by no means "illegitimate," they have customers, too ... and their customer is ... You!  Quite naturally, these sites will paint a glowing picture of your chances which has been devised to match your dreams, not market(ing) reality.  

 

. . . For the very same reason that the purveyors of fishing-lures invest heavily in television programs in which one stunning catch is made after another stunning catch after another, and no one goes home to a fish-less dinner of ... hamburgers! 

 

"Caveat Emptor."

 

O-r:  "Hey, it's called marketing!"