> Otherwise you're just sending your demo to a blog and hoping it might get listened to in the same way you would have sent it to a college radio staton 30 years ago.
What do you think the record label is doing when they contact a curator or radio station? It's the exact same as if a musician had contact them. It's an email to a person, who makes a decision based on the content.
It’s their job to have existing relationships with the bloggers, they aren’t just sending cold emails. And I’d they don’t have relationships they can built them thanks to the credibility they have naturally compared to Jim for some cool indie band sending random emails.
Not sure about this. Maybe for big music fans, but most casual listeners aren't reading music blogs. They're throwing on spotify playlists which allow artists to pay to get boosted. Guess what, it's the major label artists that can afford those payments. They're seeing that their favorite tiktoker made a video with some new band. Guess what, the tiktoker was paid by a label to use that music.
You're also being very conspiratorial by pretending that all playlists and TikTok users are being paid to place music. It does exist, but is not even remotely as ubiquitous as you're pretending.
This is a solid but niche market. There is no conspiracy. But distribution is hard. Getting a few thousand listeners is different from serving hundreds of millions.
That's simply untrue. The vast majority of curating and playlisting is through bloggers or social media personalities and not through labels, so I'm not sure where you got that from.