Everyone gets their first 1000 listeners differently, just wanted to share my experience in case it’s helpful for those starting without a budget

I made a TikTok about how a part of the track has a tempo and time signature change. The exact text was “normalize time signature and tempo changes in pop music.” and it’s a selfie in my living room counting the beats with my fingers and overlaying text of the tempo change in bpm. 

The TikTok got about a thousand views which was big for me, so I made another version of it that was slightly better: in my car, so more light, less camera shaking, etc. still same text and copy. It took off immediately and I got 30k views. Even the original TikTok started getting more views and now it has 34k views. 

I recreated the video five more times with different formats (different text, different levels of me vibing to the music, different settings). The best one was “Only drummers can stay with this downbeat” which now has 40k views. Some other ones got less than a thousand views. Mind you, I was still posting some music video clips and other selfies and getting <300 views on those 

The most meaningful difference was that the successful videos were getting 30-50% full play-through, 10+ comments, and 5+ shares. Views:likes ratio didn’t seem to matter as much. 

Now, I had other videos do well before (10k+ views) but none of them got me 100+ streams on Spotify. I believe it’s because they had my music as a background, and not the focal point. Viewers didn’t engage with the song, so they didn’t stream it. 

Hope this helps! For reference, I make folk pop music with ethnic influences (like Slavic and Arabian). 

How I got my first 1000 listeners for free