3 month into soundcloud artist pro - I know now

Well I said i would report back. What I have noticed is that in the long term it has made very little difference in my plays long term. Longer term, the algorithm seems to spread out the listens from my older sucessful tracks that never stopped getting listened to to the newer ones, and now that has slowed dowm it seem s like the older successful ones lose their reach?! Of course I dont knwo for sure by that is my view right now.

The artist pro algorithm seems hell bend on giving the artist pro payers the illusion of valuable plays, but infact it almost seems to be spreading play out in order to appease those that payed but with little meaningful long term goals in terms of helping create popouar long term tracks. Keep uploading tracks and just keep getting 500 listens with amplify of those 500 listens I see very few being valuable or maybe even real.

So after 3 months did paying to play help my long term journey, trying to get back from my heyday of doing really well on soundcloud, I don't think so. I have a lot of very cool fans that have enjoyed my music for years, but I dont think this exercise has increased my REAL fan base or REAL exposure by much.

Of course with sooo much music around compared to 5/8 years ago, AI, over saturation etc maybe its better than nothing, but I do think soundclouds algorithm is spreading plays for pay to play with artist pro rather than pushing tracks to become successful so for that reason I am considering pulling the whole thing and taking another avenue. Youtube was great until teh algorthm change last year cobatting "low effort content" whic of course mine wasnt but maybe got caugth in the crossfire. Also I got a c strike of my own music and that killed it dead, one used to get 10s of thousands of real plays, now 20! yes 20. fb is a waste of time, insta and tiktok are focused on trending music so you stand little chance, bandcamp is epic but not enough people know about it, reddit is cool but of course you have to keep using the block button for trolls and just , useless humans and power trippers.

I havnt used spotify for a very long time but with the changes against ai slop I am considering revisiting because i know so many listen there as it is so easy.