There’s a moment as an independent artist when the data stops being discouraging and starts being genuinely interesting. Not exciting in a chest-thumping, post-it-everywhere way. More like quietly significant. The kind of thing you sit with for a while before you say it out loud.
I think I’m in that moment right now.
Let me go back a bit.
When you release music independently – no label, no plugger, no marketing budget worth mentioning – you learn very quickly to measure success differently. You’re not watching for chart positions or viral moments. You’re watching for signals. Small ones. Is the algorithm picking this up? Are listeners completing the track? Are they coming back? Are new people finding it weeks after release, not just in the first 48 hours?
Those signals matter because they tell you whether Spotify’s algorithm has decided your music is worth recommending to people who’ve never heard of you. That’s the game at this level. Not fame. Discovery.
Running Away came out in late 2024. I watched the numbers carefully, the way I always do. It performed the way I’d come to expect – a steady trickle of algorithmic streams, a small but real listener base building slowly over time. I was grateful for it. It felt like progress, even if it was hard to quantify.
Then GHOST 2.0 came out in January 2026 and something shifted. At the same point in its release cycle – same number of weeks in – it was outperforming Running Away. Not marginally. Meaningfully. I noticed it. Filed it away. Tried not to read too much into it because one comparison isn’t a pattern, it’s just a data point.
Then SCROLLING dropped in March.
Within five weeks SCROLLING had matched what GHOST 2.0 took four months to accumulate. Three times the velocity. The same algorithm, the same approach, the same independent release strategy – but a completely different pace of traction. That’s when Running Away to GHOST 2.0 stopped looking like a coincidence and started looking like part of something consistent. A curve. A quiet, consistent upward curve that had been building across every release without me fully seeing it.
Here’s what I think is happening.
The algorithm doesn’t just respond to individual tracks in isolation. It responds to catalogue. Every release you put out teaches Spotify’s system something more about who you are as an artist – your sound, your tempo, your emotional register – and who your listener is. Every person who saves a track, completes a track, adds it to a playlist, builds that profile a little more. By the time SCROLLING arrived, the algorithm already had a body of work to contextualise it with. It knew where to send it and who to send it to. The runway was already there.
That’s the compounding effect. And it only becomes visible in retrospect, which is why nobody talks about it much. When you’re in the early releases it just feels like slow, grinding work with uncertain returns. You can’t see the curve while you’re at the bottom of it.
BURN releases on 22 May. It drops into the strongest algorithmic position I’ve ever released from – a Spotify Radio playlist that’s grown from two tracks to ten, a listener profile that’s been built across years of consistent releasing, and a current release in SCROLLING that is still actively pulling in new listeners every single day weeks after its release date. BURN doesn’t start from zero. None of my releases do anymore.
Then TIMES in July. Love Unspoken in September. An EP in the autumn. Each one landing into a bigger, warmer, more developed ecosystem than the last. Each one with a better chance of being discovered faster than the release before it – not because the music is being pushed harder, but because the foundation underneath it keeps getting stronger.
I didn’t sit down and design a compounding strategy. I didn’t read a guide on algorithmic growth or hire someone to map it out. I just kept making music I believed in, kept working with the same producer who keeps pushing the quality forward, and kept releasing consistently without long gaps. Turns out that was the strategy all along. The compound interest of just showing up.
If you’re an independent artist reading this and you’re somewhere in your early releases feeling like the numbers aren’t reflecting the effort – they might not be yet. But the curve is there. You just can’t see it from the bottom.