A Forum, a Song, and a Decision I Didn't Make

If you’re trying to get your music heard online, visibility isn’t something that just happens. Social ads, playlist submissions, PR work — and at some point you start considering the stranger routes.

One of the ones I considered was having someone post about my song on Ekşi Sözlük, a long-running Turkish collaborative dictionary and discussion site where entries are written by users, closer in spirit to Reddit than to a review page. I planned to approach a user there who advertised that kind of service, but not to set it up as the ordinary pay-and-receive arrangement. What I had in mind was this: they would actually listen to the song, I wouldn’t tell them what to write, and whatever came out would be theirs. If they didn’t like it, they’d say so.

I drafted the message. Then I sat looking at it for a while.

What I noticed was an inconsistency inside the setup that no amount of wording could fix. The moment I paid, the other person’s free opinion stopped being something I could measure. If the post came back positive, I’d never know how much of that belonged to the song. If it came back negative, I’d know even that was a line item. Whichever way it went, there was nothing in it for me to learn. Visibility can be bought; but the information that comes back from bought visibility loses its value the moment it’s bought.

And that, I think, is the real point. What decides whether a song reaches you today is usually not the song but the machinery carrying it. Playlist economics, algorithmic distribution, purchasable visibility. None of it makes a work good or bad, but all of it decides which work gets a hearing at all. A song not reaching you doesn’t mean it’s bad; reaching you doesn’t mean it’s good. We have no instrument for telling those apart.

So I don’t think the question “what are people listening to” takes me anywhere. What makes a song popular isn’t the quality of the song; it’s that people are listening to it. And what gets people listening is usually not the song either, but the structure behind it. If there’s something to criticise, it isn’t in the listener’s taste — it’s in that structure.

In the end I didn’t send the message. I wrote this instead.

Maybe the right road is to keep making music and let the audience that will value it form on its own. I’m not sure that always works; “good music gets where it deserves to get” may be too optimistic a thing to say. But I do know what bought visibility would have told me: nothing.