am i doing enough?

my album is now about 40 days away from dropping. i think one of the reasons that it was so hard to finish is because i knew this feeling would come once the countdown started: am i doing enough?

first, i think that feeling is very fair. it’s human. it also feels like an exaggerated symptom of the online cesspool of content that we all now live in. when you make music for a living in 2025, you are no longer in the ecosystem of just musicians when you put something out. we all coexist in this crowded social media/influencer/podcaster/whatever-space and we’re all fighting for someone to “maybe see the thing we made.” on top of that, it’s this weird online world that matters to everyone while we all simultaneously fucking hate it. (but obviously it still has impact?) weird times.

i’m not anti-marketing. i think the musician that wishes they could just work on music and do nothing else is slightly utopian and that has never really been true for an artist who wants to perform. it has always existed and has always been important, but i think it’s vastly different these days.

that’s why it feels harder than ever to put out music right now, because you know that once the song or album is about to drop, you have to step out of your creative bubble and enter that online death-match of views and engagement all in the desperate attempt for someone to maybe give your song a listen. i opened spotify the other day and the homepage was podcasts, books and music. cool. so a song is now competing with a 3 hr podcast that can be chopped into 100 twenty-second clips.

and i sit here, wondering… have i done enough to promote it? is it ever gonna be enough? do i need to do more to solve this, or do i need to change my mindset? i don’t want to be passive telling people about the project i’ve invested the last 3 years of my life into, but i also don’t want to become a race-to-the-bottom content creator, abandoning the aesthetics that are important to me, to compete with people who make things that don’t even interest me. 

so yeah i don’t really have a solution, just feels good to type it out sometimes. 

let me know your thoughts on the IG version of this post :)

-felix