Blackett Music: A Community-Driven Artist Promotion Story

The Origin (2018-2019)

Blackett Music started when I released my first album Unbound in late 2018 and opened a Twitter account to share it. What I found was a bunch of artists shouting into the wind, hoping for success. Just like me.

In May 2019, I tried something different - a weekly Artist Spotlight series highlighting one artist at the top of an #artshare thread. A total of 89 spotlights spanning over a year, I connected with photographers, authors, crafters, YouTubers, Etsy sellers, musicians, and more. The work eventually became unsustainable, but it planted the seed for what came next.

The Playlist Era (2019-2020)

October 2019: I teamed up with friends to launch a Playlist Support Thread running every weekend, featuring 5-30 playlists and tagging as many artists as possible. Within months, these threads were pulling:

1-3 million impressions/month
20-40k comments and retweets
Thousands of playlist clicks

Scaling Through Automation (2020)

When 2020 hit and my day job went virtual, the workload forced me to rethink everything. As a software developer, I built a website for musicians to manage their own content and shifted manual Twitter promotion to automation using API's.

In September 2020, I created the @BlackettPromo bot accounts across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Results:

10k followers in 9 months
45k followers at the end for just the bot account
My main @BlackettMusic account grew to 55k (growing 2k+/month)

At its peak, the website had:

~4,000 members
~2,000 artists
~1,000 songs
~800 playlists

The Model: Community-Based Free Promotion

The core idea was simple: empower artists by strengthening connections to each other and their fans through community involvement and social media.

I formed a business strategy around three simple principles:

Don’t take traffic away from existing locations and do everything possible to increase traffic to them.
Employ quality-controlled crowd sourced promotion instead of single point influencer style promotion.
The common thread is Social Media – make sure everything revolves around and leverages an artist’s social presence

The Twitter promotions routinely delivered a monthly average of:

2.5 million impressions
2,000+ link clicks
67k Profile visits
32,000 Retweets and 22,000 Likes
A 2:1 ratio of Fans to Artists

Stories started coming in—musicians getting discovered by Twitch streamers and radio stations, feeling a greater sense of belonging, and exploring each other's work more freely than before.

My story got picked up by BizBoost Magazine https://bizboost.me/magazine , where I was featured on Issue #5.

#BlackettFriday: Donation-Funded Music Buying

One of the more unique initiatives was #BlackettFriday, timed to coincide with Bandcamp's monthly fee-waiver Fridays (when artists keep more of each sale).

The concept: pool community donations and go on a buying spree, specifically targeting low-visibility artists. Artists entered by tweeting their Bandcamp link with the #BlackettFriday hashtag - posts hitting 10+ retweets and 10+ likes went into a random draw. Winners received up to $10 in music purchases.

The campaign regularly pulled in $100+ in donations per month, all funneled directly to independent musicians. 100% of donations went to purchases - no overhead, no fees skimmed. The more donated, the more winners selected.

It was a simple feedback loop: community funds artists → purchased songs get promoted → more visibility for the artists → more engagement for the community.

What Artists Said

"Blackett Music is the most legitimate and supportive promo service I have found, helping me to reach over 11,000 Twitter followers." — Byron Smith

"I have been in the music game for a long time. It is truly hard to find many in this business that you can put your full trust in. Blackett Music is the exception to that rule. AMAZING" — 3Mind Blight

"Jumped into Twitter during Rona! All in on music. Found Blackett and since has been 100 percent positive. He cares..." — Zero State Reflex

"I am making music in Japan. Ben Blackett is more than just a service provider. He is an artist who writes music and has a wonderful personality. His service has been appreciated by people all over the world." — satosii

"VERY FAMILIAL ENVIRONMENT OVER THERE. DON'T KNOW EM PERSONALLY BUT BASED ON HOW THEY CONDUCT BUSINESS, THEY SEEM LIKE PRETTY NICE PPL." — SnakeEyez NeedsADolla

"If you're looking to do things the right and honest way, with no shortcuts, this is a great place to start." — Daniel Tidwell

"Been working with them for years and will continue." — Tha Faction

"5/5 for the amazing community and kind staff! They really support independent music artists, they listen and they act!" — 8000 Miles

What Ended It

In late 2022, Elon Musk acquired Twitter and began charging for API access. The service had been sustaining itself through artist subscriptions, but absorbing the new API costs on top of that wasn't viable. The automation that made the whole operation possible - the bot accounts, the scheduled posts, the tools that let artists manage their own content - all depended on free API access.

When that disappeared, so did Blackett Music.

The accounts still exist (@BlackettMusic at 55k followers, @BlackettPromo at 44k), but they've been dormant since the shutdown. The community we built scattered, though many of those connections still persist elsewhere.