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TheVodouQueen
♡〜٩( ˃́▿˂̀ )۶〜♡ Hello. :3
I'm just a BlackBird, tryin' to find her way in the world. . .

Age 35, Female

Whole Buncha' Stuff

Masters Graduate

Manchester, UK

Joined on 9/22/20

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Comments

I wouldn't be too concerned about track scores, as pieces which get front-paged tend to attract a small number of users with very high voting power who decide to just 0-bomb absolutely everything in sight for seemingly no reason at all. If you're online more often around the time of one of your tracks getting front-paged, keep a note of not only your score/votes ratio, but others on the front-page aswell. What you'll find every single time is that if your own track score goes down massively in one vote, everyone elses is aswell around the same time. It happed the other day when all of our AIM tracks were front-paged, and it ended up with around 15-20 tracks being downvoted all at once. So it seems less likely that someone's doing it for easy-XP, and more the case out of spite.

Main things to do to keep activity/engagement up regardless is to stick close to the audio community, network abit between everyone, and keep on top of entering contests when you're able to!

as far as im experienced with other platforms. NG is very diverse from artists point of view. its very hard to make a small fanbase thatll follow your stuff. instead, your stuff gets thrown to the frontpage to hundreds of people that have a different taste (or no taste duh.)

very hit or miss situation here. collaborations are definitely the way to keep the audience fairly at the top, even if you post speedcore.

talking bout speedcore. the genres on the other hand are a thing to look at in detail. most popular genres tend to be Video Game tracks or lately Drum and Bass (showing a small renaissance.) so yeah. i guess that can be a small factor that will affect your listener count.

Oh man, the audio portal used to have a scoring system that resulted in little gangs zero bombing people to manipulate the weekly/daily tops. The little extra exposer the users got from that zero bombing was worthless compared to how divided that made the community. This was also the time when ParagonX9 was the only artist that auto-played on the audio portal front page. That bit of extra exposure was great for Paragon but really no one else.

Newgrounds has always been a small pond. You can be a big fish in this pond but your best expanding your horizons a little. Keep a bandcamp page, post youtube videos, blog a bit, favorite people (they tend to favorite back regularly). The user base more or less keeps itself chugging away but this isn't where you want to be if you want to further some kind of music career. It's why we bleed so many people as the years go by, some keep coming back because they love this website. There's always new talent growing up. You can get a lot of good feedback from certain people, we challenge ourselves often but there is no real money here. Exposure stays small. I suppose I should mention that even off of Newgrounds, being a "successful" content creator of some kind requires luck and persistence. Taking a break can hamstring your steam. I try to promote the idea that we make music because we love music, not because there's a money/exposure carrot attached to a string. Every artist I know realistically has a primary job that pays the bills and keeps the roof over their heads. Even if that job is "music teacher" or "guitar shop," it's humble work. Being an artist is difficult. I landscaped for 15 years, I'm sort of retired right now...

I've worked with people on Newgrounds that went on to do great things but all that fame and glory is fleeting, momentary, and useless. A small part of the reason I keep coming back to Newgrounds is because I kind of grew up here, playing flash games in the 90s. In my early 20s I drove across the country and randomly stopped in Missouri Springfield to meet a friend from the audio forum, EchozAurora. Through her I met my fiance Tom and in a small way every good thing I have right now is thanks to this dumb website. In my experience, the front page is the best way to gear traffic towards your work and you get there by participating in contests or events, and being recognized by the people that volunteer on the back end.

IM SUPPOSED TO BE WRITING AIM CONTEST REVIEWS RIGHT NOW, LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO QUEEN. ALL OF THIS ENERGY WAS SPENT ON YOU. WHAT VODOU IS THIS THAT YOU DO? WHY AM I STILL TYPING, I CAN'T STOP MY HANDS. THERE'S A BOMB ATTACHED TO MY HANDS AND IF MY HANDS GO BELOW 55 CHARACTERS A MINUTE THEY'LL BLOW UP. SOMEBODY GET ME KEANU REEVES. HE'S THE ONLY PERSON THAT HAS ANY EXPERIENCE IN SUBVERTING VERY SPECIFIC BOMBS THAT BLOW UP WHEN CERTAIN PARAMETERS ARE NOT MET, IM SO GLAD YOUR 33 AND CAN PROBABLY RECOGNIZE A REFRENCE TO THE MOVIE SPEED WHEN YOU SEE IT D:

Everyone who has commented is right.

We've had some luck with FP but I think it's about utilising all there is... create a new news post and frontpage it everytime you release a track or have a thought (every 7 days). Make sure you create and update your forum thread too. Include pictures in your news posts if you feel comfortable with that. Make sure you use all the tags so you show up in searches, Seek out collaborations, chat in the discord, review songs (which is why I'm here, you reviewed us!)

I think NG is very much a beast that only gives back what you put in.

Heya, guys.

Apologies that it took me longer than awhile to give a post-back to this in response to those of you who commented...

Firstly, I'd like to give big hearts ♥ and a solid, rejoiced, hearty thank you for your responses. :D They were all extremely thoughtful, and thought-provoking. I guess the TL;DR jist of it all, is to primarily take things one step at a time, network with people, collaborate, participate, love whatever ya do, and just do SOMETHING, anything in the arts' sphere or what you want to produce--all the while, try not to worry about scoring. I do appreciate (quite a lot, actually) when my work does get hoisted up to being "frontpaged" and getting swaths of views do bring in new people to chat with and fans. So that's fantastic, plus the added benefit of just having people to appreciate each others' work (I do try hard to watch out for others' artwork and music, and in contests, comment / review / score others' work in full sincerity and honesty)...so yeah, guess it all goes hand-in-hand, eh?

But I've heard ya'll, and I'll try to keep a level head in and amongst swimming through it all: learning new musical techniques, trying to find the courage to throw myself out there further, etc. It's a lot to take in (and can, many times, be pretty emotional...'cause, sadly, I can be quite the emotional person and can easily get frazzled with my blankety-blank list of mental blahs and chips-on-shoulders--namely good ol' low self-esteem), but I suppose being careful of putting too much heart-on-my-sleeve and taking an objective step back when "bad" or "bombed" reviews come in, is the best way to improve for the future. :)

I do look forward to getting to know a lot more people (and you guys) within the community over time, however! :3

Cheers again for the comments!--I think I'm just glad it isn't just me and I'm not just thinking / feeling in a vacuum over here... >_>;