This article originally appeared on the AWAL Blog.

After you’ve finished recording, producing, mastering your newest release, it’s time to decide how to unleash your latest and greatest onto the masses. If digital distribution is part of your strategy — and it should be since there are about 170 million users on Spotify and 30 million on Apple Music to date  — you’ll probably start investigating a few ways to make sure your tracks are fed to all the major DSPs worldwide.

One major difference among digital distributors you might notice right off the bat is fee structure: Some require a flat, upfront fee to upload and distribute music, while others “share in revenue,” meaning they take a percentage of the income your music generates via their service.

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You’ve decided you need a music publicist you can trust to help you promote your next album release. You’re nervous. There are stories you’ve heard from bands who hired a publicist who took their money and disappeared, or maybe the publicist stuck around but made huge promises they simply couldn’t deliver.

The result? Thousands of dollars down the drain.

I’m not telling you this to scare you, but to prepare you to hire a publicist you can trust so it doesn’t happen to you. There’s always some sort of inherent risk in hiring a music publicist, but there are also some things you can do to increase the chances of hiring the right publicist for your band’s needs — and one you ultimately trust.

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For many artists, landing a placement on a Spotify official playlist or a reputable blog’s coveted playlist is a major victory. In fact, in many instances, those Spotify placements are proving to be just as if not more sought-after than high-tier blog placements.

But for the emerging musician, landing that placement is never as simple as having great music. I interviewed artists who have had successful placements, along with those that do the placing, to tap into three major areas of interest: How emerging artists gain Spotify playlist placement, if Spotify placement a reality for most emerging artists, and if there’s a certain milestone artists need to speed up the process.

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Many people will tell you that accepting non-paying gigs as a working musician is a bad idea, and 90% of the time, I’d agree with them. Live performances will likely be one of your most important sources of income, so why would you go and give that away? I’m not here to tell you that it’s actually great, or even that it’s fair or right when someone asks you to perform for no money, but if you're willing to think about it in the rare occasion, there are some reasons why it might actually be in your best interest to say yes.

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One of the things musicians dread the most is keeping up with social media. With so much cluttering up our newsfeeds, it can become very easy to feel overwhelmed by the amount of content and underwhelmed by the value of it all.

It’s also easy to fall down the rabbit hole of comparisons and fear-based-paralysis – you see another musician killing it online and you convince yourself you have nothing to say. Or you did, but someone else already said it, so why bother?

Any of this sound familiar?