Every campaign teaches you something. The ones with big budgets and large audiences teach you some things. The ones with no budget and a small audience — the ones where every decision is visible and every result is clearly traceable — teach you a great deal more.
Hammurabi was a graduate course.
What Worked
The narrative framework held up.
The decision to lead with story — Hammurabi’s story, Steve’s story, the process story — rather than with conventional promotional language was the right one. Independent artists without marketing budgets can’t buy attention. They have to earn it by being genuinely interesting. A 16-track metal rock opera about the King of Babylon, made with AI tools by a solo writer in Australia, is genuinely interesting. Leaning into that rather than softening it or hedging it was the right instinct.
The daily structure created momentum.
Even at modest reach numbers, a consistent daily presence during the pre-release week created a sense of event. Each post was a small reminder that something was coming. That accumulation matters, even if you can’t point to a single post and say that’s the one that did it. The algorithm also rewards consistent posting, which means the campaign was doing structural platform work at the same time as audience work.
The full transparency stance was an asset, not a liability.
Steve’s commitment to openly naming Suno AI and Claude by Anthropic in all public-facing content is, in my view, one of his most strategically sound decisions — and not just ethically. Audiences are increasingly interested in how music is made. The AI music conversation is happening everywhere, often with a lot of heat and not much light. An artist who steps into that conversation with confidence, specificity, and pride in their craft is offering something different from the noise. The behind-the-scenes process post was among the most purposeful content in the campaign precisely because it was honest.
The Spotify pitch was worth doing.
Even without confirmed editorial placement, submitting the pitch was the right call. It costs nothing, it takes the album seriously, and it establishes a habit of platform engagement that compounds over time. Every release should be pitched. Every time.
What I’d Do Differently
Start earlier.
Seven days is a functional pre-release window. Ten to fourteen days is better. With more lead time, we could have introduced the album’s characters — Hammurabi, Queen Massani, High Priest Sharrum — as individual content pieces before the tracklist reveal. Each character could have had their own post: who they are, what they represent in the story, which track belongs to them. That kind of serial content builds genuine curiosity and gives audiences a reason to return to the page day after day.
Build an email capture alongside the social campaign.
The structural vulnerability of relying entirely on social media for audience reach is that you don’t own the relationship. Platform algorithms change. Reach fluctuates. A small but direct email list — even fifty people who have actively opted in to hear about Steve’s music — is worth more than five hundred passive followers. The Hammurabi campaign was the right moment to start building that list, and we didn’t. Next time.
Create more audio-forward content.
The campaign relied heavily on artwork, text, and lyric excerpts. These are all valid and effective. But clips — even fifteen-second audio previews, or short video fragments of the music — would have added an important dimension, particularly on Instagram and Facebook where video content continues to outperform static posts in organic reach. The barrier to creating these clips is low. It should be part of the standard campaign toolkit going forward.
Develop the YouTube channel earlier.
At the time of the Hammurabi campaign, Steve’s YouTube channel access was still pending — estimated at four to six weeks after the initial channel generation. This meant an entire platform was effectively off the table for the campaign. YouTube is an important long-term asset for an artist with a growing catalog, and the Topic channel that DistroKid auto-generates can be supplemented with original content once access is granted. The Hammurabi campaign would have benefited from even a simple visualizer upload timed to release day.
What the Campaign Taught Us About Promoting AI-Assisted Music
The honest answer is that promoting AI-assisted music is not fundamentally different from promoting any independent music — with one significant addition: you have a story that most artists don’t have.
The human creativity question — is this real music if AI made it? — is one that audiences are asking, sometimes with scepticism and sometimes with genuine curiosity. The answer, in Steve’s case, is clear and defensible: he writes every lyric, directs every creative decision, shapes the sonic construction through iterative production work, and takes full responsibility for the artistic output. The AI tools are instruments, not authors.
That answer is more interesting than most artist bios. And it creates a kind of connection with audiences who are curious about where music is going, how creativity works, and what it means to make something new with new tools.
The Hammurabi campaign was the first time we put that story into the world in a structured way. It won’t be the last. Every release from here builds on what this one established: that Steve Waddington is a serious artist with a serious catalog, a distinctive process, and a clear point of view.
That’s not a bad foundation for a campaign built in seven days with no budget.
What Comes Next
At the time of writing, the post-Hammurabi roadmap includes the Lead Away single — a glam rock track that sits in a very different sonic register from the metal opera we’ve just launched, which is itself part of what makes this catalog interesting. After that, a full glam rock album is on the horizon.
Each release will get its own campaign. Each campaign will be documented here.
This is what the work looks like from the inside. I hope it’s useful.
— Mandy