How the fuck do I promote my music without being an obnoxious shill? I feel like my newest stuff is really good...

put it on bandcamp and share it in the bandcamp/soundcloud/spotify/youtube threads
as long as you keep it to those threads, you can post a link to your release in every one of those threads you see on the board and nobody will think you're a cunt for doing so because it'll be in its proper place.
if you start your own self promotion thread and I see it I'll tell you to post it in an appropriate thread.

try making actual music
you know, music that people actually want to hear
>DUDE THIS MY MOST ABRASIVE WORK YET
>LMAO IT'S SUPPOSED TO SOUND BAD
fuck off

Art is certainly subjective. Not everyone is going to be enticed by the same album cover.
With that said, if you can figure out how colors work or find someone who has, you can manipulate a lot of people into checking out your music.
Good color use can make your shit look professional even if you're a DIY indie-shit

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album cover wise you just have to be aware of commonalities in design for your given genre.
several years of going through thousands and thousands of ambient releases, I couldn't put in writing what it is about an album cover that gives away what it'll sound like, but I can very consistently intuit it.

That's isn't the case at all, but thanks for your input.

This too. I find a lot of new music by checking the new additions on Discogs and it's almost comical how monotonous ambient artists are in their use of album covers.
Take a swig every time you see a photo of something in the real world with muted colors and text: discogs.com/search/?sort=date_added,desc&year=2019&style_exact=Ambient&ev=em_rs&page=1&decade=2010

you're welcome, my dude :^)

animal bones arranged into some pattern will usually indicate either some occult ritual ambient, or (often nordic) tribal ambient.
landscape photography seems to be associated with more deep ambient and drone, and the bleaker or more featureless the landscape (eg photographs from the Arctic circle), the bleaker and more homogeneous the drone.
still life paintings or photographs are also a common drone thing.
detailed original artwork, sometimes with CG elements/manipulation, you're going into your more cinematic/OST direction.
dark ambient will, you guessed it, often have a dark/black background dominating the artwork.
then you have stuff like collages, expressionist paintwork, sketches, sections & cut-outs of map blurred images that look like found footage from a haunted house, aerial photographs of interesting terrain, microscopic imagery of I dunno, a beetle's foot, lot's of greyscale and muted colours as you said, run-down buildings, space images of stars, planets, solar eclipses, esoteric symbolism,
there's a lot of give-aways of ambient albums in artwork.

I always think about this. I don't have facebook or anything to shill it to my real friends, who would probably hate it anyways. I stick to the sharethreads cause nobody fucking wants to see some randos album who thinks they deserve their own thread. If you listen to other peoples' stuff and give feedback or props, they will listen back most of the time.

I'm not really interested in trying to "make it", i'm not even interested in playing live lol. But it would be nice to have at least a few people listen to my music that don't do it out of obligation.

Would you consider this a good album cover? I think it sort of captures the sound because it's electronic/heavily produced and poppy (pink matches that, maybe)

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I'd give that a 7/10, would probably click on it.
personally, the colour scheme and the serif typeface are kinda reminiscent of Garbage and Curve covers, kinda.
I'm not sure how I feel about the border. I associate borders like that with other music, and think it would suit the album if it were messy to the edges.
not to say dont' have any variation, do, but just don't have that easily identifiable straight and even magnolia border all the way round. I'd maybe work in some darker, cooler colours in a slightly contrasting pattern and not have it so that the two elements are so evenly delineated.

Thanks for the feedback. I tried to make it less of a hard border by having the spiral overlap onto the border. I agree that the border is meh

basically in broad terms your cover has 3 elements
1) the swirl
2) the text
3) the border
if you remove the border and have the swirl going all the way out to the edges, maybe it's too simple, essentially you want the album cover to give the broad impression of an irregular shape between elements like pic related.
also an nb, make sure whatever form it takes doesn't give the impression of windowed, enclosed perspective, which I think would be unsuitable. if it gives the impression of perspective it should look more like an open landscape.

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these covers all suck

The art is interesting but the commie buzzword is going to turn a lot of people off.

Thanks. Didn't even know the term was a 'commie buzzword', kinda lame considering I'm a libertarian. It's a quite important term in cultural anthropology, that's where I learned about it.

Appreciate the reply and the insight, not really a big fan of the covers you posted though.

So I searched your album up, I don't like your vocals. You should make instrumental music.

I don't like my vocals either but I want to make music with vocals, and nobody is gonna sing this shit for me so here we are

Well I'm not going to argue with that, what the artist wants to make is trump

Have you considered taking singing lessons or something? I think if you improved your technique you'd have a good voice.

my approach so far has been that my already limited free time is better spent making music over and over trying to get my vocals to a better point, rather than paying someone for a 30min vocal lesson once a week. I should probably just grind youtube vocal lessons or something though, might help.

Alright I'm interested, post it

OP I would listen to your music.