GROSS! I hate promoting my own music, yet I am so alone!

If I can answer the question somewhat with my own experience, I have done projects where I have done almost no promotion and they found a pretty decent audience and projects I have promoted the hell out of, managed to get international coverage, and they barely found an audience. Promotion is important, because the world is so glutted with stuff right now that you need to make yourself as easy to find as possible, but the world is also glutted with promotion, so it's possible to just spin your wheels, pushing the hell out of something that no amount of promotion is going to do much for. And sometimes the attention successful promotion has brought has been relentlessly negative -- a smaller audience might have appreciated what I was doing, but a larger audience didn't. Lately, I have been experimenting with simply making my stuff easy to find online (through a website and by having it on the major outlets, like Amazon, and then just trying to build my audience person by person. Who might like this? How do I tell them about it? I guess I'd rather have 20 people who really love what I'm doing than a million who don't care or don't like it. And so I have been doing a lot more of handwriting letters, emailing people with similar interests, and just trying to be part of a community of like-minded people than a machine of promotion. If you produce something that starts connecting with a lot of people, the promotion professionals who know how to sell to a large number of people will come find you.

The people I've seen do it still go out and perform, and thereby get hooked in with a network of other people (promoters, bloggers, musicians, listeners) who do at least some of the social media stuff for them (for their own reasons).

What an interesting question, and one that I wish I had a solid answer for. I'm in a nearly identical boat, demographically, (seemingly) technically, and philosophically. I make sort of left-field, quirky takes on various underground dancefloor electronic genres, resulting in music that basically appeals to neither mindset. Oh well, it sounds true to me, and I like doing it when the spirit moves and time allows. Except, yeah, I wouldn't mind a few more strokes, right? But I don't have the time or energy (particularly regarding the learning curve/challenge of gearing up again and playing out) to do much about that. And, pushy networking makes me feel weird. Of your listed approaches, I've personally had the best luck with meeting the occasional individual (usually online) who has a similar level of ability and a similar not-quite-"correct" sound, slowly getting to know them, and eventually doing the occasional remix, collab, or comp release. At my general networking/production pace, this amounts to an external project every year or so. It's never going to make me a dime, but at least I know that an additional few people have heard what I'm doing. There is some potential in soundcloud for this sort of activity, although there's a lot of the same dumb self-promotion and false-fallows that ultimately made myspace useless. People definitely have success by working specialty forums, but the level of effort -- and dealing with the lengthy hazing process -- makes that a steep climb for many. Your idea of going straight to minor/niche blogs sounds like it might be more satisfying and have a better return on investment. Anyway, I hope someone here can be more helpful than me (I'll be watching the thread). I mostly just wanted to say you aren't alone on this kinda-conflicted self-imposed island.

If you have any kind of college/co-op/community radio in your area, have you considered reaching out to someone who hosts or programs a show that features content you feel your music might fit in with? I hear lots of very eclectic stuff from local artists on a co-op station in my small-ish city. The hosts tend to be pretty chill and engaging with listeners and the community.. some of them I have listened to on the air now for nearly a decade if not more. If I were a musician myself, I wouldn't hesitate to get in touch with a few of them, build a rapport, and send my work their way. Not a guarantee of course, but it might be a good way to get your work out there, start to build a local following, and network all at the same time. Is there a reason you don't mention much in your post about any kind of local music scene? I'm not sure what it's like where you are, but in any case my advice would be to use these lower-stakes internet/networking/social media approaches you mentioned to focus on promoting yourself to more of a local audience, rather than "the internet" at large. I think with the amount of effort you are prepared to put in, you might see more traction by focusing this way as opposed to fighting like hell to get your work noticed above the millions of other songs on bandcamp/soundcloud/everywhere else.

Oh, and I recommend this to musicians a lot - go read through the archives ofhttp://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/columns/fan_landers/. Jessica Hopper, current editor for Pitchfork, was a promoter and played in bands for years and wrote an advice column for musicians, often those looking to promote their music or book shows. Lots of what not to do as well as advice on crafting your spiel and selling yourself.

http://plixid.com/ and http://newalbumreleases.net/ are places you can share your work for people to download. It'll get you some more exposure.

I realize you're asking for practical advice, but Amanda Palmer's book Art of Asking and http://www.ted.com/talks/amanda_palmer_the_art_of_asking?language=en deals a lot with the reluctance of artists to self-promote and how society has this love/hate relationship with artists. She posits that society is constantly telling artists making art is noble and selling said art is not. She talks about how messed up that dynamic is and talks about her and other musician's strategies for navigating the weird limbo space that is asking people for their time, attention and money when interacting with your art, and also how to feel okay about asking for time, attention and money from people. It's not a practical guide to Web/crowd-source marketing or anything, but it might help move you past the statement you express in the title of this post that asking for those things is GROSS.

Yeah, I have this problem, recognizing that self-promotion is a skill and something I should really be doing but not really wanting to divert the time/energy/resources to doing it right, because I'd rather be working on the stuff I need to promote! In terms of social media, I find that my own response to other peoples' Twitter and Facebook presences and promotions is much more positive when they mix up their "here's a link to buy my stuff!" content with curated links and shout outs to other, related artists/shops/etc. I'm guilty of just making infrequent and somewhat repetitive "Here's a new thing I made that you can buy!" posts, and always feel kind of lame about it. I keep telling myself that I need to set up a semi-weekly reminder to find a cool and relevant link/song/blog/whatever and share it via social media, because that's how I stumble across a lot of things relevant to my interests; somebody will share a cool thing and I'll follow it back to its source, which is often some neat company I wouldn't have come across otherwise.

For what it's worth, the music groups I subscribe to on FB have a lot of folks who put links to their stuff on Soundcloud or whatever without a lot of promotional fluff in the links. I mean, really minimal commentary along the lines of "I just put this up, give it a listen". If all you want to do is put it out there, just find your people or at least your general neightborhood and put it out there.