With regards to marketing, here are the things that worked:

On the musical-artifacts.com page, I included ALL applicable tags, including the commonly-misspelled tags. The site will save ANY tag you define, even if you delete the project, it gets deleted, or you delete the tag. Some people have put previous handles in there unfortunately. Anyways, many users there, be it for fast typing reasons or other reasons, will tend to misspell tags by accident, and those errors get saved in the site’s tagging system. So in the tags for my works on the site, I fill in ALL the misspellings people have accidentally entered when tagging their content. Evidently people Googling SoundFonts can tend to misspell their search queries quite often, because the works I have on the site with all the commonly-misspelled tags have many downloads (tens of thousands), while the works I have there from before I started that have less. It DOES take eons to tag though. I go through every vowel, as well as the letter y, as well as all the numbers. This is done for each tag box (main tags, software tags, and the format tag, though less so there). It’s laborious and the site’s interface for that is somewhat clunky, but it gets results!

What didn’t really work too well:

Doing endless YouTube uploads of SoundFont testing. People tend to be attached these days to Super Mario 64’s SoundFont and no other SoundFont. It has infested ALL YouTube searches for “SoundFont” when sorting by New. It would seem like I’m gaining the most traction on places that aren’t YouTube, and funnily enough, some people even recommend my content in walled-garden social media and then the recipients send their praise publicly. Still not on YouTube. But it would appear that after two sprees of many covers, I am gaining subscribers faster than I did prior. Hence why I say it didn’t work too well, rather than not working. You know, I tend to release my source files very openly because I want people to be able to more freely work with my content. I also uploaded my song to Nico Nico Douga with a title that doesn’t require searching outside Japanese because I want my song to become a notable song, and I’m fine with that happening in Japan if it does not happen in my country (United States.)

With regards to getting my project in front of more people, I will say that the fact that I even have it here on itch.io, a place where game developers frequent, with a very fancy page, is part of how I’m trying to get it in front of more people. If you want retro sounds in your game that are libre, here you go.

If you have any suggestions, I would be glad to hear them!

Best Wishes, stgiga