I spent months building a platform for beatmakers. Getting the first users is harder than I expected. (I will not promote)

I’ve spent the last few months building a website for beatmakers to upload their music, create profiles and get discovered through a leaderboard. I’ve put a lot of time into it. Probably too much, honestly. I’ve spent hours fixing little things, improving the music player, working on the design and adding features. And now that the site is live, I’ve run into a problem I wasn’t really prepared for. There just aren’t many people using it. I’ve been contacting producers on SoundCloud and trying to spread the word, but getting someone to visit the site is one thing. Convincing them to actually upload a beat is another. I think the biggest problem is that nobody really wants to post their music somewhere that doesn’t already have an audience. But without people uploading, it’s pretty hard to build that audience in the first place. And I keep going back to working on the site because, well, that’s the part I know how to do. I’m starting to realize I probably should’ve spent more time finding users before building so much. Has anyone here built something that depends on users creating content? How did you get past that initial stage where everything works, but the platform still feels empty? I’d genuinely like to hear what worked for you, especially if you started with basically no audience.