What to do when a release does nothing
It happens to everyone, including people whose next release did very well.
You worked on something for months. You released it. Almost nothing happened.
This is common enough to be unremarkable, and it feels catastrophic every time.
First, separate the two questions
Is the work good? and did the release reach anyone? are different questions, and a quiet release only ever answers the second one.
Most quiet releases are distribution failures, not quality failures. The work went out to the people who already follow you, at a moment when they happened not to be looking, and then it stopped.
What the numbers can tell you
Look at completion rather than plays. If people who started it finished it, the work is connecting and the problem is reach. If they dropped at fifteen seconds, that is different information and worth taking seriously.
A small number of plays with high completion is a better position than a larger number with people leaving early. It is easier to find more people than to fix work nobody finishes.
What not to do
Do not delete it. Songs get found later. A release that did nothing in March has been picked up in November more times than anyone tracks.
Do not immediately release something else. The instinct to bury it under new work means you never find out what went wrong, and you spend the next thing at the same reach.
Do not buy plays. You will feel better for a day and you will have destroyed your only honest signal.
What actually helps
Release it again, differently. A live version, a clip with different framing, the story of how it was made. The same work reaching different people at a different moment is not repetition, and audiences do not experience it as such — most of them missed it the first time.
The artists who get somewhere are rarely the ones whose first releases worked. They are the ones who were still going after several that did not.