I met Nikki Lerner back in 2019, from Seth Godin’s Freelancer’s Workshops. We’ve been talking almost every Monday on Zoom ever since.
We originally connected over work. She had just left an office job to strike out on her own, I was trying to make my “helping busy music publicists with their digital dirty work” thing work better.
We used to over think the tiny bits, now we seek alignment in our work.
Last summer Nikki (a life long musician) wanted to work more in music, and wasn’t sure how it’d pay any bills, but just knew she had to do it.
So she formed a choir, and that led to a job offer (and more time working in music).
Sometimes we need to push into the work we want to be doing, even without any clear path of anything working out. Dare to start building ways to create tiny moments of fulfillment.
On Break Up 💔 With Social Media Day on Valentines Day, I deleted the YouTube and Substack apps. I reinstalled the YouTube app one day, lost about 20 minutes to scrolling through Shorts, deleted it again, and have seriously kept the phone plugged in and out of sight most of the time since.
I work from home, don’t drive much, and I answer emails and Slack and Asana stuff when I’m at my computer. Sure, I use my laptop quite a bit, but cutting three hours of iPhone time from my life has felt great.
I spent so much time on the Substack app just “keeping up.” Joining in with conversations, replying, replying to replies, managing DMs, sharing articles I liked. Seriously added up to over an hour a day, easily.
Getting back 7+ hours per week means I can write more. Or repurpose a bunch of the video and audio I’m already making every week. Processing and reflecting on all the calls and interviews I do with people every day.
That’s the work I should be doing, instead of dealing with 100 little pebbles of “engagement” per day on the Substack app.
I still have not consumed content on the phone, three weeks in. That’s awesome, and I want that to stay that way.
That was the killer for me, too – video. Making coffee, put on a YouTube video. Scroll the YouTube shorts. Warming up coffee? Repeat. Eating lunch? Catch up the latest Colbert zingers.
A solid week without all that? Just under 20 minutes of screen time per day? Yeah, I wanna keep this going.
This from January 5, 2007, from my Flickr account:
Freaking A, right. Giant screen. Nice speakers. Working with a mac at work is a dream. Also note the stack of Final Cut Pro 5 books over on the right. Yea, I need to learn Final Cut Pro for this job. Not a bad deal.
From a post I wrote about my time working on TypePad blog and hand coding HTML newsletters:
I built and maintained several TypePad blogs, one of which appeared on The Colbert Report because one of the authors pissed off a bunch of people, and it created a bit 2nd amendment debate. The blog post was removed, then re-posted, I think. Details are fuzzy, but it I sure do remember perking up when Stephen Colbert flashed the magazine cover on the screen.
For some reason I got this video in my head tonight, and really had no way to find it. I remembered it was on Vimeo, but didn’t know to search under staff picks or whatever.
From the movie “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere,” manager Jon Landau explaining the release to the label exec
“I’m not asking for your understanding, and I’m not here to explain Bruce’s thinking or justify his artistic choices. I am here to make sure the album is released precisely the way he wants, that’s it.
Whether or not you believe in this particular album, in this office, my office, we believe in Bruce Springsteen.”
This movie rattled me in a few ways, but this is the part I carry in my mission going back to 2001, that being, “I just wanna help my friends in band’s sell albums.”
This mission has changed over the years, notably to, “I just wanna help bands sell albums” when I helped launch Noise Creep at AOL Music in 2008. In 2021, when I launched Heavy Metal Email, a newsletter to help heavy bands return to email lists and websites as a way to regain a direct connection with fans, to 2023 when I renamed it as Social Media Escape Club, my mission is broader, “I just wanna help creative people make their work.”
It’s not quite so noble, more selfish than anything. I just wanted to see my friends in bands, or people I looked up to, I just wanted them to keep putting out their music, and keep this great big circus going – the artists who painted album covers, photographers who took band photos, the journalists who wrote about rock and roll.
I just wanna help creative people do their thing, and to do that thing they need to be able to let their fans know when they’ve got a new art exhibit, a new album to promote, a new book to order, and that’s becoming harder on social media in 2026.
So yes, I think simple email lists and websites make that work, just like post cards and tube amps and print flyers still work in the year 2026. Because it’s people, not platforms. It’s DIY venues filled with weirdos and punks and freaks that will outlast the “too big to fail” monoliths.
I’m not asking for your understanding, or to justify these artistic choices. Whether or not you believe any of this, I believe in the art.
The culture that feels the most dangerous, and, thus, exciting to young people, will be what you can’t see online. And the most dangerous thing for platforms is not racist garbage. It’s unmonetizeable content. The “metric” that will matter most going forward will not be the numbers at the bottom of a post or video, but the human beings in a room that left their house to experience something.
I’m sure people nearing 50 in prior generations kept fighting for drive in movie theaters, and muscle cars, late night diners – but that’s gone, only to be unearthed like dinosaur bones. I can’t remember the last time I even saw a photo of a drive in movie theater, a muscle car, or the late night diner scene, you know?
That’s just from the 1950s to 2025, that’s 75 years. Give it another 25 years and the fond memories of MTV, corded phones, and VCRs will be long forgotten.
It was in 1971 Gil Scott-Heron told us “The revolution will not be televised.”
The revolution will not be televised Will not be televised Will not be televised Will not be televised The revolution will be no re-run, brothers The revolution will be live
Perhaps the revolution will not be online, it will be live.
So “Polymarket is Doubling Down on Substack,” the CEO of Substack is “hyped,” a gaggle of Substack writers are up in arms over a for-profit company doing for-profit things, while onlookers are aghast, voicing their “I told you Substack is bad” quips on the very fine and respectable Twitter platform. Burn it all down.
Go beyond the idea that you “need eyeballs” for your efforts to be worthwhile, and believe that writing about what you do in a lower stakes manner might be the best thing for your work.
I’ve been blogging since 2001, writing and publishing and hitting post or send for 26 years. Heck, even before that in the late 90s when building websites for bands and sending email newsletters for tiny music venues.
Here’s 12 albums on the best selling Electronic > Down tempo genre on Bandcamp. Use your taste, pick one, and hit play. Don’t like it? There’s 1,000 more.
We have taste, computers have luck. Choose accordingly.
Love this from Rolling Stone: “Johnny Blue Skies, the guy formerly known as Sturgill Simpson, will release a new album only in physical format.”
No streaming, just vinyl, CD, and cassette.
As Steve Vai once said, “I get paid the most.” As more artists call the shots, and resist the allure of giving everything away for free, then we’ll see some actual change in the creative world.
Spotify won’t one day wake up and start paying more. Nor will the general public just stop streaming everything for $10 a month.
