It’s almost 2022 and bands are still loading their Tweets with hashtags, and posting URLs in their Instagram posts, and the whole time crying about how unfair everything is.
I have seen this for 20+ years now.
The world has changed, and there’s no going back.
The days of just having riffs? Man, I got 40+ years of riffs. What else you got?
If Coke commercials were just images of 2 liter bottles and the price for the past 20 years, they wouldn’t even be in business today.
Creepiness aside, this 2001 commercial is selling fucking sugar water.
And yet countless music acts treat their art like a commodity, with “free” downloads, limited time discounts, “merch bundles.”
Add in the fact that 90% of the time artists can’t be bother to actually link to the very things they’re trying to sell, because that would be “spammy” or gross. The art should “stand on its own.”
People will just know how to find it.
Coke gets away without dropping “find it at your nearby grocery store,” because they’re already in every fucking nearby grocery store.
Radiohead can just drop an album because they’re Radiohead. But your band, label, art, photography – you’re not Radiohead.
You’re spending hours every day on algorithm-throttled sites that limit your reach, your website (if you have one) hasn’t been updated in three years, you haven’t been collecting email addresses because “social media,” and you don’t have a prominent link to your Bandcamp page anywhere (if your music is even on Bandcamp).
You want fans? It’s never been easier to make fans, but even that’s taken too literally. Simply LIKING or RT’ing a Tweet is garbage in 2021, so simple an unpaid intern could do it for you.
Send a video, make a quick clip, record a message, get people on your email list.
You hire a producer. Why? Because you don’t know how all the knobs work, and you don’t own any $1000 microphones.
Talk to people who know about this stuff. Get in touch with me (hi@sethw.xyz). Check out what Brianna is doing with Taste Creators. Follow @BigSto on Twitter. Sign up for my HEAVY METAL EMAIL list.
Adding more hashtags ain’t working.