The sun was going down, so I grabbed my cameras (my god, I can’t believe I’m writing that) and headed outside. It was in the low 40s but for whatever reason, I really enjoy going out and seeing what I can see. The above was taken with the NOMO CAM INS W.
Shot with NOMO CAM 135 GR.
Not shown here is the few shots I took with my Canon P Rangefinder. I finished up my first roll of film with that. Can’t wait to get that developed and see how bad I did!
I also took a few shots with my point and shoot film camera. That roll is almost done, too.
Just last month I sent off one roll of film to be developed, and now this month I’ll be sending off THREE ROLLS. Who the heck am I?
Here’s the terrifying thing about the state of music in 2024 (from The Verge):
“The tech industry’s introduction of MP3 slowly felled major retailers. Behemoth music stores went belly-up in the 2000s: Tower Records, Virgin Megastores, and Sam Goody. FYE bought up the rest. Ads from those retailers vanished, too.”
Like, that happened 20+ years ago and we’re still recovering. All the music knowledge, the time we spent going to those stores, the jobs that were cut and lost… the digitization of music is an atomic bomb that I don’t think we’ve recovered from.
Back when we paid $16 for a CD, yes, music review sites were crucial. And of course, yes, music critics are of course needed, but they’re not valued (as we can see).
There was a time you could write for an online outlet and make a few bucks. There was also a time when you could write for a newspaper and pay the rent.
Ernest Hemingway was paid $1 a word in 1936. That’s more than $21 per word in today’s dollars. The maximum I was ever paid to write for a glossy magazine in print was $2/word, in 2021. No one (and I really mean no one) in media makes $21/word. That compensation just doesn’t exist.
That’s from Defector (above).
When I ran Noisecreep in 2008 we were paying writers $50 a post.
A few years later, I was writing posts for $5 a post.
Now Yahoo for Creators isn’t even paying per post, but they “offer a competitive 50/50 ad revenue share from ad placements in your articles as well as e-commerce benefits like affiliate revenue share.”
CPM display ad placements. On blog posts. It’s 2005 all over again.
Never be afraid to say, “thanks for your time,” and walk away—not as a bargaining chip, but as a source of sanity and professional growth.
“We also, by the way, need family, friends, colleagues, customers, clients, everyone around us to help us understand what it is that we do better than anybody else because we can’t really get there by yourself. You can’t do thinkism, you can’t figure your way there, you have to try and live it out.”
“We can’t really get there by yourself. You can’t do thinkism, you can’t figure your way there, you have to try and live it out.”
Maybe some folks can figure it out on their own, but holy moly I’m pushing 48 and I’m finally starting to feel like I’m getting close to what it is I really seek to do.
And how did I get there? Like Kevin Kelly said, “friends, colleagues, customers, clients…”
Social media rotted our brains on the instant gratification racket.
“I accept defeat,” I repeat after HINDZ from a recent video, “I accept that billion-dollar corporations have invested millions and millions of millions into the psychology and understanding how to keep me on these devices on their platforms, and it works.”
It’s not enough that social media gobbles up our attention – it tricks us into thinking we’re nothing without them.
We are isolated, working on projects alone in our studios and rooms. We are so in our own heads that when we get together to discuss these things, we can cry.
We’re trying to figure this out on our own, thinking we’ll beat the tech bros with better-crafted hashtags, disguising our “link in bio” text, or churning out vertical videos to appease the social media overlords.
If we just read one more social media strategy guide, or watch more one more YouTube video then we’ll crack the code.
No, thanks.
I’d rather spend my time in deeper connection with good people.
Cody Cook-Parrott hosts FLEXIBLE OFFICE, where amazing creative people gather on a video call to work on their projects together.
Carolyn Yoo made a zine called ‘How to keep your hobby from becoming a job’, and it’s brought a bunch of people together in the comment section and in real life – I handed a copy to my creative friend, and she loved it!
Start reaching out to fellow zine writers, artists, photographers, and designers – get on a phone call, plan a meetup, gather in secret in remote parks, commandeer several tables at the local Denny’s, plan your own hyper-niche flea market, write a short skit.
These are things made outside of isolation.
Spending more time around creative people will do us more good than if we just sit on our hands and wait to be saved by the next tech-bro platform to deliver us a new magical marketing machine.
Are we so powerless to change the current situation that we sit back and hope somebody else fixes everything?
And then what? That person will sell the company to a Nabisco+Tide hedge fund subsidiary, and we’ll be back where we started.
The answer is other people, community, and the exchange of ideas away from the supposed champions of our “creator economy,” which was here long before the silicon valley dorks showed up.
You can wait for things to change, but reaching your fans on social media will never get any easier. NEVER. I’ve been saying this since 2021.
Find some other weirdos, form your own band of misfits and start having the conversation about living in a post-social media world, ‘cuz baby it’s coming.
Here at CREEM, we’re not building the biggest audience of digital tourists. Creem.com doesn’t have ads; we don’t publish free content. If you want SEO-friendly music news like dozens of other sites do, don’t waste your time, CREEM isn’t for you.
If I click on your band’s LinkTree / Link In Bio and I can’t tell in 1.2 seconds how to LISTEN to your music, you’re fucked.
Tour dates. Great. Press kit. No thanks. Website.
Hmmmm… think about that last one.
While I’m stoked a band even has a website in 2024, what has our experience been with band websites for the last 20 years?
They’re usually not updated, maybe it’s just a bunch of tour dates from a BandsInTown embed, maybe some old photos…
DON’T. MAKE. ME. THINK.
Make one of the buttons “LISTEN” or “HEAR OUR LATEST SINGLE” and link it DIRECTLY to a place where I can listen to your actual music, or click play on a YouTube embed.
This might sound like I’m being old and curmudgeonly, but patience for this stuff wears thin after two decades of doing this 10 times a day.
“For each edition, all participants share their artworks via Instagram by uploading their typographic interpretations of each letter and number to their profiles, while using the project’s hashtags plus the daily hashtags to submit their work and enter the challenge.”
See, IG removed the “Recent” tag for hashtags, so now it’s just TOP POSTS.
This means that if you were to tag your entry to enter a giveaway or contest, you wouldn’t be able to see all the entries, just the TOP entries, according to however IG determines what “top” really is.
Because of this, the next round is canceled for now (via their IG):
Instagram’s never-ending updates have brought many significant challenges and changes since we started, leaving us with the feeling that the platform isn’t the same as it once was.
In particular, the recent updates to hashtags, one of the core parts of the project, have made them almost useless (with no way to browse all entries and no chronological order), making it almost impossible to manage a new edition as we used to.
This is just another reason why you should always be using social media to drive traffic to your own properties, where you own the content, the system, and the relationship with your readers.
And for fucks sake, it’s mullet marketing, all the way down.
Look how cool and vibrant their Instagram page looks! Party in the back!
If I had Instagram I’d want to check out every single one of those types! So much color, life, magic!
The website is all business. It reflects barely any of the magical energy of their Instagram page, which is such a bummer.
Friends – Instagram is still just a webpage.
You can make your website look cool, I promise.
And then as a brand (37 Days of Type has over 400,000 followers on IG) you simply tell your audience, “hey, we’re fucking moving. Don’t like it? Well, too bad.”
“Yeah but, Instagram makes it so easy to follow and keep up!”
Does it? What the fuck just happened here?
When you post do you reach more than 10% of your followers?
If 90% of your fans miss everything you post, maybe Instagram or Twitter are not great platforms for communicating with people who enjoy your work.
Drive people to your fucking website. Companies like Instagram and Twitter do not give a shit about your art, your music, nothing – if you ain’t dancing and singing and pointing at words, you’re dead to them.
