Cal Newport makes a great point about artists and creative people being on social media.
If our work is on social media, we leave the chance of “being discovered” to a grey box. An algorithm.
But the “old way” of finding and discovering things on the Internet was through blogs and directories.
Posts and link dumps curated by real humans. DJs on live radio stations. Writers that reviewed music in magazines.
It was slower, sure, but I don’t think we need any more “36 new songs released today” posts, do we?
I think it’s time to get back to directories again. DIY style. Curated links to resources to duplicate tapes, make zines, and lists of art galleries by city and state.
What if the people receiving your emails forwarded it to friends? What if they copied the text from it and posted it on social media? What if your words traveled from the inbox into Facebook group chats and meeting rooms?
When was the last time you sent a newsletter that got 10 replies?
If none of those things happened — not even close— maybe getting more subscribers isn’t the answer.
From social media to Substack Notes, people post in the void. No comments, likes, or engagement of any kind.
Hey, sometimes things don’t work!
Your “questions to everyone” or “open invites” have good intentions, but after a dozen or so attempts, it’s time to reassess your strategy.
Stop asking “everyone” and start actually asking people.
➡️ Reply to someone else’s post. Go into the comments section of another post, or another Tweet, and reply there. Be the person that people love seeing in the comments section by being insightful, gracious, and / or funny.
➡️ Email someone directly in your network. If you’re hoping those people even see your original post and take the time to reply is a long shot. Instead, reach out and ask them. Say you’re looking for their insight for an upcoming post.
➡️ Invite someone before inviting everyone. If you’re just getting started in hosting video hangouts, live sessions, or workshops, consider inviting a few people you know directly. See if you can get three people to commit before announcing to “everyone.”
➡️ Go beyond “just sharing” and make it a big deal. Make a whole post about it. Go deeper than typing “THIS,” and explain why this piece resonated. Don’t just “curate your feed,” rolling the dice hoping that 10% of your audience might see it. Take the time to write about something (or make a video or an audio snippet), and share it directly with your audience in an upcoming newsletter (where 99% of your subscribers will see it in their inbox).
Soda section from a grocery store in Palmerton, PA
“Yeah, but Seth, I just want to post my thing and go do other things,” you might say.
Well, you see the results that “just posting” gets you.
Also, how can talking to your fans, audience, and readers be a waste of time?
Setting a timer for 15 minutes and communicating with real people five days a week will probably get you more results than the hour you spend making one Reel for 153 “people” to see (and which will never be seen again after 12 hours).
Does it scale? Fuck scale, do the work.
The strategy of “just posting” ain’t working, and it’s not going to get any easier to reach your fans in that way as we roll into the second half of 2024.
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.
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.
How do you make it as a musician in 2024? Have fans that you can reach.
On Spotify, I can’t reach the people who follow me—I have no idea who those people are, and I can’t communicate with them. I’m just on a playlist or an algorithm. But here on Substack, I’m cultivating a community.
Bet you didn’t know that a handful of people wrote 15,000 articles about roads in the US! Well, the editors behinds have left Wikipedia behind and started their own site.
Despite minor disagreements, the US Roads Project mostly worked in harmony, but recently, a long-simmering debate over the website’s rules drove this community to the brink. Efforts at compromise fell apart. There was a schism, and in the fall of 2023, the editors packed up their articles and moved over to a website dedicated to roads and roads alone. It’s called AARoads, a promised land where the editors hope, at last, that they can find peace.
See, this is what I fucking love about the internet.
If you don’t like something, you can build your own thing.
Sure, AARoads might not get the views and traffic that Wikepieda provides, but… life is more than views and traffic, right?
It’s about writing, stories, history, humanity.
Split up the cost of a domain name and website hosting and you’ve got something sustainable and organic that you can hold onto for many years.
“MTV is a ghost. Its average prime-time audience of 256,000 people in 2023 was down from 807,000 in 2014, the Nielsen company said. One recent evening MTV aired reruns of “Ridiculousness” from 5 p.m. to 1:30 a.m.”
Such a unique opportunity in front of us, if only we could all look up from our phones for fucking three minutes, shake out of our trance, and believe that we can make something great.
Ten people at (Engadget) are losing their jobs, and the editorial staff will be split into two sections. A memo says strategy will focus more on traffic and collaboration with sales and SEO
Founded 20 fucking years ago by Peter Rojas, it was then bought up by AOL in 2011, which eventually became Yahoo, which has a stellar track record of destroying everything they touch.
