Writer, musician, wizardly guide to platform independence
Today’s Daily Loop gets a little raunchy, featuring a vocal sample and a mish-mash of other sounds and debris. Still getting the hang of the APC40 but woo, I love it.
LIKES:
“I love @YouTube and put a music video on there the other day… how can this be happening? I don’t want my fans or anyone to be funding hate or violence,” @selenagomez
Daily Loop #16 Video by C Technical from Pexels
During a recent Instagram Stories doom-swipe session, I noticed Kendriana post about one of her posts being removed because IG thought it broke some rule. A physical trainer I follow had their entire account wiped out because of some unknown one-and-done rule breaking (thankfully they got their account back).
With each day that passes, it’s never been more important to move your followers to your website. To your email list. Get your biggest fans to follow you to a platform you own.
Social media is so enticing for artists, photographers, musicians, etc because of the instant feedback. The interaction. The release of endorphins that come from instant validation.
The entire system is built on that, but it’s a system to benefit them, not you.
You feed their system day and night with content, with engagement, with interaction. In turn, they harvest your user data, habits, track what you look at and like, and sell it to advertisers.
So long as you keep feeding social media your time and effort, they will make lots of money.
The alternative is update your own website. Send an email to your newsletter subscribers.
Neither give you the instant feedback, but stop and consider that instant isn’t alway better.
Sometimes you need to let your work cook.
Make your site something that’s so rad that people would miss it if it were gone (via Seth Godin). Make it something that is a part of people’s lives. Something worth typing into an address bar (or even bookmarking).
Make your thing so great that people will trade you their email address and the sacred access to their inbox just to keep up with you.
When you spend four hours a day on social media, you helped sell a lot of ads.
When you fill your site with two years worth of content, you had a body of work. Anyone with a web-browser can see your talent.
Your magic.
From Seth Godin, who I’ve been reading and following since about 2003.
“The blog you write each day is the blog you need the most. It’s a compass and a mirror, a chance to put a stake in the ground and refine your thoughts.”
That Tweet or Instagram post might get 10 likes, but will it even exist in 10 years? You can read Seth Godin’s first post from 2002 on his blog right here.
Social media is the the box of sugary cereal, being that you have to eat a whole box to feel full, but it just leaves you feeling like garbage 20 minutes later.
Solid black lines, grayscale images (with color roll-overs) – I love it all.
Check it out here: https://www.helenazhang.com
Browser template by Ilya Aleksandrov
Photo by Kerimli Temkin from Pexels
Saw this today from ‘That which is unique, breaks,’ via @hundredrabbits.
If you commoditize toys, you remove the toymaker. If you remove the toymaker, the toy is only an object of consumption. It ceases to be an object of wonder.
When tasked in 2009 to “fill up the search engines,” during my time at AOL Music, we published 20+ posts a day. Anything that people might search for, let’s have something written and published.
Here we had a stable of competent, knowledgeable writers – all uniquely qualified individuals – cranking out SEO-friendly “content” to be read and indexed by machines.
As an editor this pained me.
Throw away posts about band members getting arrested got more traffic than finely written interviews with notable artists.
Therefore, feed the machine. Find the drama. Find the bleeding story in the ocean of content, attract the swarm of sharks.
At this point, the inmates run the asylum. The child screams for a cookie, so feed them cookies.
“That which is unique, breaks.”
A unique offering, built with editorial discernment, breaks.
I do not need to spoil your view with visions of this architecture, I only wonder, what have their creators ever repaired?
Who has turned the ship around? Rebuilt the damaged hull? Fixed a site? Started from scratch?
As Seth Godin says, “If there were a map, there’d be no art, because art is the act of navigating without a map.”
In keeping Metal Bandcamp Gift Club going over the years (and sometimes not going, oops), it’s been a struggle to match the sense of community we had on Twitter back in 2016. As you know, quite a bit of things changed back in 2016.
I’ve resisted going all-in on Twitter again, mostly because a lot of people I know that were once involved don’t even do Twitter much anymore, for some pretty obvious reasons: their inaction against dangerous jerks, their inaction against harassment except when it might happen to men, nazi stuff – the list goes on and on.
I don’t want to tell my friends to come visit me at a dangerous bar filled with sexist creeps, jerks, and nazis, so why would I do so online?
So, Metal Bandcamp Gift Club has mostly been an email newsletter, and it’s been working well. Each day that there’s a birthday, we send out an email to about 120 people and a handful of those people buy music for someone they don’t know from their Bandcamp wishlist. It’s wonderful.
People feel good, they discover music, and artists and musicians and label make money.
But, that’s pretty much where it ends.
Yes, some members thank each other on Twitter, but blink and you’ll miss it. And heck, Twitter might not even let all that many people see that post, either.
Now a post on Circle (like above) is a post for every member to see. And if you blink, you can find it a day or a week later. Many times someone on Twitter will talk about a new album, or some gem they found, but if you’re not on Twitter right then and there, it could be gone forever. Same with year end album talk – there could be a great thread happening in real time on a Thursday night, but if you’re doing something else, and you check back in on Saturday, it’s probably gone.
I don’t know for sure if Circle is the solution, but I know for sure the current state of Twitter (and all of social media) is a big problem, and I’m trying to fix it for our little corner of the internet.
The delivery, the snark, the attitude – god, I love this so much.
I love that in a second, in just a few thumb-swipes on social media, you can come across a video so well done that you’re saying the lines to yourself while you’re making coffee.
“Logistics? You want me to write… logistics?”
“Oh, you still have prisons!”
Like, growing up with Star Wars, Ghost Busters, Air Plane – there’s just random movie quotes that we all know from our years of watching movies. Then of course Key & Peele (“I said bisssshhhhhh”), or “it is you!” Then Vine, and videos like this; the videos get shorter, but the quotes are just as strong.
The last album that came my way via a DSP algorithm was VOWWS‘ ‘Under The World,’ back in 2018. For real, two years since and Apple Music nor Spotify has really surfaced anything for me.
These days I just go to Bandcamp, pick a genre that I’m interested in at the moment, then look for album art that intrigues me. It’s how I found these amazing albums:
If you’ve been listening to music for years, and buy albums, you know shit that looks good most of the time sounds good. It’s how DJs source music from local shops – finding shit that looks cool is a great place to start. And now with Bandcamp, it’s even easier.
Compare with this Spotify playlist, one of the biggest for “Dark Ambient,” with almost 7,000 followers.
It may has well be a fucking Google Sheet. No artwork, no branding, no vibes.
Same with Apple Music. Sure, it’s got the cool Apple playlist branding, and while it has album art, you have to use binoculars to really tell what looks good.
Of course, this is all a ploy to get you to hit play. Just trust them, and don’t worry about that album art, I guess.
All that said, nothing is black and white. I still use Apple Music for streaming a playlist on my runs. I also stream NTS radio via Apple Music, and some DJ sets via the MixCloud app.
There are so many ways to listen and consume music. Bandcamp, though, is the closest we got right now to the local record shop, and the feeling of digging through the used CD bins (my favorite).
Above I just outlined how I dig, and maybe you have better luck than me with the big streaming services. So keep digging, friends. Support artists and musicians when you can and buy their music.
This post inspired by a lovely Tweet storm by Vince Edwards:
He’s talking about this live-streams that Marc Rebillet did today, on his way to one million subscribers on YouTube.
It’s easy to be a band and figure, okay, we want to do a live stream, so we have to just do a live performance and set up lots of cameras, and…
Well, yes, you CAN do that, but that’s a huge undertaking!
You can also just open up a live stream and talk about horror movies, or sports, or whatever.
Like, now is the time to connect and interact. Bands are competing with the The Madalorian and freaking COVID-19, like… do something.
I always think about all the shows I’ve gone to over the past 30 (?!?!) years – it’s the people. The people you meet at the show, in between sets, after the show in the parking lot, all that… that’s a part of the live show experience.
You can re-create that from your fucking porch with a decent WIFI signal and an iPhone.
Do you have to become a Loop Daddy? Nope. Do you have play guitar and videos games at the same time?
Nope.
Just do your thing, whatever that might be.
Remember your links when posting engaging content!
Metal Bandcamp Gift Club, where we gift people we don’t know from their Bandcamp wishlist on their birthday.
Got a Patreon? Link to it. Got a piece of press? Paste a pull quote and link to your Bandcamp. New video? New song? Link. To. It.
Worried you’ll come off looking spammy? Hah! Social medial algorithms ain’t letting 70% of your fans see your content without “boosting” anyways!
People unfollow all the time. Sometimes even by accident. Oh well. Link to your stuff. Make sure your links are in your bio. Set up a website with links to everything. Start an email list.
“But what would I even put in my email list?” Start with the 1000 pieces of content you post everyday on socials. Pick the three “most engaging” items. Boom (and include a link to your Bandcamp).
If you do all these 100% right does that mean you’ll be a star?
NOPE. But don’t take yourself out of the game without even taking a shot (horrible sports analogy).
I’ve been in and around this online music jam since 2001, I’ve seen a LOT. I remember mp3 DOT com and Rdio and Napster and Best Buy end caps and street teams. Put your links where fans can click them. Start there.
