Founder of the Social Media Escape Club
Finding the delightfully weird is a challenge without social media, but also its own reward. I spent about 10 minutes digging through Bandcamp before I found this little gem. Look at those colors. Hit play and dream of color patterns. Why not?
Since cancelling my YouTube Premium subscription, I’ve had to find alternative ways to listen to my ambient music for work and sleep. Thankfully Focus Soundscapes isn’t just on YouTube, but they’re also on Bandcamp.
I don’t have a membership to Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube Music now either, so last night’s run on the treadmill was a challenge. Thankfully the Bandcamp app did the trick, and I was able to pull up the albums I’ve purchased over the years and continue running.
Now I need to find a straight MP3 player app for my iPhone, or maybe look into a dedicated MP3 player that isn’t tied to the Apple iOS ecosystem. Man, I just want to plug things in and move files around, you know?
From Queen Kwong in ‘Why Quitting Spotify Won’t Help Indie Musicians,”
“indie artists like me can’t afford tо ignore and abandon Spotify, nо matter how much we despise it. If I want tо book a live gig, a promoter will check my streams first. If I want tо get label interest, A&R will glance at my numbers before deciding іf I’m relevant enough tо even respond to.”
This is also true for social media – some media outlets won’t feature you if you don’t have a big enough social media following. See, they think when they publish your feature, then you’ll share it with your big social media audience.
Which is fun, since we all know barely 5% of anyone’s audience will see that feature from the band’s social media feed.
But then, with Spotify numbers – they can be fudged, right? You can artificially boost those numbers. Make a song called “lofi-beats playlist” and hope for the best.
I wrote this a few years ago:
Right now Spotify is for the masses. Easy to consume. It’s a never ending buffet, and while your music is on the menu, you’ll never make enough to buy groceries for the week.
A quick three gems I found on Bandcamp tonight. Hit play and see what you think.
“More music is being released today (in a single day) than was released in the calendar year of 1989.”
Lowering the bar to entry into the music world has been a wonderful thing. Along with the internet, it’s made it possible for anyone in the world to hear your music.
The problem is that every musician is doing the same thing. Everyone competing for the same listens and streams and downloads.
(source)
This is from Cassidy Frost’s latest, How to Dedicate Your Life to Music When You’re Fucking Scared:
“You don’t need to believe in yourself, you just need to act in service of whatever thing you do believe in, no matter how small.”
Stack up Small Acts daily and weekly. They don’t need to be heavy, cost a lot of money, or take up a lot of time.
As time passes, these Small Acts will create a mountain built on all the cool things you’re doing.
Then I saw this is Lauren’s latest newsletter a day later:
“If you keep swimming, shooting your shot, putting in the reps, things are bound to look different or at least pleasantly more weird a year later.”
Heck yes, “pleasantly more weird.”
The work doesn’t guarantee you’ll achieve some new level of success. But the cliche “it’s the journey, not the destination” rings true for a reason.
Act in service of yourself. It has to start there. Yes, help may come, but you must work towards something for someone to believe that helping out is worth the effort.
To be alive is fraught with tension – a delicate balance of having your shit together and being moments away from everything falling over the rails.
People talk about the “hot new thing” because of tension. Taylor Swift has a big tour. Great! I’d love to go. Tickets are $1000, and the nearest tour stop is five hours away. That’s tension.
There’s no tension in posting a song on Spotify or uploading a video to YouTube. That’s the easy part. Telling someone, “I posted a new single on Spotify,” is easy. An AI bot could write that. No tension.
Time to up the ante. Send the link to only ten people, and then see what happens. Show your next film or gallery with only a cryptic map to a secret underground venue under the local college water tower. Limit the number of people that can attend your next Zoom meeting.
When everything is available for everyone, there’s little incentive to pay attention; it’ll be here tomorrow, digitally or available to purchase on Amazon.
I love that Mastodon and Lamb of God – two of biggest names in modern metal – teamed up and released a song after touring together.
“We [in Mastodon] were just talking about the possibility of doing more collaborations because we don’t do it enough and it’s a fun thing to do,” said drummer Brann Dailor in an interview with Rolling Stone.
These two bands didn’t need to do something like that this at all – they’re already legends, selling out venues and plenty of vinyl over the years.
Even if you’re not in a band, DO COOL STUFF WITH OTHER PEOPLE, FRIENDS.
When asked why they didn’t release the song before they left for tour:
“The music industry is a complex and at times clunky behemoth. It’s not like we wanted to just put it out on YouTube, like, “Check out our song,” with a picture of me and Brann, like, “Er.”
YES. Don’t just put it up on YouTube and make an IG story saying, “CHECK IT OUT.” It don’t work for Mastodon, it won’t work for you.
Listeners have unlimited options. They have probably 25 albums they could recite word for word and another 10 they put on for a good cry or workout.
Expanding on your “NEW SONG, CHECK OUT IT” messaging is the very least you can do.
Sometimes, the algorithms get it right. The computer overlords can feed me vibes like this any day.