David Allen gave me a pretty big break back in the day, linking to music blog in my early days. I think he said it was cool, or something – hah! That was like… 20 or so years ago, so I don’t remember all the details. I just know we got a few more readers after that.
I met David years later in NYC, and I don’t even remember how that even happened, either. I do remember him making the comment that I didn’t have any tattoos, and that we needed to change that! It was a fun moment, I remember it vividly.
And then here we are, all these years later, and now I get to see what David has been doing this whole time. This video brought up plenty of feelings, that’s for sure. Not just because of the discussions I’ve been having about mental health, or money, or art, but… the process of life. Continuing to learn, and find out new things about ourselves. Things we didn’t think possible.
When your band or your art gets that TV mini series like The Beatles: Get Back, will you have any archival video footage from the studio? From writing your songs? Talking about the inspiration of your lyrics, of the pedals you use, of the shows you’ve played?
Or will all that footage and text and audio be lost to a social media platform that you don’t own?
I’ve covered and worked a handful of albums over the years, from my music blog days in 2001 to now working with indie music publicists and labels, and I’m still blown away at how little reverence there is for the archival process for so many acts.
Sure, there’s concert photos on Twitter, and maybe some 200 word captions on an Instagram post, but there was a lot we uploaded to MySpace, too.
What about all the features you gave to media outlets that don’t even exist anymore?
Spinner.com, 2010Spinner.com, 2021
Just a decade later a handful of outlets don’t exist anymore, and no one really remembers the video interview you did (maybe it’s on YouTube), or the print review in a magazine, or all the photos from your tour in 2003.
They’re… pretty much gone.
And even if they’re out there in Google images or YouTube, they ain’t on your site.
Looking for a sign to document more of your work, your magic, your art? This is it.
I see this so often – a podcast shares an interview they did on socials, maybe with an audio clip. Once, maybe twice. Then a week later, its as if it never happened.
Same with bands posting songs and videos, or artists sharing a new work.
A week later, it all falls off the face of the earth. “Old news,” more or less.
And it hurts my weary soul.
Transcribe some bits of that podcast episode, and post that on your website (it’s 2021, and not everyone listens to podcasts).
There are people on YouTube “reacting” to music videos and wracking up 10s of thousands of views – YOU CAN FUCKING DO THAT.
You’re the band. You’re the artist, or the director, or the sound person – it’s not “reacting,” it’s “this is the work I did, and I’m going to talk about it a little bit.”
Sure, we’d all love our magical art to just “stand on its own,” but you’re competing with a tidal wave of magical art every HOUR.
The answer isn’t post more, but post interesting things around your art.
Star Wars ain’t just movies. They have TV shows now. Comics. Books. Toys. If they just stopped with movies, they’d miss out.
Your podcast can be a quote image (which you can make using Canva). It can be a blog post (transcriptions are cheap, and you just need a few key parts). Your music video can have a behind the scenes breakdown. A commentary video. Its own podcast episode!
The magic doesn’t stop when you hit post. Keep it moving.
Woke up to an email about a case being opened on ETSY for not shipping a product. Except I don’t have a store on ETSY. Well, in like 2012 I did, when I was selling robot drawings for a bit, but this was new.
Seems someone hacked into my account, set up all these products, made a bunch of sales, and routed it to their bank account… all in my account.
It took me a minute to find a way to actually reach a human at ETSY (everything in their help docs was for fraudulent charges, not ummm… people setting up shop in someones account), but a few hours later it was fixed.
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.
I sent anybody who tagged me as their top artist a voice message on iG yesterday to say thanks cuz those literally are the ones keeping me in business every year
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.
So this is very different than my previous beeps and boops. All those bouncy loops are still a part of my life, of course, but hey, humans are complex creatures, and over the past year and a half I’ve grown to love the utility of dark ambient and drone.
Oddly enough the search for this type of music spawned from the Headspace app. The sleep music is great, particularly “Warm Engines.” But I just wanted something a little “darker,” but not too scary. So I started putting together my own mixes under the name ‘Goodnight, Metal Friend.’
Now I’m starting to make my own under the name HUNTERTHEN, a vague reference to The Mandalorian TV series. If you know, you know.
This first release is meant for sleeping, or staring at the computer screen while you work, or maybe for walking through graveyards early in the morning. Please enjoy.
A Percival Pembroke is a “British high-wing twin-engined light transport aircraft,” according to Wikipedia. Also the engine behind ‘Paravian Sequences,’ a whimsical electronic album I found on Bandcamp, meant as “movement and patterns for mesozoic bird species.”
It will get harder to reach your fans on social media in 2022.
The best time to start an email list was 10 years or 10 months ago. The second best time is right now. Today.
Buckle up.
In the world of email marketing, there’s something called a “lead magnet.” It’s a freebie, like a digital download (PDF, video, etc) that people use to get people on their email list.
People will say, “sign up and get my free guide on how to gain 1,000 Twitter followers in 10 days.”
Why do this?
EMAILS ARE VALUABLE
There’s a reason why Amazon, iTunes, Spotify, LiveNation, etc. don’t give you the emails of people who support your work; they’re gold.
So how do you get people to sign up for your email list?
Use your own lead magnet; offer something your fans want, and give them a way to get it in exchange for an email address.
For instance, we’ve all seen this sort of post on social media.
Not even 50% of your fans will see a post like that. And when you’re ready to release your hot new song, you have to start the attention-roulette game all over again.
Instead, let people sign up to be reminded when your hot new song is available.
Run those posts for a week or two, in between all your other posts.
Now that you have their email address, when your new song is ready you can email those fans directly, without worrying about social media algorithms.
This isn’t easy, though. It takes some planning. Much more planning than tossing up a social media post on a whim (and then wondering why it didn’t do much).
COLLECT THE EMAILS
In the example above, I used Tally to gather emails (I just used it for my Black Friday give-away, too). For my day job we’ve used TypeForm to collect emails for new project campaigns. You can get fancy with Mailchimp, ConvertKit, Elementor, Carrd, or even Substack, or Revue (which ties in super well with Twitter).
SEND THE EMAILS
Once you’ve collected the emails from your fans, don’t you dare send them to a BCC list in Gmail. Sign up for a Mailchimp account at the very least. You could also use Substack or Revue from above, though, though they offer less design options.
All that to say – when you’re ready to go live with your new song, video, or whatever, you send an email to your email list audience first. These are people who said “hell yes, let me know,” so treat them like the royalty that they are.
Statistically speaking more of your fans will see the email and click it than social media.
Example: 100 email subscribers, 29 people opened it: 29% SAW IT 1000 followers, 125 people saw it: just 12%
Sure, you probably won’t have 100 people on your email list right away, but you’re probably just starting out with email marketing, and you’ve been on social media for HALF A DECADE. Give it a minute.
Use this method multiple times over months and years, and you’ll grow a solid email list.
THIS SEEMS LIKE A LOT
The allure of social media is that most everyone can do it. You see what other people are doing; you just write some text, add a link, and hit publish. Then you’re done!
Unfortunately, most of your posts aren’t even seen, which means you have to keep posting, and staring at your phone, and “engaging,” to get any sort of results. This is hours of time that you could be working on your craft.
Or you could send one email a week and probably get the same results.
So, if you have some questions, reply to this email.
If all of this seems like too much, you could hire me to set it up for you, too (for about the cost of selling 10 CDs, or five vinyl records).
Reply to this email and we’ll make something happen.
I think a lot about nostalgia, especially around the holidays. We grow up, and suddenly everything feels less magical. As adults we know too much, the magic is gone. Black Friday shopping, credit card bills, traffic… good luck fitting in any Christmas magic, I guess.
When we were young the magic happened around us, and we just walked into it. My parents loaded me in the car, and we went and bought a Christmas tree. We went shopping during the holidays. I pointed out the video games I wanted. I still knew my parents bought me these things (SPOILER ALERT), but it was still magical.
Now the only magic is the magic we create. I hung Christmas lights around my two windows, and I have them on all day and night. I love them.
My housemate and I bought some Christmas lights and hung them on our back porch last night. We were outside, with thumbtacks and zip ties, messing up, re-doing it, and finally, boom… we have lights on our porch now.
We’ll buy a tiny tree, and put some ornaments on it.
It’s the October, November, December months that I always look forward to, and they always seem to disappoint, but that’s like looking at the the music that “kids these days” like, and saying everything was better when I was a kid.
Not sure the answer, but I know no one is gonna show up and make it magical again. That’s on all of us.
