Say no. If you can’t say no you’re never going to have credibility.
You’re selling more than music, you’re selling your identity. I’m not saying you have to be all over social media, I’m just saying your identity should be baked-in to your music. This is why hip-hop eclipsed hair bands. The hair bands were wearing spandex, unlike the rock bands of the seventies, who wore street clothes, and they were writing ballads to appeal to people who otherwise wouldn’t like them. And when the tide turned, the hair bands became laughable. You cannot regain credibility, it doesn’t work that way. Meanwhile, hip-hop was all about truth. Living the life. Having an identity. And the public resonated with that.
Your career is your responsibility. If you’re looking for people to help you, to shoulder the weight, you’ve got it wrong. Today you are responsible for your own career. This is something that social media influencers have right that musicians refuse to accept. Yes, pre-internet, when distribution was closed to most, when radio and music television ruled, the major label had power and you could utilize this power to your advantage. But that game is on life support.
No one will work unless pressed. Don’t tell the label, anybody who is ultimately working for you, and a label works for you, what you’re doing, become friends, contact them on a regular basis, and get them to do work for you that you can’t do yourself. Yes, you’re willing to help out the label, et al. But my point here is these people are overwhelmed, and if you tell them you’re going to do the heavy lifting, you’re letting them off the hook. It’s a partnership, and your partners have to pull their weight. They love nothing more than to be let off the hook.
Live, live, live. The era of sitting at home in your bedroom and creating a hit are done. Even if you have that hit, odds are you’ll never have another one. You’ve got no real fans, no one to support you. Be ready to go on the road if you get any streaming action.
Ignore Spotify counts. The best thing in life is that Spotify and YouTube are free. You can get your music heard if someone chooses to listen to it. It’s available to all. And this is very different from the way it was in the pre-internet era. The key is to have fans who go to Spotify, et al, to hear your music. As far as people discovering your music on streaming outlets… It’s nice when it happens, but that’s not the way it usually happens. As for the vaunted playlists… Those are listened to by the most passive of listeners. You want active fans. And active fans search and play exactly what they want to. Streaming is the sideshow. Correlate concert grosses with streams, oftentimes they’re upside down, incredible dollars in the venue, anemic streams. People are fans of the live experience. And their fan bases are narrow. The billion stream club is populated by those who appeal to the broadest audience, oftentimes sacrificing credibility in the process.
Money comes last. You’re a tech startup. Grow the audience, there are plenty of ways to monetize thereafter.
TikTok is a fool’s errand. No one has figured out how to game the system. Furthermore, usually only a snippet is employed by TikTokkers anyway. And a lot of people who get traction with their music on TikTok…are homemade artists creating music just for this purpose. The retrograde labels are signing these people, believing they’ve got an audience, which will scarf up their albums, but in truth that is wrong. People only want the snippet. Yes, you can go viral via TikTok, but it’s serendipitous.
Just because it happened once doesn’t mean it will happen again. Fleetwood Mac got a bounce from that skateboarding worker, Lil Nas X blew up after TikTok, but that’s like Radiohead’s “In Rainbows,” one and done. When it involves tech, it’s a fad. Focus on the music.
It happens later than ever before. If you’ve got a Plan B, take it. To make it in music requires all of your time and effort. And you still may not make it. But that does not mean you should labor in obscurity forever.
Be wary of focusing on albums. The Stones? All that hype over “Hackney Diamonds”? The album is already in the rearview mirror. People are focused on the now, it’s the only way they can cope. What happened yesterday is forgotten. Embrace this paradigm. Think of creating ’round the year, keeping your fans satiated and giving you hope that you’ll get lucky with a track down the road.
You know as much as those working at the label, if not more. This is why the labels have not broken a new act in a year. And the landscape has changed, there’s no universality. Everybody is listening to different stuff. And the majors don’t like this, they are built for mass, and they keep employing old school systems thinking they’ll work today. Sure, terrestrial radio reaches more people than any other medium. It’s just that it’s fewer than ever before and its listeners are the least active. Terrestrial radio is like network TV, it’s a business, but a small fraction of what it once was.
Innovators succeed. Both in music and business. The majors are supported by their catalogs, sans them they’d be screwed. Don’t let someone tell you how to do it, do it the way you want to. That does not mean you shouldn’t respond to audience feedback. You play a song live and you know whether it works or not. In other words, if you’re progressing, having success, stick to your guns. If you’re not, then you need to change. Or give up. You can wait forever and nothing can happen, no matter how much you like what you’re doing, how much your friends and family like what you’re doing. As for professional feedback…people will rarely tell you honestly what they think. They’re afraid of pissing you off. So, if you adjust to what everybody says, you’re screwed. Having said that, if you’re going to ask for professional feedback, accept it, don’t tell the pro why they’re wrong.
Talk to people in the business. They’ll tell you they’ve never gotten an unsolicited tape from an act that they’ve ended up signing. So don’t bother to dun people, it’s useless. Focus on satiating your audience, and if you make enough noise people will come check you out, but they still may not be interested.
It’s the music business, emphasis on business. The only thing people are interested in is whether you can make them money. Everybody…agents, managers, promoters, labels. If you can make them money, they’re interested. If not…they’re not running a museum.
Hits often can’t be quantified. It’s not how many streams a song has, but what it means to the audience. If it means enough, these listeners will tell others.
Virality. It’s key, it’s king. But don’t think of it solely in terms of social media, think about it in everything you do. Did someone tell someone else to listen to your song? Did someone tell someone else to come to your show?
Mobilize your fans. They’re your street team, even though they do most of their work online. They love working for you. Find out who wants to participate and give them something to do. Your army spreads the word, better than any other medium.
Print publicity only means something if you’re appealing to people who still read newspapers and magazines. And most active young listeners do not read, do not pay attention to those outlets. So the story is worthless. And no story reaches everybody, in fact, stories reach fewer people than ever before. I’m not saying print will hurt, I’m just saying it’s oftentimes a wasted effort.
No one knows how online word of mouth, i.e. virality, works. The key is to be in the marketplace, otherwise you can’t get lucky. You’ve got to play to win. And everything starts online, and not on the big music streamers. You keep playing, trying to get lucky.
Your big break is never your big break, ask anybody who’s ever had one. Your big break is always the afterthought, the thing you did reluctantly, or that you thought was minor.
There is no one breakthrough moment, it’s a slew of breakthroughs. And when you get to the end, you will not be on top of the world, no one is. Be satisfied anybody is listening at all.
