Message spam I sent to someone today asking me about marketing their dope ass album that ain’t pop off:
bro FUCK the social media rat race. 333,333 plays for $1000 or sell 100 $10 tickets… sell 50 $20 items… sell 20 $50 items…
build the second part and then by the time you have 333,333 people buying that $50 item, ur rich
ur music represents you, your vibe, your aura, and anyone who hears it and fucks with it wants to experience more things curated by you. they’d wanna hang, they’d probably like a party/show thrown by you, they’d prolly fuck with clothes you design, they’d prolly fw book you wrote, game you designed, etc etc
notice there, that isn’t Meet n Greet, that isn’t Headline Show, that isn’t Merch, that isn’t Autobiography… those could easily be interpreted as those, but once you remove yourself from the “format”s they’ve forced on us, it’s suddenly so much more fun and so much more valuable.
I don’t fit into formats anymore. Spotify, Instagram, TikTok, Youtube channel, Blog, Merch, Shows, etc etc, everyone’s already doing them. These formats exist for US to revolutionize them.
Kanye’s listening parties? bro didn’t feel like performing so he aux cord’ed it and ran it like a house party DJ. he didn’t wanna put his face on a shirt so he made a clothing brand. He was always evolving his mixes and songs so he became the first artist on streaming services that they let him update his songs and change track lists n shit after the album already dropped. Unfortunately we don’t have the billions of dollars to change streaming services minds like that, but we can control the way we distribute still
I’m not making content for IG. IG is hosting my content for me. I AM THE PRODUCT, not them.
So, am I chasing their algo? No. I like doing music videos and live performances. So, I’m going to do those. I will consider while doing those how I can chop them up into 28 days of daily content, so that when I drop the music video for the single:
- we filmed at 3 locations, i can chop chorus, verse 1 & verse 2 at each one. that’s 9.
- the music video itself (verse/verse2/hook, intro w/ release date, cover art w/ audio, there’s 5.
- how much behind the scenes bullshit did we get? Did I fall, did we make a funny joke, did a pedestrian join in, etc etc? You can prolly pull ~4 clips?
- selfie video hyping the date? photoshoot you did during the MV while u had the cameraman on pay anyways w/ a description pumping the date? hell, photoshoot spread across multiple posts to fill the gaps? maybe your fans are hyped for it and u get to post some of their organic content or stories or dms or whatever
there’s a 28 day marketing campaign, and 28 days of daily content for a single music video.
imagine what you can do with an entire show? a closed set live performance? a studio session you turned 3 cameras on for & paid an editor to slice down? designing your products (clothes, book, game, whatever whatever)
You can’t be “making content” all the fucking time. You’re a musician, not a fucking TikToker. And ‘Big Music’ wants you feeling stuck like that.
Make your music. and make shit you like. just happen to capture it cuz without footy it’s fiction. once you have all this footy, make sure there’s systems in place to have that stuff get distributed:
1) aesthetically appropriate to you
2) efficiently so that it doesn’t burden your main creative flow (if you enjoy video editing as much as music, congrats, you unlocked more fun, etc etc)
It’ll grow as it does. As you make genuine connections with PEOPLE. not collaborators, not fans, not followers, not fellow musicians, but HUMANS.
Cuz you never know who has an entire business plan written about marketing campaigns, who has a dope verse that would fit perfect, who might make a Skate 3 edit to your song, or who might say something about your work that enlightens your perspective and fuels you. Hell, you never know who might fire emoji every one of your posts forever (which ain’t much, but it’s honest work lol)
A tidbit onto the bottom of this is something I’ve been thinking about the past few days for the YV Anthology. I wanna do a release party. I don’t wanna perform an hour set, so I can just aux it as a listening party. That’s boring. I should edit an hour of video to play behind me out of the old music videos & extra content. What do we do before and after the hour? Set up gaming stations for like… Skate 3 with the Skate 2 modded map into it, and the amazing WWF No Mercy ECW mod, and maybe even a lil VR setup for my backyard wrestling game! That’s so fun. Now, what do I charge for it? I have like 30 people I want in for free and I don’t want to market it to randoms. So do I just throw this party at my house? Also, if I’m looking to actually sell anything, do I make hard copies of the album? Or should I just finish my memoir and flip those as they provide so much more of the core experience to what the Anthology means moreso than the record itself.
The idea has evolved so far that I don’t even wanna do the release party anymore as much as I’d want to set up my customized video games for a few hours and have people come thru to play them. I’m sitting here adding the missing chapters to the book instead of working on that 1h video for the backdrop. And tbh, making the video sounds more fun than the listening party too!
All of this disposition as to say, fuck the ‘formats’ bro. Look at all this cool shit I wanna do. However it ends up, whatever, but I’m having so much fun thinking, tinkering and creating that it almost doesn’t even matter how it ends up.
THIS IS WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT. The formats exist to steal your light.
That’s it. Good morning y’all!
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