Marketing MAYhem, AI Survey is LIVE!

Congratulations, you just made a record, one of the hardest things to do as a musician. Now what? Conventional wisdom suggests that it’s now your job to make hours worth of compelling (read: click-bait-y) content designed to garner you thousands of followers so perhaps, adjacently, those (we presume?) people (to whom your “content” was mostly ‘pushed’, not organically ‘discovered’) might also notice that you make music, decide they like it, and magically become rabid fans of yours. There were always holes in these suppositions, but this month, the holes seemed to turn to gaping wounds.

First, there was the revelation that indie-darlings Geese had worked with Chaotic Good, a marketing company whose strategy involves creating thousands of fake social media accounts populated with content promoting their clients, which then tips the algorithms in their favor. Geese were of course not the first band to work with Chaotic Good, but the fact that they’re a band that presents themselves as very organic and becoming popular on the strength of their own coolness made them seem an unlikely fit for a promotional campaign that was referred to by some as a “psy-op”.

More recently, I found this article in Vulture where the founder of Floodify (another stealth online marketing company) estimated that 90% of what we see on our social media feeds is “advertising in disguise”. Of course, self-promotion on social media isn’t new, but the implied word before “advertising” is paid. Millions of people try to promote things on social media without purchasing paid ads (which on Instagram for example, they (Meta) recommend that you spend roughly $5/day at a minimum).

If 90% of social media is (paid) advertising, does posting (for free) even matter?

Also, wither musicians who don’t have access to wealth? Should they not bother?

Third Man Records, the independent record label and vinyl distribution company founded by Jack White is holding a “Release Lab” early next month (which I’ll be tuning in for) where they’ll be discussing best practices for indie releases. Among the things they say in this promotional video for the sessions is “It’s never been easier to make a record, it’s never been harder to get noticed.” What follows below doesn’t solve the broken system outlined above, but it’s some (hopefully for many of you actionable) good news.

It still holds that email (of all things!) is more effective for actually ‘activating’ our fans: Asking them (and actually getting them) to listen to new music, buy concert tickets and merch, participate in a crowdfunding campaign, and watch new videos. Every independent musician, regardless of their stage of career, has at least dozens of people who are interested in their music. These can certainly be family and friends (who don’t necessarily behave like ‘fans’), but they can also be people who are a few degrees of separation away: Family friends, your parents’ friends (some of whom you might barely know), people you were friendly acquaintances with in grade school, former co-workers, random people who follow you on social media, etc.

I advise my NYU students and any independent musicians that I speak with to make a list of all of these people, gather up all of the email addresses of those folks you can find, choose an email client with a free plan to dump those addresses in, and when you’ve got a big “ask”, send them an email and ask them to help. Among those asks could also be “Please follow me on ____ and share my profile with people you think might like it.” Social media, so the current understanding goes, is the best for growing your audience, but anyone that starts following you is still significantly less likely to do whatever you ask them to until you make that ask…via email.

In short, use social media to steer folks to your email list, not as your “ask” space.

I know, it sounds so…2000s. And yet, in a world where we’re trying to compete with every media behemoth and psy-op-style marketing company with the negligible amount of money we can use to buy advertising, it’s a bit comforting to know that we’ve still got our people. We’ve got the folks who are simply fans of us and are willing, giddy even, to support our efforts. As I learned first-hand in my Kickstarter campaign for my solo debut album, we are wise to give everyone in our circles the maximum opportunity to find ways to contribute to (not just ‘like’) our artistic endeavors…and that we might be surprised by who shows up, and how.

On behalf of my attorney and CEO and co-founder of ViNIL (a ‘digital fingerprint’ startup) Jeremy Brook, please allow me to invite you, the faithful, first Come Together subscribers to participate in our “What Do Musicians Want From AI Music?” survey. As I mentioned in the first edition of the newsletter, with all of the maneuvering in the AI music space, no one seems to be asking us what we want. Our survey…does. 🙂

Please be encouraged to share this survey with every musician you know. We intend to publish the results and share them with our media contacts in an effort to re-frame this conversation in a way that puts the opinions and needs of musicians at the center.

In musical solidarity,

Derek