Category: CommunityCategory: Community

Start DM’ing with five like-minded folks about the work you do and you won’t need to go viral.

“Here’s the thing about small, quality audiences: you never know which conversation will start the chain reaction. Which episode will reach the one person who changes everything… in the age of infinite content, finite and intentional might be the most radical choice,” Yancey Strickler

A great example of this is the story Joi Katskee told in one of our Escape Pod Zoom calls:

“I texted probably 15 people about the show rather than posting on Instagram, and maybe over half of them showed up. They were like, Yeah, I’ll be there. Thank you for the invite.”

Get seven people to a show on a Tuesday night and watch the magic unfold.

Some good thoughts on working in collaboration with other people.

“Community is such a source of nourishment. Sometimes we may believe that we are creatively blocked, but really we’re just cut off from the nourishment of community,” Giselle Buchanan

“Our laptop wants you to work on your music alone. And the (usually exaggerated) hype around a lot of records is that they were done all alone by somebody in their bedroom. That’s fine for some people. But most musicians seem to do their best work in collaboration with other musicians, each one bringing their own strengths to the game. Embrace collaboration if you can,” Dan Wilson

“The creative status quo has made us lonely content machines. Pressured to post with unnatural quantity and frequency. To pursue our livelihoods and express our work. We play someone else’s game,” New Creative Era

This can be sending an email and asking for feedback, calling a friend to think through a problem, or getting on a Zoom call with some like-minded folks to talk through a challenge.

I did this recently with an email I was trying to write. I sent it off to two people, and their feedback got me unstuck.

Expand your work and possibilities by pulling people into your creative orbit.

“Direct access to your audience is so important, and very much worth the time and energy,” Seth Werkheiser

It takes time to build an email list because there is friction. Social media gives you the illusion of speed in this matter, as it’s very easy to for someone to just hit the follow button.

It’s hard work getting people to do anything on the internet, especially hand over their email address! But it’s worth it.

Read more in ‘How I grew my Substack by 7,000% in less than 3 years without burning out‘ by Alex Lewis over at HubSpot!

Great line from Skyr0 at about the 1:20 mark:

“Social media just completely broke me, rewired my brain, and changed me for the worse. I’ve had multiple times of burnout, and I guess that’s kind of just the nature of short-form content. But honestly, at this point, I feel like my future fans—wherever they are—they aren’t on these apps, and it’s just not the place to be anymore for me.”

It’s possible your future fans aren’t on social media.

From “Death of the IG Party Flyer” over at NINA:

“Semi-secret shows and anti-Instagram promotional strategies hold obvious appeal for audiences who want to be in on something, so how under-the-radar can these projects stay? And if the Wedding Planners do manage to stay relatively offline, can they stay afloat in a scene that is as expensive and competitive as New York? For now, they seem unconcerned with that, focusing on building community and giving musicians a place to play.”

There is allure in belonging to something small, to something that not everybody knows about. Social media got us grasping for more instead of focusing on living in the moment.

Don’t forget – we had a good thing going with music blogs in the early 2000s, before the techbros and investor hawks swooped in and bled it dry. The CPMs couldn’t keep up, so they built up the social media racket, which – if you love tragedy, hate, AI slop, and worse – well then, you’ll love it. And it’s ready to implode. Maybe not “Facebook closes up shop” implode, but enough so that the culture makers and curators and artists abandon ship.

History repeats itself, which is why if you have a foundation of creative friends, enthusiastic weirdos, and vibrant beings you’ll be just fine.