Category: CommunityCategory: Community

“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.

A musician with some impressive Spotify numbers wrote me for a bit of Email Guidance, asking how to get people from streaming music platforms to a paid Substack or Patreon. Here’s part of my reply (lightly edited):

Open a Substack account TONIGHT and start filling it up with stories. Give your fans a place to DIVE INTO. You can build a real website later.

Get 10 posts up there. Twenty.

Buy a domain name at Hover.com, point that domain to the Substack.

Stop using LinkTree. Stop driving everyone to platforms where you can’t reach them. 

Get them to your Substack, where you can still embed all your music, and your videos. And that’s where everyone can SUBSCRIBE to your email list. Be RUTHLESS about it.

Get people to YOUR SITE FIRST. That is your mission.

Then go play shows. Have a clipboard and a pen to get people on your email list. Hand it out before your third song to someone in the crowd so people sign it while you’re playing (inspired by this story from Jes).

Send a newsletter once a week, or twice a month. Subscribe to other musicians on Substack and see how they do it. “Steal like an artist,” like Austin Kleon says, and develop your own rhythm and style.

Make your newsletter something that someone wants to open, and not just “hey I’m playing somewhere next week,” or “listen to my new song.”

There’s lots of shortcuts in the online music world, but that just means that everyone is taking them, too. You gotta be where they can’t be, and that’s strumming a guitar in front of 15 people on a Tuesday night. 

Community is your unfair advantage. Whether you’re a musician, a writer, a photographer, whatever – you need other people in your corner. You need fans and friends more than you need funnels and lead magnets.

Yes, you can play the streaming music lottery and maybe hit it big. That’s because the casino has to pay out on occasion, otherwise people stop going to the casino.

The choice is yours; keep playing the lottery, or make better bets.

“It’s absurd how we’ve come to think that reaching thousands of random people will be more impactful to our lives more than meeting a handful of people with whom we share interests and goals.”

That’s from Matilda Lucy (from ‘What do you measure when the metrics don’t matter?’), and it’s spot on – meeting a few people every week and pulling them into your creative orbit is what’s going to build the foundation for your work for the decade ahead.

That reply above was just a snippet. I usually write 1,000 words to folks reaching out for Email Guidance. I’m not saying I got all the answers, but I can put you on the path to finding them. The first email is free, too.

“Getting to know other artists, writers and musicians is far more fun than optimizing a newsletter, for sure.”

This is from James Hart [here], in response to my post “You’re Not Marrying a Platform.”