Category: InterviewCategory: Interview

Linda Bloomfield started #OpportunityTuesday on Twitter in January of 2018, which is a weekly round up of paying gigs for creative folks in the UK.

What caught my eye was a Tweet (here) saying she’s moving Opportunity Tuesday to a newsletter format, so I reached out to understand her move from a social media network to an email list, which I think can be super helpful for lots of us!

I guess my first question is how long have you been doing Opportunity Tuesday? And is that how you built up to 16.5K followers on Twitter? That number of followers is no joke.

Linda Bloomfield: I posted the first thread back in January 2018 – can’t quite believe it’s been that long! I think I maybe had about 1,000 followers at that time, and I was working in an arts centre in London. I was constantly being emailed opportunities to “pass on to my network,” and started to question who that really was? And did it seem fair that people only had access to a lot of these opportunities if they were already in a ‘network’ of some kind?

It can be hard to find interesting paid opportunities in the arts as they’re not all shared in the same place, and frankly freelancers have enough unpaid admin to do without spending hours hunting for the next commission.

The first (Twitter) thread was a hit, and my following grew steadily – I tried to keep up the thread every week, with a few breaks for holidays, and now I somehow have 16.5k followers, which seems wild to me as outside of OppTues and the occasional theatre/arts chat I mainly post about nonsense: cooking, gardening, and my dog!

When did you see the writing on the wall regarding Twitter?

I owe a lot to Twitter – I can’t deny that my following has helped me build a profile and definitely helps me find more work – I’m freelance too!

So I’ve been following the Musk takeover closely and it really feels like things are headed down a rocky path. If Twitter even still exists in a few months I’m concerned it will no longer be a safe or trusted platform. I hope I’m wrong!

Did you consider moving Opportunity Tuesday to another social media platform?

I did consider other platforms. I know quite a chunk of “theatre twitter” has already jumped ship to Mastodon, but it just didn’t seem as “easy” and accessible as Twitter. Instagram doesn’t really work for words and links in the way I would need it to for OppTues, lots of people aren’t on Facebook anymore, and I’m too old for TikTok!

I follow a couple of other Substack newsletters and it has always seemed a clean, simple and accessible form of communication – so giving that a go now instead. It’s going well so far!

The thing I love here is you’ve been doing this since 2018. That’s four years, which is forever in internet time. And in your first post on Twitter, asking for people to sign up, you got about 1,200 people to sign up. From one Tweet, that’s great! But again, you built up four years of trust to do that, so when people saw “hey, subscribe here,” they did it. They trusted you.

I guess so. It’s very lovely! I’m just so glad people have found it useful for all this time. It’s my favourite thing in the world when people get in touch to say they’ve had successful applications for things they’ve found through Opportunity Tuesday!

Can you speak a bit about showing up for those four years? There had to have been slow weeks, right? Self doubt creeps in, “why am I doing this?” What kept you going all those years?

Oh my gosh, yes absolutely. There are definitely times I’ve regretted committing to 10 every week!

I genuinely put the hours in to find the “right” things for the list each week. I won’t, for example, just list standard jobs that wouldn’t be of interest to freelance artists, and I won’t list anything exploitative. So it takes around three hours every week and there are of course times I wish I didn’t have the commitment. I’ve occasionally been known to post at midnight, or “Opportunity Tuesday… on Wednesday,” and even once or twice have included an “interval” in the thread while I eat my tea or watch bake-off.

But people get it because I don’t get paid for this so it’s got to realistically work with my life. I’ve taken a few breaks over the years, for holidays, family stuff, or just when work is particularly chaotic – and people have mostly been kind, understanding and patient.

For the handful of times I’ve regretted starting it, there have been 1,000 times I’ve been so glad I did.

It feels like it’s bigger than just me now – a community has been built around it, one that celebrates open recruitment, fair pay, and support for freelancers, arts and culture. A bunch of other free lists and threads have sparked since 2018, often citing Opportunity Tuesday as their inspiration. I feel very proud.

And with your first email send, what was the reaction? I’m guessing you had like a 50% or higher open rate, right?! What’s the response been so far, from sending out these listings via email?

You can tell I’m new at this because I hadn’t actually checked until I saw this question! Oops. Looks like the first email on Tuesday received a 76% open rate – wow!

Since then we’re now up to just under 1,800 subscribers in total – I’m floored to be honest. And delighted it will be able to keep going this way, if / when twitter dies.

A few people are also chipping in real money now – access is the same for free and paid subscribers (and always will be) but people can choose to chip in £1 a week if they can afford to. The income isn’t huge but will mean I can properly make time for it each week going forward. As a freelancer myself, in a cost of living crisis, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that!

A 76% open rate??! You are a legend. And it’s a testament against the silly notion that “nobody reads emails anymore!”

Compared to putting up these listings on Twitter, how was it different putting it all together in your first email? It was your first time, I know, so there’s a learning curve, for sure. But it’s nice to not have a character limit, right? Haha

Not going to lie, it took quite a bit longer than anticipated! But I think that’s just because it was my first time, and I’m also still cross posting to twitter at the moment which I won’t be doing forever (maybe).

Substack is a lovely platform though to use, really simple and clean, and it was a treat to be able to write as much as I like for the introduction and the end. It sounds silly, but OppTues has such a specific format that it’s hard to give it much…personality?

But you’re totally right, the change to email means each weekly list can come with a bit of razzamatazz and colour – an intro, a story, some context, a response to what’s going on in the world and in our industry for freelancers – that feels like an exciting opportunity.

I’ve already thought about adding in some news, links to other arts folk doing great things, stuff like that – it’s going to be fun to get creative and experiment. I’m sure the layout will get a little fancier in time too, once I’ve learnt the ropes! (It will probably always end with a photo of my rescue dog Mabel though, I reckon she’s the main reason the open rate is so high)

ANTI-SOCIAL

My absolutely-biased bunch of raging links against social media:

• “Instagram is telling creators when and why their posts are ‘shadowbanned’” – oh, how nice!
• “Facebook and Instagram are struggling to attract and retain the younger generation that’s crucial for their longevity. Why? The simple answer: Gen Z prefers video.”
• Speaking of video, “the rise of personalization and short-form video platforms means that the streaming services’ marquee editorial collections don’t drive as much listening.”

Ryan J. Downey is a reporter, podcaster, writer, manager, and a million other things, and still finds time to publish his Stream N’ Destroy newsletter a few times a week – and it’s one of the Top 25 Top 20 (as of Sunday, March 20, 2022) music newsletters on Substack!

Why Substack, instead of something like Mailchimp?

Joe Escalante told me about Substack in November 2019. I liked the functionality, business model, and simplicity of the platform. Substack was far from ubiquitous at the time. In fact, it was new enough that my initial rush of subscriptions earned me a phone call from the CEO. I’m sure Stream N’ Destroy is small potatoes for them now, but I took that as another positive sign, encouraging me to continue down this path. I’m not supporting myself entirely with Substack by any means, but it earns plenty for me to feel great about investing so much time into it.

I was on MySpace in 2003; Facebook in 2005; Twitter in 2007; I’d like to think my early adoption of Substack is actually providing a great return.

The feedback (questions, suggestions, support) I receive from people is fantastic. They haven’t converted to the Substack comment section, but I suspect that’s because most of my readers are prominent figures (band members, managers, agents, label staffers, etc.) who don’t necessarily want to chat about this data in a public space. They just email me.

I enjoy finding new sources of data, organizing what’s relevant, and knowing that I’m making something that directly helps people I like and respect to put their art out there in the most effective and efficient ways possible.

In 2013 you planned to retire the email. Can you speak a bit to the work of just doing something like this for years? There’s up and downs, of course. What stuck with you, to keep doing doing this?

I sat at a dinner table with about a dozen colleagues after a show in 2013 when someone mentioned “Downey’s Scans email.” I made an offhanded comment about how I planned to retire it as it became harder to justify putting so much time into something I wasn’t sure meant anything to anyone else. A loud protest erupted around the table. People told me stories about how and why the weekly emails were of value to them. The positive reinforcement from that dinner propelled the newsletter for another six years.

Shortly afterward I moved the newsletter to Constant Contact (a platform similar to Mailchimp), primarily to give it a more “polished” look with a few graphics and space for a small amount of advertising. Over time, the metrics that matter multiplied. I changed the name from “A Few Scans…” to “Stream N’ Destroy” in recognition of the dominance of digital service providers like Spotify, Apple Music, and Pandora over traditional retail sales and physical media.

Social media, YouTube, concert attendance, merchandising — my goal is to gather all of the relevant numbers and distill them into something easy to read, saving my subscribers the considerable time and effort involved in tracking all of that down on a regular basis. Moving to Constant Contact and selling a small amount of advertising was a great and necessary step. But as the newsletter continued to expand – in readership, content, and frequency – that ad revenue no longer covered the time invested into the posts.

With the holidays approaching in 2019 I decided to “flip the switch” with monetization. (I set the weekly subscription rate to the bare minimum the platform allowed.)

I prepared myself for a flood of indifference, or even scorn, but I was pleasantly relieved by the outpouring of support from longtime subscribers. That encouraged me to continue this thing indefinitely, to work harder at it, and to constantly evolve and expand it to meet the needs of the folks who depend upon it.

You said, “I prepared myself for a flood of indifference, or even scorn;” where do you think that comes from?

A handful of people I know, myself included, sort of scoff that we could be compensated for this “thing we do,” without realizing, oh wait, “I know what I’m talking about, this might be of value to someone, so here’s a price tag.” How long was the debate with yourself about the move towards monetizing?

It’s probably left over from my experience in the punk and hardcore scene, where the spirit of the DIY/counterculture values is often coming from the right place, but the practice is messy and complicated. I did have one colleague/friend tell me I should never sell advertising for the newsletter, let alone subscriptions, as I should “do it for the love.” This same friend is a record executive with millions of albums sold by bands he personally A&R’d and handled. I wouldn’t expect him to do that for free and the more I thought about it, I shouldn’t work for free, either.

I run a Danzig fan account, This Day In Danzig, with close to 30k followers on Instagram. That is a labor of love. I’m happy to continue doing that for free. The newsletter, however, is fairly labor-intensive to put together and provides a unique service to some great people who have told me they rely upon it for various reasons.

(Keep in mind, I DID write these emails up for free for many years.)

I suppose the internal debate was in stages. First, whether to sell a small amount of advertising and later, whether or not to offer subscriptions.

Thankfully, the response to both measures was overwhelmingly positive.

You also said, “I’m not supporting myself entirely with Substack by any means.”

I see this a lot, among artists who believe their “one thing” should pay all the bills, and if it doesn’t they’re not really a photographer, or artist, or musician… that they aren’t really “doing it.”

Can you elaborate on this “multiple income streams” thing, a bit? It sounds very BUSINESS-like but man, if we can’t pay the rent it’s hard to be this artist person in the first place. Like, you do several things, just like a lot of people that work in music.

You make an excellent point! The last full-time job I had was with MTV News and that ended in July 2004 (though I continued to freelance for them for another decade after that). I do believe in the adage “jack of all trades, master of none” but as with many things, it’s about balance. I like having a handful of things happening both in terms of personal fulfillment creatively and from a practical standpoint. I have a couple of colleagues who are now executives at MTV who started before I did. But dozens more were swept away during layoffs and reorganizations of many kinds.

In 2022 I’m aiming to get more out of fewer things, but I can’t imagine being married to a single “thing.” I abandoned that notion that something wasn’t “real” if it wasn’t my “one thing” a long time ago. I mean, as a teenager, I was playing in a hardcore band, publishing a fanzine, putting on shows, working with Anti-Racist Action, going to school, and doing restaurant jobs part time.

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As Ryan says, “Stream N’ Destroy is tailored to hard rock, metal, and punk(ish) music and culture, delivering relevant data about streaming, sales, concert attendance, and social media, distilled it into easy-to-read metrics for industry professionals.” If that’s your thing, you need to subscribe!

What I love about Stream N’ Destroy is it’s not Ryan’s “main thing.” He could have started a newsletter about all the interviews he’s done, or talked about the bands he’s managed, but instead he covers topics and trends that are helpful to those in the heavy music orbit.

Hit reply or contact me at seth@socialmediaescape.club – absolutely here to talk about all things email marketing for your creative projects!

This week SOCIAL MEDIA ESCAPE CLUB speaks with artist, musician, and video editor Joan Pope about her weekly email newsletter Week in Review.

Pope’s creative output is epic, and as she explains how a trusty email newsletter keeps her fans in the loop with everything she’s creating on a weekly basis.

How long have you been doing a newsletter, and what sort of reaction or feedback have you gotten from it?

I started the Substack newsletter in January 2021. Its the email version of the blog posts I have on my website. I started doing the “Week in Review” compilation posts in 2017. I still do those posts on my website, but driving traffic to my website is probably harder than to deliver the newsletter right into people’s inboxes.

Why did you pick Substack for your email list, rather than something like Mailchimp?

I went with Substack because its sort of a newsletter-blog hybrid. The monetization feature is great, too.

How long does it take you to put together and send your weekly newsletter? And you do additional posts for paying subscribers, yes? What would you say the total time investment each week?

It takes me about an hour to compile everything for the newsletter.

At this point, I don’t really have any posts behind the paywall besides access to one of my poetry books. I really hate having to put my content behind a paywall, I want to be able to share it with everyone and I know not everyone can afford to pay for access. “Exclusive” content isn’t really my thing.

My approach has been this: pretty much everything is available to anyone, and if you have the means, and you like my work, you can choose to support it by paying for the subscription. Or just enjoy it for free. I leave it up to the fans to decide.

Why even have an email newsletter in 2021?

The fast pace of social media makes it pretty easy for stuff we actually like to get lost in the mix.

I have a pretty intense level of output, I can barely keep track of my own work, I can’t expect other people to be able to keep up, too. So the weekly compilation of all my creative works helps me reflect on my own work each week and it keeps my audience in the loop. It seems like people like it. A lot of people will tell me that they can’t keep up and the newsletter helps them do that.

I haven’t noticed any “subscribe to my email list” type posts on your socials – how do you grow your list? Or is that something that just happens organically from your All My Links page and Bandcamp?

It’s true that I hardly ever make posts like that. I have a link to the signup in my allmylinks link-list thing. I let people find it on their own. However, I usually do at least post the published Substack newsletter on my main Twitter account each week. I usually end up getting a few subscribers each week as new people discover my Twitter account.

So how do we as writers, artists, bands.. how do we stay motivated at one or two sign ups a week?

It might not seem like much, but signups do start to accumulate, and when they do, they start to grow exponentially.

Patience is key.

It’s important to remember that 10 genuine fans who subscribe to your newsletter, follow you on social media, etc.. are much better than 1,000 bots signing up for your newsletter. Bots don’t buy your albums, they dont come to your shows, they don’t care at all about whatever you are doing.

Cultivate the audience you have, regardless of the size.

I try to dissuade people from just shouting “hey, join my newsletter” messaging, which is why I appreciate how you put it on your Substack page: “This email newsletter documents my worship.”

How important is to you to present your work in such a way vs. the standard marketing speak?

I don’t exactly have the vocabulary to frame what I do in the typical marketing terms. However, the social-sharing aspect is as important to my work as the work itself.

I consider every art piece, song, video, etc to be truly complete once I’ve given it to the world. So, getting it out there is all part of the devotion I have to my creative works.

I guess my work is intriguing enough that it makes people want to dig deeper, they end up finding the newsletter, my bandcamp, my website, etc. I get a lot of people comparing this experience following a breadcrumb trail. Its not my style to do too much outright explicit promotion, I have a more subtle approach.

I want to close by saying that growing an audience is really hard work, and for most people, it will take a lot of time and effort to see results. It’s really unlikely that you will amass a huge email list or social media following overnight. However, if you are consistent and keep working at your craft, you will eventually succeed.

It took me over a decade to get to where I am, and the reality is, I’m still a virtually unknown artist. But I keep doing what I do, and I’m not going to stop. If you are just starting out, don’t get discouraged if it doesn’t go the way you hoped on the first day. Set attainable goals, and commit to following through.

What are some of those goals we can set as we’re just starting out, trying to move some of our fans from social media to an email newsletter?

You just have to be realistic, and put in the work to get the word out. I am grateful to have a decent social media following, its made getting subscribers to the newsletter much easier.

I’m pretty passive in my approach… I just post a link on twitter to each week’s newsletter. My way is probably not the best way to get results. If I was going to do it “right” I’d probably add a call to action, asking people to subscribe.

This week we welcome Professor Pizza of Axeslasher, a thrash-tastic band from Denver, Colorado that leans heavy into horror, gore, and other delicious death-metal themes.

But we’re not talking about any of that. Oh no, we’re talking about email marketing! Social media! Bandcamp!

Yes, we’re talking about how the heavy metal sausage gets made on the internet here in 2021, which helps get people to come to your shows, to buy your shirts, and listen to your new music. This is what you signed up for!

Oh, you’re reading this on the web, and you’re not signed up? Subscribe today so you don’t miss out on the next email I send out!

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You told me a bit ago, “I’ve been testing every avenue we’ve used for the last 10 years. Guess which one generates the most traffic and revenue,” with the answer being email. Can you speak a bit to how much WORK goes into email campaigns?

I’d start by saying we’re not particularly adept at email marketing. I always kind of considered it old-fashioned but knew we should be doing some form of it. Axeslasher rode the wave of social media really well until recently. Back in the days of chronological sorting we were able to find an audience quickly, especially on Instagram. I’m a super visual person and focusing on creating killer images really appealed to me, and when it was actually getting shown to our audience we caught lots of traction. 

Additionally, we were able to really take advantage of paid marketing1 on social media to increase our reach. There was a time where I could consistently count on a 2:1 return on marketing dollars spent to revenue made. 

But, that’s not the case any more.

Algorithmic sorting and the sheer amount of people paying for ads now has caused that reliability to plummet. Creating on those platforms feels an awful lot like working for Facebook and not myself. The mental math equation went from “What do I think our fans would like?” to “What do I think will break through the algo that our fans will tolerate?”

“The short answer is you have to start looking at and leveraging trends, which by-in-large, are fucking lame.”

We’re a thrash band comprised of ghosts of vengeance. We shouldn’t be doing funny hand dances, or the running man.

All that pre-amble is leading somewhere, I promise.

In regards to how much effort it takes to create an email campaign, I’d say it’s slightly more. I’m not a great writer so it takes me a little longer to craft longer-form messaging to make a marketing email worth reading. However, the whole time I’m doing that, I’m back to thinking “what will our fans like?” Which is exactly the head space I want to be in. 

How long have you been managing an email list, and how do you get new people onto your email list in this digital and social media age?

We’ve been tepidly maintaining an email list since 2012. I say tepidly because we’ve really only been sending three to six emails a year. However, over time, that list has grown to about 1,200 subscribers. It’s not the world’s biggest list, but the way we’ve built it has made it extremely valuable and effective. 

The main source of email subscriptions is through online sales. On Bandcamp and merch.axeslasher.com folks who buy our merch have the option to opt-in to our email list.

The key here is that they’ve already shown major interest in the band by putting their hard-earned dollars into the equation. By opting-in at purchase, the audience on that list is much more engaged and more likely to be interested in things we do in the future.  

I got your recent October Horror Marathon email on October 1st. The last email was from July 31st. Is there any set schedule you stick to with these things?

Nope, and I feel like that’s something we need to be better at. Until recently I’ve always looked at email as an additional boost for announcements. New merch, new music, festival appearances. Things like that. 

Lastly, you use Mailchimp, which I recommend to a lot of folks. Do you have any one little secret tip or “hack” you picked up over the years with using it?

I love Mailchimp. The UX of creating, sending, and measuring campaigns is top-notch.

If I had one hack, it’d be to connect it to your online store6. You can start to see things like how much sales revenue your campaigns generate, as well as let you segment your list by amount spent. You can basically make a segment of your folks who are most invested, literally, and hit them with special offers or poll their opinion on what merch to make next. They’re the ones spending their own money on your dream — give them what they want!

Hello, SOCIAL MEDIA ESCAPE CLUB folks!

This is the first official “email newsletter” from your pal Seth, and it’s an interview with Jeff Gretz who plays drums in Zao, along with From Autumn to Ashes, and a million other projects (including the killer ZOMBI and Friends). 

This interview supports the purpose of SOCIAL MEDIA ESCAPE CLUB: to learn how folks in music and the arts are using email marketing to connect directly with their fans – let’s go!

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You joined Zao before Twitter existed, right? 2005?

Yeah, 2005. Pre-Twitter. Even Facebook and YouTube were still off the grid, at least for bands. That was the Myspace era.

I remember having REALLY big arguments with a lot of people surrounding the band at the time, and with other bands, about not letting go of an actual website. My argument was, “if this MySpace thing goes down we lose all contact and are starting from scratch.”

Then Zao went dark for a bit when MySpace actually went down, and wiped everything out. By the time we came back everything had shifted and we were playing catch up, and still are to an extent.

Back to the original question about Twitter; we still struggle with that one. Just don’t have the time or energy to devote to those algorithms. Can’t tell if it makes a difference for a band like us or not. 

How long have you been working the online marketing side of things for the band?

Pretty immediately after joining. It was a case of one, seeing it needed to be done and in an involved way, ie the band itself, not some marketing team answering messages and questions, and two, nobody else in the band really wanting to do it or having the time. The job has stuck with me to this day. I really don’t mind, though.

You don’t have to disclose exact numbers of course, but how do socials perform vs email? Sales, clicks, “engagement,” etc. again, totally fine to be general about this.

They all feed into each other. We don’t worry so much about the click counts or the engagement. We do find that the more we engage – even if it’s with trolls – that it all helps beef up everything. 

I think people tend to pay a bit more attention because of the engagement from the band.  Email list is good for the real diehards, especially when it comes to new releases and big announcements like shows. But I feel like the social thing helps people find out we are still active in the first place, which then feeds back into stuff like them being on the email list.

How do you grow your email list? I know there’s a subscribe box on the website. Anything else beyond that?

I would say probably 95% of our email list has come from people that have bought things through bandcamp. Every time someone buys something that email gets added into “the list.” And honestly, that has worked out tremendously.

We have never really farmed email addresses at shows. People will sign up in that scenario as almost a, “oh I guess I should support,” but the turnover is too big.

When you are sourcing from people that go out of their way to purchase something from the band, that is already a prime person to have on your list. These are people that go out of their way to support bands in a direct way and want to buy shirts, records, CDs. They are also more likely to go out of their way to got to a show. 

You use Mailchimp for the Zao email list, right? Do you have any tips or tricks for using that for people who might just be starting an email list?

I don’t remember why I picked Mailchimp in particular, but it does the job. The nice thing about Mailchimp is you can see how many people open the email, how many people click on links, what links they click on. 

I am constantly tweaking how the emails go out, and what the setup is based on which links are being clicked. 

Subject lines are huge too. You want them to feel the need to open it, so too much info sometimes can be bad. Keep it just vague enough that they need to see what is up. 

Also don’t hit people too much. If you swamp them with emails too often you become an annoyance and they unsubscribe. 

How often do you send out emails?

When there is something to say, honestly. There is no schedule. And there are times where I will lay off if it’s something that isn’t time sensitive, but I know there is another thing around the corner. 

I would rather have an email with two or three big things in it, as opposed to hitting them with three separate emails. Maybe the people aren’t in the region you happen to be playing a show in, but they will click because they see “tour dates,” and while they are in there they think, “oh crap they aren’t coming to me, but oh look, I missed this album that came out last month, I will grab that.”

How’d the release of your most recent album ‘The Crimson Corridor‘ go?

It was pretty great. The first pressing of vinyl was almost immediately sold out, and we had a dead zone almost where there wasn’t any left, I literally had to tell distributors, “I don’t have anymore to send you for now.” The CDs even moved. It was a good feeling especially since we didn’t know if anyone even would buy a record after the past year and a half of uncertainty.

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PARTING THOUGHTS:

💰 Having the emails of people who have bought your album in the past is very important, so make sure your fans know they can buy music via Bandcamp, and not just stream it on Spotify. Give your biggest fans the chance to support you.

⏰ As far as frequency, Zao can get away with not sending too often – that’s an honor. But online stores can send like eight emails a week! I totally believe you can send something once a week, so long as it’s more than just “hey, pre-order our vinyl.” Use your existing photos and captions from social media and put that into your email newsletters – not all your fans are on every social media network, and even if they are, because of algorithms they probably didn’t see it anyways.

💀 Someday Twitter and Facebook and Instagram will be dead. Heck, MySpace was the #1 music site on the entire internet back in 2006, and AOL Music was #1 in 2008 – neither are a blip on the radar today. So make sure you’re building your email list today, while you can still reach some of your audience on social media!