Category: MarketingCategory: Marketing

Are you asking people to “subscribe for updates” to get people on your email list? Maybe promising a 10% discount?

“Say, “follow our adventures as we leave for tour in a month. Sign up so you don’t miss a single photo of our adventures. Sign up so you don’t miss out on all our crazy tour stories.”

There’s a reason media outlets ask, “got any crazy tour stories?”

It’s because stories sell.”

Remember, you’re competing with Netflix, social media, family, new albums, holiday plans, and a million other things – rework your pitch.

I recently asked “What’d we learn this year,” and Shane Valle offered this inspiring lesson:

“Of the 19 times someone performed one of my pieces of music (I’m a composer) this year, 17 of those times were because I directly reached out to an individual musician or ensemble, not because they were passively consuming or interacting with me or my content on social media.”

Finding musicians and ensembles to approach takes time and effort, and results aren’t promised. Posting to social media is much easier, and gets us off the hook – we get to say “hey, I tried!”

If the work we’re doing is magic, if it has the power to transform and uplift and inspire, then the work required to get it out there goes beyond just the work.

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We have potential fans beyond the social media platforms, we just have to let them know we exist!

1/6/2026 – Rabbit Cavern, “Do you want to be friends with a crow?”

1/3/2026 – Elise Granata, “Flyering as a Spiritual Practice“

12/29/2025 – Mel Mitchell-Jackson

12/15/2025 – Mel Mitchell-Jackson

After listening to you chat with Amelia on Off The Grid I made a bunch for my tutoring offers! Here’s one in San Francisco after a few months of sun and fog fade!

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12/14/2025 – From WBEZ Chigago (link via Jen):

The 51-year-old graphic artist, Derek Erdman, swears there’s no catch behind his quirky side project. Instead, he describes his public art stunts as acts as civil disobedience, or “civil d” for short.

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Social media can’t wait. It needs your posts now, several times per day.

Photographer Noah Kalina explains his belief that “it takes at least six years for a photograph to start getting interesting again after the day it was taken.”

As artist Tim McFarlane said in one of our recent Escape Pod Zoom calls:

“When I think about posting or blogging, I usually start visually. The photos come first, and that’s what gets the story going for me. I’ll remember where I was, what was happening around me, what I was thinking at the time — everything tends to spin out from the photograph. And it’s nice looking back now, having all this material that I can move into other things if I want to, because nobody’s seen it already. I also have a different way of talking about it now.“

Isn’t that magical? That nobody has seen the image yet? And our thinking of the image, the art, the photo – that you’re a different person today, different from when you made the image last week, or a year ago.

Social media begs us to share quick and often, but we’re allowed to distance ourselves from that urgency.

Booking gigs in 2025 isn’t rocket science. You don’t need to outrun a bear, you just need to run faster than you friends.

Bookers get buried under a gajillion emails a day, and they’re not wading through your 10 links to find your music. If you want better shows, you need to make their life stupidly easy.

1. ONE LINK
   Your job is to get your music in front of a booker fast. One link. your site. Your best stuff at the top. No scavenger hunt across Instagram, Dropbox, WeTransfer, whatever. Don’t send them to a platform that forces them to scroll — they won’t.
2. REMEMBER THE BASICS ON YOUTUBE
   YouTube is the biggest music discovery engine on the planet. Bigger than every social platform combined. If someone finds you there and actually likes your work, don’t make them guess how to reach you. Put your damn email in your About section. Baseline professionalism.
3. JUST BE COOL
   This game runs on relationships. If you’re a pain, it doesn’t matter how good you are, nobody wants you on the gig. But if you’re solid, kind, and easy to work with? You get invited back.
   Don’t be a punisher. Show up in your local scene. Talk to people. Support other artists. Build real friendships.