Category: UncategorizedCategory: Uncategorized

Don’t seat your guests at your restaurant, then explain that the specials are at your other location across town.

EDIT: this post sort of led to this interview with Audience Republic

So stop telling fans to follow you on platforms that are built to limit your ability to reach them

I know it’s easy to post to socials during your big event, but remember; you’re lucky if you reach 10% of your followers.

Instead, go grab a slice of pizza afterwards. Go dancing. Get home super late, and collapse on your bed fully clothed and exhausted.

The next day, after some coffee and a shower, put together an email newsletter with a handful of the photos and stories from the night before.

Because, come on… when you “take a minute” to post to social media at the event, you’re going to end up checking your email and DMs, open IG, process your notifications – stop it!

Get back to the show, hang out with your collaborators, go make some new friends.

And stop posting your most exciting photos and stories to the places where your fans are least likely to see them

You can put photos in a newsletter.

You can upload audio right to your Substack.

You can upload a video clip right to Substack.

You can write big captions.

When you send it with Substack, it’s also on the web, so new fans can find it from Google.

When you send it with Substack, you can link to it from your social media (good luck with that, but still).

You can link to your upcoming tour dates, pre-orders, or anything you want unlike Instagram (which doesn’t allow links)

You can link to anything and your fans will still see, unlike on social media which throttles your reach when you do that.

It won’t get any easier to reach your fans on social media in 2024

That’s why you should start an email list today, and get subscribers by sending great newsletters.

Make it as simple as possible for your fans to subscribe to your email list.

Streamline the f*ck out of your landing page.

You want as few distractions as possible.

Less options.

Make it so easy to understand that a person can’t help but give you their email address.

A few notes about your landing page:

• Include your photos, your images, your logos, your branding. Do NOT let your landing page have any sort of DEFAULT look.
• Explain what they’re signing up for. Avoid the boring “sign up for updates” text – that’s for car dealerships and Kohls. Think of all the things you post on socials – I bet subscribers would love to see more of that!
• Don’t ask for a lot, in fact I recommend just asking for an email address. No need to go overboard with last name, city, town, zip code, phone number – you can ask for that later when you’ve developed your email list!
• Send a welcome / thanks email afterwards (if possible). You can use this email to link back to your website to watch your latest videos, or see your newest products.

There’s a few ways to build a landing page. Some are simple, and some more feature rich. Some are free, some will cost you a bit. Here’s some I’ve worked with over the years:

• Substack – (Free, then 10% if you turn on payments) they give you a pretty basic WELCOME page, which just asks for an email address, and if people have signed up for other Substack newsletters, their email address may already be filled in!
• Flodesk – ($35/mo) They offer some nice pre-built designs, and you can automate all sorts of responses.
• Tally – (Free) Can be bare bones, and provides a nice THANK YOU page when people sign up.
• Mailchimp – (Free up to 500 subscribers) A standard in the email marketing industry. Can be as complex or as simple as you make it.
• Your own website – Squarespace, WordPress and lots more offer some built-in ways for people to join your email list.

If you’ve got questions about any of these, get in touch!

As is the case with most people that give advice, I’m good at telling people to have websites, while seriously neglecting my own.

So today, Monday, August 7, 2023 I’ve come full circle, having a fresh WordPress install (thanks Tom at I Heart Blank), and ready to get back to it.

Why have a website for your creative project? Why not just have a Bandcamp, or set up several social media accounts?

Well, you can have everything on Bandcamp, but as we saw earlier this year, there was some friction from ownership when their employees moved to unionize. Things worked out, I guess, but still.

And social media platforms are about as stable as crypto currency these days. Hell, Twitter is now X, even though their domain name is still Twitter. Instagram is a half ads, half people you don’t know, and Facebook? Dear lord.

Set up a website. Put all your press and accolades on it. Like I said in ‘DON’T MAKE SOCIAL MEDIA YOUR TROPHY CASE,’

Don’t spend all your effort on the “billboard,” then neglect your own establishment.

Playlist placements are amazing. All that hard work. The song writing. The recording. Years on the road.

All posted on platforms we don’t own, just so 10% of our social media followers can see it.

Websites close. DSPs will fail. Magazines will fold.

So make sure you got screen shots and photos of some of the big cool “earned media” on your own websites, set your domain name to auto-update, and pay for hosting every year.

You should be reusing your already-written social media posts for your email newsletter.

The Instagram post (above, left) is from December 15, 2022.
The email newsletter (right) is from December 16, 2022 – the next day.

Church Road Records has 5,587 Instagram followers.
That post got 143 likes, and three comments.
Add those up and divide by the number of followers, and that’s a 2.6% engagement rate.

(Engagement rate means someone did something – liked, shared, left a comment, or clicked a link.)

Now, let’s assume they have 1,000 email subscribers, and let’s pretend only 100 people opened the email (I bet it’s more).
That’s still a 10% open rate.

I’ll take 10% over 2.6%, thanks.

We’re all posting to social media, just trying to get people to our store, buy tickets, and sign up for our email list.

AND MOST OF OUR FOLLOWERS NEVER SEE OUR POSTS.

Think about it; if you “only” have 1,000 email subscribers, and “just” 10% open your email, it’s still more effective than spending hours of social media “engaging” and posting, trying to hit 5,500 followers just so less than 3% of them will interact with your posts.

Like I wrote over a year ago in FIGHT FOR THOSE EMAILS:

You know all those Spotify Wrapped images that were being shared on socials this week? Well, people who don’t follow you on social didn’t see them, so why not send those Wrapped images to your email list?

It’s a great way to bolster your love for your fans, too. Set up a 20% discount for your store and include that with your thanks email and see what happens.

You’re already spending hours every week on social media. Take 15 minutes and reuse that social media content fore your email list, include a clear “call to action” like BUY THIS RECORD, and watch some magic happen.

So scroll through your old social media posts. Find something that “did well” (got a bunch of likes or comments), and send it to your email list.

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.

---

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!