Roddy Bottum (of Faith No More fame) recently wrote “These Rooms,” which goes against all pragmatic guidance on what an email subject line or headline should be.

But this is art.

He’s promoting his current book tour (more art), and if anyone could get away with uploading the tour poster and writing, “hey, book tour is going great. Hope to see you out there,” well, it’d be Roddy. Instead he wrote about 1,800 before getting to the “point.”

This week musician Nolan Green joined our Thursday Escape Pod Zoom call, where he talked about:

• Learning about “recoupables” in the music industry.
• Sending his demo to 30 labels and getting signed by Network Records
• Moving to the Netherlands from the United States
• Embracing happy accidents
• Finding joy in the creation process over live performance pressure
• Trusting that authentic creations will find its audience organically
• His current Netherlands Soundscapes project
• Working as a photographer at CMJ in the early 2000s

Audio replay is available in your Memberful Account. And from our Mini Escape Pod session we got into:

• Website redesign focusing on single message versus multiple interests dilemma (we’ll figure this one out, someday! haha)
• Migration from Substack to WordPress definitely isn’t seamless
• Spam prevention strategies: CAPTCHA, double opt-in, country blocking via Cloudflare
• How personal websites allow authentic expression vs platform uniformity constraints
• Patreon versus Gumroad for paid offerings

Social Media Escape Club isn’t just about ditching Instagram, but the continued discussion and support after we’ve left behind those platforms behind. Hope to see you on an upcoming call!

From Ana Roman, in their interview with Thought Enthusiast:

“A hundred times a day I think about artist-owned web spaces and how to build stronger communities that mutually nourish artists and creators… We need cozy web spaces where artists control the platforms, not algorithms designed to extract our labor.“

As I’ve said, maybe centralized kingdoms of power and influence aren’t the answer. It’s time for those in the “creator economy” to work together and take back the means to spreading culture and vibes.

I love the internet. I love Zoom calls, message boards, and checking my bank accounts without visiting a branch.

I read blogs, news sites, keep up with sports, and music, and current events with intention, rather than sitting back and letting these things be curated for me by computers that are programmed to increase shareholder value and help pay for executive yachts.

Social media is a walled garden, similar to AOL back in the early 2000s. The platforms do everything they can to keep you on their service. Not on-line, but on-their-service.

“You’ll see what we show you,” they say.

Posts with outbound links don’t get seen, and sometimes links aren’t allowed at all (like Instagram).

Fresh new content is wired to your eyeballs with every swipe and scroll and refresh, giving you very little time to even click off and actually do anything “online.”

On Chelsea Riffe’s In My Non-Expert Opinion podcast, KP Pilley (Ask Jupiter) mentioned Social Media Escape Club (!!!) when talking about the risks of depending on social media to reach your fans.

“I know Seth Werkheiser, who is on Substack and the Social Media Escape Club guy, he has his own RSS feed, so like anytime he publishes anything it like comes to the RSS feed, and I think lives on his website which I like really like as well, and kind of is echoes back to like the old days of the internet.”

This was the second time today I heard RSS brought up, and I am loving it —check out the full episode here.

We think all our subscribers know everything we’re doing, and that is not even close to true.

• They don’t all know everything your offer.
• They don’t all know about every upcoming event.
• They don’t all know that you’ve got a new song out.

It’s not about repeating the same message over and over again (new song! new video!), but finding creative ways to subtly remind your fans about what you’re doing.

As Cody Cook-Parrott said in our chat, developing the skill of “creative bothering.”

Sharing an hour with a community of like-minded creative people in similar pursuits will give you a greater “return on investment” than spending 45 days per year on social media.

Most people won’t do this because there’s no instant gratification of LIKES or shares.

An artist told me recently they paint with their art friends from around the world four times a week on Zoom, and they’ve been doing it for five years.

I don’t even need to know if that person sold 10 paintings this month, or built their email list to 10,000 people, and I don’t care. Fulfillment and a sense of belonging to something outside of ourselves can’t be measured in a spreadsheet.

Many creative people lose themselves in their phones, spending 3+ hours a day posting, engaging, and replying. Instead of scratching lottery tickets everyday hoping for that big break, put down the phone discover the real payoff with those in your creative orbit.

Substack began as a place to send newsletters to email subscribers.

Substack has since become its own bustling social media space, complete with the communal unease and tension of trying to “win” on the platform. This gets people complaining about a lack of likes or comments on their posts.

We have to remember, though, that not everybody reads newsletters in the Substack app, or on the Substack website, which is the only place to “like” a post or leave a comment.

To do either, readers must visit the Substack website or open the Substack app, a platform optimized to increase paid memberships, whether yours or someone else’s publication.

Substack needs eyeballs, and every writer sending a newsletter is how they get ’em.