People will spend lots of money in the coming weeks.

Black Friday is November 25th.
Cyber Monday is November 28th.
The last Bandcamp Friday of 2022 is December 2nd.

Do your fans know about your upcoming specials?
Do your fans understand that supporting independent artists is crucial?

Are your online store fronts updated and looking sharp?
Got your LINK IN BIO service set up?
Do your social media channels have the proper links to your store? Could your merchandise images use a refresh?
Are you offering holiday bundles, free shipping, bonus items?
What happens if you get locked out of your social media accounts on Black Friday?

Yes, Spotify rates suck and inflation is a bummer – so what can we do today to capture some of the money that’ll be flying around?

Here’s your FOUR THE WEEKND tasks – complete 50% of these by Monday.

1. Geared more for the “online coach” crowd, but ‘How to determine what discounts to offer for Black Friday’ over at Teachable is a good read for anyone selling on the internet.
2. As mentioned in August, check ‘Quick Tips for Holiday Selling’ from Big Cartel.
3. Purchase the Black Metal Rainbows Compilation Album which benefits charities that support LGBTQ youth.
4. 💥 Collaborate with some trusted partners and create a gift guide that you’ll all share with your own fans. Imagine five trusted friends / bands / labels all promoting solid, vetted goodies a few days before Black Friday (and keep repeating it).

“The world will not know how to help you unless you scream from the mountaintops what it is you like to do, and how you like to do it.”

From James Edmondson in ‘F You Money, & Don’t Release Your First Font.’

Ask your fans for the support, and stop being afraid to promote your Bandcamp or store sale. Tired of updating 13 social media platforms? Start asking fans to sign up for your email list.

“In a capitalist economy, the market rewards things that are rare and valuable. Social media use is decidedly not rare or valuable. Any 16-year-old with a smartphone can invent a hashtag or repost a viral article.”

From Cal Newport in 2016 in the NYTimes. Does your work blend in, or – like Seth Godin asks (below) – would you be missed if you were gone?

“You could be the one we’d miss if you were gone.

It takes quite a bit of emotional labor to pull this off. Consistent effort to contribute, to see possibility and to be patient. If it were the easiest or most direct path to a short-term goal, everyone would do it.”

I recently swapped a few messages with a fellow writer on the Substack Office Hours thread.

This person writes motivational posts on LinkedIn. You’ve seen those posts, I’m sure.

A lot of those folks write that stuff, in hopes of turning their LinkedIn followers into newsletter subscribers.

This was part of my reply:

Isn’t what you’re writing already sort of “widely available” on LinkedIn? Lots of helpful advice, things that make you think, interesting ways to look at things. Those are all great things!

But since there’s a LOT of that, why do people need to subscribe to your newsletter?

Some LinkedIn folks are putting everything right there on LinkedIn. And some people (on any social media network) are perfectly fine to just keep scrolling, knowing they’ll find similar content for hours on end.

What are you doing that’s so special that people will stop scrolling and click a link?

You might not be writing posts on LinkedIn, but you’re posting about your new EP, your upcoming tour, your new designs, your latest interview.

But you’re not just competing against other metal folk, you’re competing with Andor on Disney+ and NBA basketball and beautiful people dancing and pointing at words.

You got riffs? Friend, I got 50 years of riffs.

Figure out why anyone would click on what you’re offering.

Elon Musk is full of shit with this Tweet, which he’s since deleted.

Ask any managing editor or writer or social media manager or founder of Punk Planet and they’ll tell you the same thing; Twitter is not great for driving traffic to your site.

That’s a bummer when you’re promoting a new album, tour dates, or new products in your store.

And it can be demoralizing if you’re asking your fans to subscribe to your email newsletter and you’re not getting a lot of sign-ups.

Let’s see how that went for someone on Twitter this past week, shall we?

Linda Bloomfield has been doing #OpportunityTuesday on Twitter, sharing job opportunities with her 16,500 followers every week.

Since then she sent her first email and mentioned that a, “whopping 1204 of you who have signed up so far!”

If you take 1,204, and divide by her 16,500 followers, that’s a nice 7.2% conversion rate.

In the internet world getting even 3% of anybody to click anything is good, let alone visiting a site and subscribing to a newsletter.

Much of that, though, is having built a reputation for something cool and useful (sending out job postings in the creative world every Tuesday), so when she says “hey, we’re moving to an email newsletter,” her already devoted fans followed her.

Which is why I say the ‘ole “Sign up for updates” line “is for department stores and car dealerships.” It’s boring.

Can Metallica get away with that? Yes, but you’re not Metallica.

Your art is still magical to your fans, so spend some time crafting exactly what your fans are signing up for, like Tegan and Sara‘s newsletter:

Updates? Nah.

“Tegan and Sara talk to each other about music, writing, art and life using voice notes, annotations of lyrics, personal essays, video conversations, and unreleased music.”

And note that they have, “thousands of paid subscribers.” Hmmm.

1. Tell your fans what they’re signing up for.
2. Make it easy for them to subscribe.
3. Deliver on your promise.

It will never get any easier to reach your fans on the various social media platforms than it is today. It’s only going to get harder.

Best bet is to not even play the game. Start an email newsletter today and reach your fans directly.

QUICK BITS:

“Ten minutes on Joe Rogan is worth a year of tweets. It’s far better as a way to find people or information.”

That from Matt Taibbi on Twitter, which spark Musky-boys reply that Twitter is “the biggest click driver on the internet by far.”

So, you probably can’t get on a super big podcast, but you can get on other podcasts, make videos that people talk about, create websites that people visit. Make amazing stuff with good people, in real life and online. Put things into the world that will outlast a Tweet (and probably the company).

“The native and ad-free Patreon player allows creators to upload their content directly to the platform, select thumbnails for their videos, and view audience data like view count. Creators will also be able to select who can view the video without worrying whether links will be shared outside of subscribers.”

From The Verge; gee, it only took until late 2022 for this to roll out, but this is probably a good thing for lots of Patreon users.

GOOD TWEETS:

“But no one goes to websites anymore,” says some guy who spends all his time on Discogs, buying concert tickets on various websites, and refreshing his web-based email for UPS delivery updates.

Even though I lost my glasses and ended up paying over $350 for new ones so I could drive home I wish nothing but three wins for Turnstile.

The biggest part of the SOCIAL MEDIA ESCAPE PLAN is the escape – how we get our fans, followers, our audience motivated to actually click a link and give up their email address.

Here’s the simplest and most boring (and probably the least effective) way to do that.

Updates, huh? Thrilling.

After years of offers from boring companies we know what those “updates” will be; boring sales, special offers, tour dates for shows eight time zones away. Those are important, but your art / music / magic deserves better than just “updates.”

⬛️ ANNOUNCEMENTS: Tell the people on your email list first – they just gotta sign up, like below:

Or something like this:

⬛️ GIVE AWAYS: You could collect emails by doing a giveaway with a heavyweight service like Gleam (below), or something more basic with Tally:

TIP: Make sure your give away is for your fans, and not everyone. Give away some merch, or a record. If you give away an iPad you’ll get lots of people on your email list, but only because of the iPad, not your project.

⬛️ VIDEO:Maybe you made a reaction video, reacting to your own music video. A personal message to your fans, or showing off your new clothing line, an acoustic version of a song, a lyric video, or a behind the scenes look at a recent photoshoot.

Get yourself a Vimeo Business account, embed the video on your own website, and set up a contact form at the start of the clip.

When people visit your site, they’ll be prompted to enter their email address. Be sure to include some text near the video, assuring your fans are signing up for your newsletter, of course.

Don’t just use the same old boring text and expect amazing results. You don’t write boring songs, or make boring products, do you? So don’t skimp on the presentation of your offer to your fans.

Okay, enough ideas – here’s your FOUR THE WEEKEND tasks, due by Monday.

1. Regardless of what email service you use, ‘Bringing your Instagram followers to Substack’ is required reading.
2. Look at other genres and see how they’re rolling out their new music. Go ahead and copy one or two ideas for your own project.
3. Decibel Magazine revealed their Top 40 list already. Rather than shovel your thoughts about it onto social media platforms that monetize your content, consider putting your year-end list on your own website, where you can encourage your fans to sign up for your email list. First person to send me a link to their list on their website or newsletter by 12/1/2022 gets a $20 Bandcamp gift card.
4. Did anybody complete last week’s tasks of setting up a LINK IN BIO? Send me your links and I’ll feature them in next week’s FOUR THE WEEKEND.

QUICK BITS:

Notion social media manager Alex Hao over at Link in Bio :

“So rather than making “growth hacking” a core part of our strategy, and risk becoming beholden to it, it’s something we leverage sparingly—when it can surprise and delight a user-base that is familiar with our “normal” content. And when you’ve already cultivated an engaged audience via other strategies, jumping onto a trend that aligns with your brand yields some killer results.”

Remember, as part of our Social Media Escape Plan we have to do well on social media to drive people to our websites and email list. Post memes? Post only serious stuff? You have to find out what resonates with your fans if you’re going to entice 1000s of your followers to your email list.

🪦 And R.I.P. Metal Insider’s Metal By Numbers feature, which hasn’t been updated since July.

A good thing to remember for sites with features like this – they can be turned into stand-alone newsletters – like 

Stream N’ Destroy!

I’d subscribe to a newsletter of editorially curated (meaning, not all) new videos and songs.

Where’s the email newsletter of just amazing concert photos from the week?

Imagine just sending an email newsletter every week, instead of posting to nine different social media outlets? Dreams come true, friends!

I’m not a designer, but Mike Monteiro sure is.

He wrote a book in 2012 called ‘Design Is A Job,’ which was mostly about the job part of being a designer, which is why I bought a copy around 10 years ago.

He’s sent a few emails about this new book, including the one below (which you can read online).

This guy is one of the tops in his biz, with a new book to sell, and yet he’s talking about.. a painting?

Yes. And that’s the wonderful part of all this.

You are more interesting than what you’re selling.

Coca Cola commercials are more interesting than a 2L bottle of sugar water.
A live show is more interesting than a CD mock up.
Your Twitch stream is more interesting than a shirt.

There is no shortage of vinyl records or songs to stream on Spotify or podcasts to listen to.

But there’s only one of you.

You aren’t just a bass player, you are a songwriter.
You aren’t just a guitar tech, you’ve got stories.
You aren’t just a writer, you weave stories.
You aren’t just a photographer, you capture timeless moments.

ALSO: look at the example above, and get it through your head that you don’t need to labor for hours over your email newsletter. The email sent from Mike Monteiro is made up of one image and about 150 words.

That’s an Instagram post, friends.

Like I wrote in ‘YOUR NEXT NEWSLETTER IS ALREADY WRITTEN,’ “re-purposing the content you’ve already posted means less time thinking about your next email newsletter, and gives you a jump on the creative process.”

This is part of the Social Media Escape Plan.

We all fell for the promise of eyeballs and audience, like foot-traffic at the local mall food court.

But Zuckerberg and Musk own the eyeballs and the audience. They own the mall, they set the hours, and they keep raising the rent.

They’ve got the email address of everyone who signed up for their platform, and they’re not sharing it with you, because they know how valuable that information is.

Figure out your angle, start an email list, and get your fans to sign up now. Today. Twitter is in disarray. Facebook just laid off 11,000 people.

Run. Get your fans on your email list while you still can.

SMART THINGS FROM SMART PEOPLE:

This from Ryan Broderick in his Garbage Day newsletter, on people fleeing Twitter for Mastodon:

“The metaphor I’ve used a few times in talking with folks about a Mastodon migration is that suggesting Twitter users move to Mastodon is the same as someone saying, ‘don’t drink at the the country club full wealthy and well-connected famous people, come to my bar, it has the same alcohol.’ The alcohol isn’t the point. It’s the people in the bar.”

I could Tweet that Korn’s ‘Coming Undone’ is one of the best metal songs in the last 20 years and the band could retweet my post to their to their 1.7 million followers. That’s what makes Twitter so powerful; it’s “the people in the bar.”

Earlier today (Wednesday) the new Twitter owner Elon Musk spoke about verified accounts and more on a Twitter Spaces Q&A:

“Elon just compared non-verified accounts going forward to emails in a spam folder. Sounds like you’ll need to pay for Twitter Blue for people to actually read your tweets.”

Are bands, labels, media outlets, writers, photographers, producers, publicists, and everyone else ready to cough up $8/mo so their Tweets don’t go to the “spam folder?”

“When you rely on social media subscribers for your business, you are committing to an uphill battle. Algorithms want to keep users on their respective platforms, whether that means recommending your content or not. “Owning your audience” (e.g., building an email list) is the only way to cut out the middleman.”

This from the Ghost newsletter, and it’s solid advice even if you never use their platform.

The Elon Musk drama continues (he laid off about half of Twitter on Friday), and I believe the mess will trickle down to all of our marketing efforts, so we must move forward with our Social Media Escape Plan.

Did you know:

Tweets with a link achieve 7.2% fewer retweets
Tweets with a link garner 28.76% less reach

This according to Buffer (thanks, Jocelyn for the tip), a company I’ve been using for years that lives and dies by scheduling social media posts for big and small businesses and brands.

And that’s before half of the company was gutted.

Think about that; if you include a link in your Tweet – for your pre-order, new video, email newsletter – it could reach almost 30% less fans than if you posted something without a link.

I refuse to believe our reach / impressions will ever get better than right now. It’s all downhill from here.

So what now?

Well, let’s try something with this week’s FOUR THE WEEKEND to-do list:

1. Check out the “link in bio” links of some other metal folks like Testament, Anthrax, Relapse Records, and Death Wish Inc.
2. Now set up your own “link in bio” service (I use LinkTree), and make it the main link in your social media profiles (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram).
3. I’ve always said “it’s okay to repeat yourself” because most of your fans won’t see that one social media post from a Tuesday at 2pm anyways, so re-post something from earlier in the week to your socials this weekend and ask folks to “click the link in bio.” Trust me, most of your fans didn’t see it anyways.
4. If you haven’t yet – set up an email list! The social media game we’ve been playing for the last TEN YEARS will get worse before it gets better. Encourage your fans to subscribe to your email list before it all burns to the grown and lose contact with every follower.

SMART THINGS FROM SMART PEOPLE:

“While Instagram might be using save as a signal to rank posts, it is far more likely that people are saving it because it’s worth remembering, and creators are conflating these two things: That something that resonates will get saved more, not that saving more will make something resonate.”

This from an interview with Sebastian Speier, a former Design Lead at Instagram from 2018-2019. This interview is a year ago, which is like 10 years in Internet Time, but I still think it’s relevant.

“Artists have been forced into a digital diaspora, where they have to exist everywhere but don’t own anything anywhere. Fans bounce quickly from artist to artist across different social networks, DSPs, etc. When you publish only on these platforms, you can lose part of your art and identity ‒ you become a commodity, putting your work in a box that looks and feels like everyone else’s box.”

This from an interview with the people who make Tell.ie (a more robust “link in bio” service) over at YourEDM.

If your only online presence is on various social media networks and Spotify and Bandcamp, where do you truly display and show off who you are?

Hey, you probably know someone who got locked out of their Instagram account earlier this week, but hey, soon you’ll be able to sell NFTs through their shitty app!

Hopefully you didn’t have some product roll out or big announcement to make, and were blessed to still be able to access your account.

Like I wrote about a year ago, “Your 2022 is going to be a bloodbath if you rely 100% on socials to keep in touch with your fans. Especially if you lose access to any of your social accounts.”

Seriously, what’s your plan?

Elder lost access to their Facebook account back in September and according to this recent IG story they’re still locked out.

Access to 78,000 Facebook followers gone, and now they’re left trying to get word out to their Instagram audience of 42,500 fans about the situation.

Even if they reach 10% of their fans on IG, that’s just 4,250 people.

Seriously, what’s your plan?

This is absolutely not a knock on Elder – that shit happens.

So what are we doing? Today? This week?

Started by getting your fans to subscribe to your email list:

• When fans buy from your webstore, make it easy (and enticing) for them to join your newsletter.
• Run giveaways and capture emails (use Gleam, KingSumo, or roll your own with Tally)
• Tell fans on social media to sign up (while you can still reach some of them)

You’ve worked too damn hard for too many years to lose contact with all your fans just because a 3rd party platform shits the bed.

SMART THINGS FROM SMART PEOPLE:

“Send a decent email even if it’s not perfect.

Getting the impression and staying top of mind outweighs waiting for the perfect email.” (From @thePhilRivers newsletter)

Write a decent song, take a decent photo, paint a decent sunset – perfect is the enemy of done. Keep producing and refining what you do over years (then decades), then keep going.

“Patreon, once the only creator paywall platform in the game, lost 70% of its value this year, though, not because people aren’t making money online, but the opposite. Influencers, once tethered to the algorithmic whims of a home platform, have freed themselves and become a creator economy, which now encapsulates sex workers on OnlyFans, writers on Substack, and every form of content producer in-between.” (From ‘The great unbundling is already happening’ by Ryan Broderick)

Lots of talk of Twitter and Facebook crumbling, but what happens if Patreon implodes? Yikes.

“Maybe I’m alone in thinking this but it’s so funny to imagine a point in the future where I can’t listen to the music I enjoy anymore because a company founded by billionaires crashed and burned.” (@World0fEcho)

“When our competitors are raising their prices,” said Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, “that is really good for us.”

We’re doomed.

You may have seen this image from Creative Industries Policy & Evidence Centre around socials. It’s from their 2021 article ‘A little greyer and a bit more rectangular,’ where Dr. Cath Sleeman dug through 7,000 photos of objects from back in the 1800s to the current day.

We can see this in the heavy metal world in terms of sameness – same looking websites and social media feeds.

For a genre with such imaginative artwork, tour posters, and shirt designs, we can be pretty bland when it comes to actually promoting these things in creative ways.

Look at the band Vile Creature and their nod to Geocities-era websites:

What you create is unique to you, and sets you apart from everyone else, so let the world see just how magical you are with every image, and video, and chunk of text.

How the fuck does any of this tie into running a newsletter?

For me, it bums me out knowing how much blood, sweat, and tears we put into our craft, and then we push it out to social media where an algorithm decides if that hard work is even seen by your own fans. That’s fucked up.

Like I wrote in my last newsletter about Cody Cook-Parrott who has been on Instagram since 2012:

Getting 300 likes with 80,000 followers means that just 0.3% of their audience clicked like, no doubt because most of those 80,000 followers never even saw their posts.

So even if you managed to grow to 80,000 followers, most of your fans won’t see your pre-order announcement, or the sale you’re having, or the call for people to come to an upcoming video shoot.

So let’s not sleep walk in our efforts to get the word out. The Twitter / Facebook / Instagram world ain’t what it used to be, and it’s never going back.

THAT is why I want my heavy metal pals to start heavy metal email newsletters, so all the cool things they’re making actually get seen my their fans.

They ain’t sexy, but they work. Let’s do some good work.

FOUR THE WEEKEND HOMEWORK:

1. Get off social media for a minute, and visit the websites of a few of your favorite bands. While you’re there, buy a shirt if you can afford to do so.
2. Halloween is on October 31st. You’ve got all weekend to whip up a special offer, a give away, a video message – SOMETHING – for your fans on Monday.
3. Check out ‘Setting up your Substack for the first time’ and have your email newsletter up and running by Monday.
4. Thanksgiving is right around the corner – get on Google and find how you can support or volunteer at your local food bank.

SMART THINGS FROM SMART PEOPLE:

“During any given hour, there are millions of tweets, photos, videos, podcasts, articles, and newsletters published, and you’re going to be competing with them no matter when you post. There’s no magic golden hour for content distribution.”

This (again) from Simon Owens’s Media Newsletter, answering the question “how important is it to post on the same day and the same time every week?” Consistency is key, sure, but aiming for the exact TIME of day isn’t always the most important part.

“It’s fair to say that Instagram and Facebook have become platforms that use their users, with your feed feeling like some sifting through cat litter for whatever nuggets of whatever it is you logged on to see, a thing that is becoming increasingly hard to remember.”

From Where’s Your Ed At, and that is spot on – ‘sifting through cat litter for whatever nuggets!’

In a recent interview with Substack, Cody Cook-Parrott spoke about shifting their audience from social media (they’ve been on Instagram since 2012) to their email newsletter (where they have 683 paid subscribers).

“I have had to completely unhook from the algorithm because I have never had lower social media engagement. I have 80K+ followers and often get 300 likes on a post.”

Getting 300 likes with 80,000 followers means that just 0.3% of their audience clicked like, no doubt because most of those 80,000 followers never even saw their posts.

Think engagement will get easier for bands and labels and creative folks in 2023?

NOPE.

In more fun social media news, according to Reuters Twitter’s most “heavy users” are leaning more into “Cryptocurrency and ‘not safe for work’ (NSFW) content,” and “interest in news, sports and entertainment is waning among those users.”

So expect to see engagement on tour announcements and pre-orders (and a million other things) dip in the new year.

Oh, and looks like Elon Musk is gonna own Twitter later this week, too. That’ll be fun!

Imagine just sending an email once a week directly to your fans, and seeing those emails actually help you sell things.

Then think about how much time you could spend on your art, your music, your design studio if you didn’t have to feed the social media algorithm for hours every day.

“Make sure you’re building your email list today, while you can still reach some of your audience on social media!”

I said this in my very first SOCIAL MEDIA ESCAPE CLUB just over a year ago (in my interview with Jeff Gretz of Zao), and it’s even more true today.

Someday all of us (including your fans) will log into Twitter and Instagram and Facebook for the last time – don’t let the years you’ve spent building that audience disappear! Make a plan today to build a direct connection with those fans with an email list.

SMART THINGS FROM SMART PEOPLE:

“Instagram influencers are increasingly pushing their most dedicated fans onto platforms like Discord, Slack, Substack, and Patreon so they can forge a deeper connection with them.”

Look, it’s not just me who’s saying that people are pushing their social media audience elsewhere – go read Simon Owens’s Tech and Media Newsletter.

“What we do together matters. The way you connect with someone by drinking coffee at a cafe will feel entirely different than how you’ll feel connecting with someone while volunteering at a food kitchen.

What’s something that you can ask members to do that they wouldn’t usually do at a community experience like this one? What activities feel novel? What activities will help members connect in a different way?”

Some interesting concepts on “how to design community experiences your members will never forget,” by David Sprinks.

“Doing it right is expensive. Doing it wrong costs a fortune.”

From Shane Parrih at Farnam Street. Yes, hiring a professional is expensive, but in the long run it’ll probably save you a lot more time and money.