Marketing Monday Written by Jon for October 5th I watched Thursday Night Football on Amazon Prime last week. It was a pretty good game, despite the fact that the Browns won. (I am, as you've probably guessed on the basis of my moral qualities and good teeth, a Steelers fan.) And it was a pretty good broadcast experience, too, because Amazon got Al Michaels to do the play-by-play, and that guy could effectively narrate a dentist's waiting room. And plus they had like five billion cameras to...
20 days ago • 5 min read
Marketing Monday Written by Jon for September 28th This is Part 2 of me telling you what to do. For context, this is a continuation of my answer to the question: How should an indie artist spend their limited time and money? In last week's Part 1, which you can read here, I offered a basic three-step plan for anyone who wants to build things online: Pick one social platform. Develop a repeatable broadcast format – i.e., a Thing. Invite people who like your Thing into a deeper community. And I...
27 days ago • 6 min read
Marketing Monday Written by Jon for September 21st Here's how I would spend my time and money if I were you. (Quick recap in case you haven't been following this thread over the past couple of weeks: Someone asked me to explain, in plain English, how I'd recommend an indie artist spend their limited time and money. I turned around and threw that question out to you guys, and you came through with a bunch of helpful and mutually exclusive answers. This week, I'm going to give you my own two...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
Two Story Tuesday Written by Tom for September 15th Hello again. Man, I really should develop some systematic way of planning this newsletter. As it stands I treat every Tuesday as a blank slate and it shows. Last week was personal story time. The two weeks before were Q&A. The week before that was business commentary about Spotify. Forget rhyme and reason. There's not even ritual to this mess. But also, eh. Maybe I'll start next week. This week, because we're all artists in the room trading...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Marketing Monday Written by Jon for September 14th "In plain English, please explain where an artist should invest time and money." 👆 That's the question I submitted to this email list last week in the hope of soliciting the wisdom of the crowd. Well, as per usual, the crowd's wisdom was easily solicited and the people had many varied things to say. In today's newsletter, I'll include some of them, lightly (only very lightly) edited for clarity and brevity. Without further ado, here's what...
about 1 month ago • 9 min read
Marketing Monday Written by Jon for August 31st I've had this creative writing prompt floating in my head for the past week: I'd like to write a detailed, stream-of-consciousness account of 10 minutes spent scrolling my Instagram feed. The idea is I'd describe every single flashing, fleeting video as vividly as I could – the dumb little skits, the brilliant displays of talent, the nature shots, the sex-saturated scenes, the ads, the camera motions, the blaring captions, the ironic comment...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read
Marketing Monday Written by Jon for August 24th I've always felt some cognitive dissonance related to marketing. It's not really due to marketing itself; at a basic level, marketing is merely the act of presenting a message to an audience. This is a worthwhile profession since messages are meant to be shared, and it's even more worthwhile when the message being shared happens to be good music. So all that's wonderful. But the worthiness of marketing is complicated by two things. First, you've...
2 months ago • 4 min read
Marketing Monday Written by Jon for August 17th I, like most people on this list, am a hobbyist musician. Before my wife and brother come at me for applying that label to myself, I'd like to clarify that I don't think being a hobbyist is a bad thing, like it means you're a second-class citizen or an un-evolved Pokémon or something. I think it's a normal, good thing to be. Most people – even people like you who read music marketing newsletters – don't do music as a full-time thing, and thank...
2 months ago • 3 min read
Marketing Monday Written by Jon for August 10th I've soft-pitched paid communities over the past couple of weeks. My basic argument is that mainstream music success has become rarer than ever (see here), but also that small-scale music success has become more achievable than ever (see here). So it makes sense for many of you to launch some sort of paid community that will support your artistry at a small scale – something like a Patreon or a Substack, etc. But this doesn't make sense for...
3 months ago • 3 min read