Marketing Monday Written by Jon for May 11th It's horrible being a curator. Maybe that's overdramatic. I know some people who genuinely like being curators; they enjoy sorting through oceans of music, picking out what they like best, and then helping it find its audience. Good curation is, in its own way, a kind of art, and I greatly admire its artists. More power to them. Personally, I hate it. I was a SubmitHub curator for a few years. It was like being ground into dust by an endless...
16 days ago • 5 min read
Marketing Monday Written by Jon for May 4th Everyone is busy. I found this out at my first job, back when I was a Content Strategist at a tech marketing agency. Internally, we were always running hot – like, three projects behind, two weeks late on everything, always barely keeping fifty spinning plates in the air, every so often dropping one with an impressive crash. I might have assumed that this state of general overwhelm was unique to our company if I hadn't also witnessed it in every...
23 days ago • 4 min read
Marketing Monday Written by Jon for April 27th I wrote a book a few years ago. I published it in 2020 – so I guess that's six years ago now, and really even longer, since I mostly wrote it in the two years prior. That's an eternity in the marketing world. It feels like yesterday. Every so often I'll still Google¹ the book's listings on Amazon and Goodreads to check whether anyone has left a review that'll fill me with pride, shame, or a deep sense of personal significance. The most recent...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
Marketing Monday Written by Jon for April 20th Last week, I asked for your advice. Here's what you told me. For context, my original question was: "If you could give somebody one piece of music marketing / life advice, what would it be?" The following responses are presented with only a few very minor edits and without any comment. *** "Pursue your music without expectation." – T. "After you (think you) finish something, give it at least 3 days to 'bake.' Then re-check without listening to it...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Marketing Monday Written by Jon for March 30th I've been rewatching old YouTube videos lately. Maybe this is just a function of getting older, like how everyone thinks the music from their teenage years is the best, but man – nobody can tell me early YouTube wasn't something special. It was gold. See below for a small sampling of videos from the years 2006-2007, as a demonstration: Bo Burnham's first video Charlie Bit My Finger Chocolate Rain Let's get some shoes David Blaine Gold, right? And...
about 2 months ago • 6 min read
Marketing Monday Written by Jon for March 23rd I owe you some good ol' fashioned marketing stuff. My assumption is that most of you have found yourselves on this email list via some combination of bad luck and an interest in music marketing. I hate to disappoint people, and having spent the past couple of weeks philosophizing about the morality of Spotify and rambling on about the great questions of life in our tech-drenched age, I figure I should probably get back to my lane. So let's talk...
2 months ago • 5 min read
Marketing Monday Written by Jon for March 16th I switched away from Gmail last week. I've used Google's professional email product (along with the rest of their workspace) for the past decade. But as of this morning: I'm off. The switch was, as expected, a bit of a hassle. I had to swap DNS records, get new user accounts for my team, and copy over a bunch of email filtering rules that I'd set up as part of my ongoing (losing) battle against inbox bloat. All told, the move took me about four...
2 months ago • 10 min read
Two Story Tuesday Written by Tom for March 10 Hello again. Last night, at dinner with a few folks, the conversation found its way, as often happens these days, to AI and Spotify. Two clarifications (inspired by Jon's most recent email) first: I'm using "Spotify" mostly as a stand in for all music streaming services. It might seem unfair, but in my defense, Spotify is probably the worst one, because it's also the best and the biggest - its algorithm is still the most effective music discovery...
3 months ago • 6 min read
Marketing Monday Written by Jon for March 9th Spotify is not obsolete. I know, I know. We're talking in circles. Last week, Tom's email featured a subject line to the exact opposite effect (although, to be fair, he did punctuate it with a question mark, so there was more than a suggestion of ambiguity). In that email – which you can read here – Tom leads with a semi-viral article on Spotify's pending obsolescence, but he actually ends by taking the opposite stance: Spotify is not going...
3 months ago • 4 min read