Marketing Monday Written by Jon for June 22nd I'm back. Chances are you didn't notice I neglected to send this newsletter last week; if you did notice, chances are you either don't care or are my mom. But I feel bad anyway, the same way you feel bad when you skip a workout or die on level 255 in Pac-Man, because it was the first week this year in which I didn't send a newsletter and now 2026 is wasted. (Thankfully, Tom sent his weekly email as per usual to cover for me. Apparently he hates...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Two Story Tuesday Written by Tom for June 16 Hello again. (I wrote this earlier today to be posted elsewhere, and just edited it down for use in this newsletter because I don't have three hours to write another whole new thing today. I think the points in it apply to the music business as well, and hopefully you find something helpful somewhere. And if not, see you next week. Anyway, here we go...) Social Clubs are the dumbest things imaginable. In my city there are two that I know of: Soho...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Marketing Monday Written by Jon for June 8th You can't please every algorithm. There was a bit of a craze a couple of years ago toward front-loading Meta ad budgets in the early days of a release¹. The idea is sound and simple: Spotify's algorithm rewards early activity on a track. So if you put most of your budget toward the first few days after release, the reasoning goes, you'll reap the rewards in algorithmic streams for months and years afterward. To make it concrete: Let's say you've...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Marketing Monday Written by Jon for June 1st Consistency isn't the point. If you subscribe to any kind of music marketing content, my guess is that you've probably come across the following advice: "Release one single every four to six weeks for the rest of your life." That's not altogether bad advice. If you release a single every four to six weeks for the rest of your life and promote each one accordingly, then you'll see recurring Release Radar traction, have constant fodder for social...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Marketing Monday Written by Jon for May 18th "Should I use Spotify Marquee?" I got this question last week from one of our ad clients. He'd just read a "study" (designed and published by Spotify) claiming to find that Marquee, one of Spotify's own advertising tools, was a way better and cheaper form of promotion than social ads of the sort he'd been running with us. To quote Spotify: "The study showed that Marquee delivers an average of 10x more Spotify listeners for every dollar spent on...
2 months ago • 4 min read
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...
3 months 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...
3 months 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...
3 months 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...
3 months ago • 3 min read