Marketing Monday Written by Jon for August 3rd Last week, I poured cold water on your hopes of ever becoming a superstar. Basically, I told you that you won't ever be famous, on the facts that: You are now competing against all the music that's ever been made, including the very best songs from every era. Pop culture has fragmented and there are very few mainstream distribution channels left by which to become famous. Maybe you'll prove me wrong (I hope you do, and I hope you'll invite me to...
15 days ago • 5 min read
Marketing Monday Written by Jon for July 27th It's harder than ever to become a superstar. Let's be real, your odds have always been small. But in 2026, they're even smaller than ever, for at least two reasons. 1) You're competing against all the music that's ever been made. You will find this hard to believe, but for most of human history, we haven't been able to pull up and stream any song that's ever existed on our iPhones. Between the creation of the phonograph and the advent of the...
22 days ago • 3 min read
Marketing Monday Written by Jon for July 20th Compared to an average person, I'm good at music. If you were to ask me what instruments I can play, I would tell you guitar, piano, and clarinet, and I would only be completely lying about the clarinet. I can sing in tune if you don't judge me with the ear of Jacob Collier, and I can clap on the beat as long as the beat is on the two and the four. Basically I'm good enough at music that I can semi-competently lead a four-chord worship song at a...
29 days ago • 4 min read
Marketing Monday Written by Jon for June 29th "The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb." Those words are from Marshall McLuhan, spoken during a 1969 interview that he gave to Playboy magazine. It is just now dawning on me that the fact that McLuhan said this in Playboy magazine is more than a little ironic, but leaving that aside I'd say his point is both hyperbolic and directionally true. We severely...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read
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 2 months 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...
2 months 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...
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...
3 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...
3 months ago • 4 min read