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 got the fact that so much marketing feels disingenuous or coercive: spam calls, pop-up ads, outrageous product claims. I'd argue that all this is just bad marketing, and the fact that it exists doesn't make me feel as if I shouldn't do good marketing. The opposite, actually, since I feel almost a moral obligation to counterbalance the scales.
My bigger problem is this: I hate modern messaging platforms. Basically I hate social media. I think TikTok and Instagram and Spotify and their ilk are generally awful for the world, and I don't enjoy spending large chunks of my waking hours contemplating the most effective ways to stick hooks in a person's eyeballs via the first half-second of an Instagram reel.
So all that kind of sucks.
Like most people, I'm very good at living with dissonance. I do what I don't want to do, and I don't do what I do want to do, etc., and somehow I keep on ticking. But I think the mission of a good life is to reduce dissonance – to bridge the gap between what we do and what we believe in. Sometimes this process demands painstaking slowness and sometimes it demands a leap.
And all of this brings me, in a rather absurdly moralized and very roundabout way, to today's announcement:
I'm not going to offer playlist-building as a marketing service anymore.
In case you have no idea what I'm talking about: By playlist-building, I mean running ads to artist-built playlists on Spotify.
The idea is that you create a playlist on which your music fits, then promote it so that a bunch of people save it and stream it. Here's a more detailed explainer, if you're interested. I'd recommend this as a tactic to just about any artist who wants streaming growth.
I'm stopping for one main reason: I want to focus on depth and connection.
It's not that playlist-building doesn't work (it still does, quite well), or even that it's antithetical to depth (I think in some cases it can be incredibly meaningful).
But it's also true that at least part of the appeal of playlist-building is that it's something of a quick fix. It works irrespective of the quality of an individual song, because the focus is on promoting an entire playlist. And service-wise it's fairly easy to deliver, because there's a proven template for the sort of ads that work. The upshot is that, as an agency, you can do a bunch of playlist ads at once. At our peak, we've handled 50+ campaigns per month, and that's peanuts compared to what other companies do.
And I just don't want that sort of impersonal scale anymore.
More and more, I just want connection. I want a handful of clients who are basically friends. I want my work to focus on community building as much as possible. I want depth.
So, starting in September, I'm turning over all of our playlist campaigns to my good friend Jeremiah.*
Jeremiah is awesome. He's been the one leading Two Story's playlist campaigns for the past year or so. At this point, he's singlehandedly built hundreds of playlists that have driven tens of thousands of saves – probably more. He's also been one of my best friends for the past decade. Aside from my wife and my mom, and despite the fact that he is a Patriots fan, I can't think of many people I trust more.
He's launching his own agency that, at least to begin with, is exclusively focused on playlist ads. So if you're interested in streaming growth, I'd highly recommend giving his services a shot.
Check out his agency, Sweet Playlist, here.
To summarize:
I still think playlist building is a stupidly good, useful marketing tactic. Good playlists drive good streams and good data. But building them for a bunch of artists no longer feels quite aligned with Two Story's direction – and, more specifically, what I, personally, want to be working on.
So I'm leaning more and more into:
- Our membership, which has live calls and an awesome community to help artists learn marketing.
- Direct ads clients, for whom we do more focused, deeper work (including release promo and ticket sales).
- Live cohorts, like the Patreon-building group I mentioned the other week.
And I'm handing playlists off to Jeremiah, who, again, is awesome.
Maybe someday I'll ditch the internet entirely and become a farmer, or a monk, or a hermit, or all three. But for now, I'm just trying to do more of what I find most meaningful, one step at a time.
– Jon
Jon Anderson
Founder @ Two Story Media
Surprisingly Good @ Brewing Pour-Over Coffee
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100% Human Guarantee
I wrote this, not AI.
Today's random photo: This is another picture from my friend's wedding in Kansas City a couple weeks ago. Jeremiah is the Ted-Lasso-looking guy in the middle. And he's even nicer than Ted, believe it or not.
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P.S. – Last week I wrote about why I'm okay with being a hobbyist musician. You can read that here.
*If you're a current playlist client, don't worry, very little will change. I'll send you an email walking through the logistics in more detail, but the short version is that Jeremiah's going to keep managing things in the same ad account, so your results won't be affected.
But if you do have any questions, send them over!