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 media posts, and get a bunch of swings of the proverbial marketing bat. In the end, you'll hardly be able to help dying with many more streams than you have now.
But you may also die without having made anything very interesting.
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I think of this as the Mike Tomlin problem.
(Bear with me. I'm 80% sure this metaphor will make sense.)
For those of you who don't follow American football, a little context: Mike Tomlin coached what is inarguably the world's best sports team, the Pittsburgh Steelers, for 19 seasons before finally resigning this year.
I was 14 when he was hired. I'm much older now. In all that time, Tomlin never had a single losing season – which, given the NFL's parity, is basically insane.
But he also failed to win a playoff game in his final nine seasons – which, given how often he got to the playoffs, is also kind of insane.
The reason for both his success and his failure was his remarkable week-to-week consistency. Pittsburgh's sports media loved to note that Tomlin was only ever focused on winning the next game. He would do whatever it took to engineer victory each week – sign veteran QBs, play old players over rookies, play it safe rather than take risks – but he rarely looked up for the sake of the longer-term picture. His myopic doggedness led to more wins than losses, but it also sacrificed transcendent greatness at the altar of the immediate.
For all of Tomlin's winning, he only ever won one Super Bowl. He was too consistent to do otherwise.
(I've got to tell you here that I am not a Tomlin hater. I actually love Mike Tomlin; he's been a staple of my life and I will miss him dearly. But I gladly would've traded a losing season for another Super Bowl.)
I am not saying consistency is bad. That'd be stupid. For one thing, consistency often leads to improvement – you get better as you go.
For another, it's obvious that big-picture and detail-oriented modes of thinking should live in fruitful tension. Great goals are only realized at the small scale of moment-by-moment commitment, while small-scale consistency only has value if it's in service of a great end.
But I am saying there's a balance. And while I'd that guess most artists, being artists, probably lean too hard toward the big-picture stuff at the expense of short-term, concrete action, I also think that...
Most marketing advice over-focuses toward short-term stuff that doesn't lead to lasting value.
I can relate. I write this newsletter pretty much every week (I've missed maybe five or six weeks in the last five years), but sometimes I worry that the time I put toward these small topics each week would be better put toward bigger projects.
What if I took a year off from this newsletter and wrote a book?*
What if, instead of releasing music every four to six weeks for the rest of your life, you spent the next three years making the best album you could?
Kendrick Lamar hasn't put out new music in two years. Noah Kahan went three years between albums. Leonard Cohen took five years to write his best song. It's okay to take gaps.
The short version of what I'm trying to say is that consistency should serve greatness rather than simply serving itself. If you can put out a decent single every four weeks, that's wonderful. But don't get it twisted; consistency isn't the point.
If you can only put out a truly great album every four years, that's much better.
– Jon
Jon Anderson
Founder @ Two Story Media
Surprisingly Bad @ Being Unbiased
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100% Human Guarantee
I wrote this, not AI.
Today's random photo: That's a possum. I caught him waddling down the street and tried to stop him for a picture, but he was in a hurry and brushed me off.
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P.S. – Last week I asked you to send me things you were interested in, and you guys came through. There were so many good (and genuinely very interesting) responses. Thanks so much. I'll try to cover some of them in the weeks ahead.
On that note...
*I will definitely keep writing this newsletter. You can read that as a promise or a threat, but either way, I've got no plans to stop. Aside from whatever value it might have, I honestly just enjoy it too much.