“New Anxieties” is out everywhere!
If you follow my various social media accounts, you’re well aware that my band, The Narrative, released “New Anxieties” on Friday 8/25. What you’re not aware of is that I have not felt this distracted in months.
It’s no wonder artists have historically worked through album cycles where they write, record, promote, tour, and then go back to writing again. Every time I try to balance releasing with creating new material, it seriously challenges my focus.
The Main Distraction
If you release music with the goal of growing your audience, you have to shout about it from the rooftops over and over and over. In today’s world, that means creating lots and lots of content. But hold on a minute, didn’t I just create a song? Yep, you sure did. Now put on your marketing hat. Your work has just begun.
People are busy, and even if they are interested in what you do, they might not catch your release announcement right away. Connecting with your own audience is at the mercy of algorithms that may not display your content to your own followers for days after you post it.
Funny that platforms whose main revenue is derived from serving you ads and products would be more incentivized to show you what they want than what you want. 🤔 That’s a major reason for why I decided to start this Substack. I can email you and the worst that will happen is that it goes into your promotions folder!
Hello logic brain. Goodbye creative energy.
Once I dive into creating content, I engage my problem-solving, over-analyzing brain. In true Suzie fashion, if I’m going to do something, I want to learn all about it and do it effectively. I don’t want to post content to simply check the box and say “I posted something!”
I’ve learned over the years in my business that busy for the sake of busy trades long-term happiness for short-term happiness. No thank you. So, in pursuit of my bigger goals of growth and visibility for my music, I’ve consumed so much educational content about marketing that my creative output has taken a perfect nose dive into the deep end of the content creation swimming pool.
Oh my, the analytics!
Spotify tells me the number of streams, playlists, unique listeners, active listeners, passive listeners, and top locations where my music is played. TikTok tells me exactly how many seconds it takes for someone to get bored of me (not in those words exactly but I can see a TikTok dating app in our collective future). Instagram serves me music marketing tips and data insights all day long.
For example, did you know that The Narrative’s Instagram reached 16.6k accounts in the last 30 days and of that, 15.6k of them aren’t already following me, which means that only 9% of the people I’m reaching are following me.
Enter logic brain.
What the heck is that about? What’s my content strategy for improving that percentage?
Enter insecure artist brain.
Why don’t you like me?
At the end of the day, you gotta do it.
Talking about yourself as an artist feels incredibly counterintuitive. You spend all this time creating something that feels meaningful and personal and it feels totally shallow and attention-grabby to promote it. Not only do you spend all this extra energy creating content rather than music, you spend as much or more time wondering how annoying and insufferable you are repeating yourself on the internet.
But you have to do it. If you only make noise about a new song when it first comes out, it quickly gets buried in the graveyard of unseen and unheard art, which leads to this frustrating cycle:
So what’s the antidote?
So far, I can think of two things that really help me reset:
#1: Support
Hearing from friends who encourage me and remind me that what I’m doing is worthwhile (including the marketing side which can feel so cringy) really cuts through the noise inside my brain. So, to everyone that has already done that, thank you. I can’t quantify how big of an impact it makes to feel supported by my community of peers. It helps me refocus, remember my priorities, and dive back into my creative side. And every now and then, someone I don’t know super well sends me something like this and it feels really special:
#2: Compartmentalization
There is something absolutely magical about the moments when you’re creating something new without any pressure.
“New Anxieties” was one of the first songs I wrote after my partner and I started our consistency challenges in the pandemic days. It was just 10 minutes of “creativity” a day and the bar for output was super low. There was zero external pressure. Since creativity is one way that I connect to myself emotionally, just cracking that portal open a little bit every day gave me space to dig into all my feelings and I ended up with a bunch of song ideas.
So, I am going to attempt to trick myself into thinking that I’m not releasing any music and that I’m not working on any marketing by setting some boundaries around when I’m working on what. I’m hoping to find some space to breathe and feel my feelings again without the distractions of releasing, even if for specific and designated amounts of time.
A few gratitudes…
Since I’m an expert minimizer, I thought it would be good practice for me to publicly celebrate some small wins on the journey of releasing music, and naturally we can include some data, since that’s the theme of today:
I happened to catch that So Far Sounds (Nashville) posted “New Anxieties” to an Instagram story and I don’t know anyone over there, so maybe there’s a cool show in our future sometime down the line? Fingers crossed. They do secret shows where they don’t announce the artists in advance and it’s always someone that’s considered to be up & coming. Been watching them for a while, so very cool to see my song on their socials!
I have overcome all my fears about talking on camera and am basically a TikTok professional now, DM me for a consultation.
My family has been incredibly tolerant as I navigate the need to be “working on my socials” and I am grateful for the support structure that I have at home.
We got played on the radio in our hometown prior to our release! Thanks Lightning 100! Been a listener for years, so this felt very special.
We had a 14% increase in listeners on Spotify in August and have over 10,000 listeners per month now. We were also added to 269 playlists!
If you’ve read this far, let me know and I’ll add you to the list of extra special people that forever have a place in my heart. If you know anyone that would be interested in receiving this free newsletter, I send it out 2x/month on Sundays and I would love for you to share it! Thanks again for being here.
