Do you tell folks when you listen to a song?
As I’ve been playing music and teaming up with folks online, I have encountered many musicians that thought no one listened to them. I have discovered that is rarely the case.
I’ve even explored the notion with a couple musicians and found real-life folks that listened to them. There’s a million ways to stay off radar, some listeners don’t even do it on purpose. They’re just at work with indie music going.
I contend the psyche of a project is bizarrely impacted by this phenomenon. If you don’t think anyone is going to hear it, some things get a pass in the QA department. I mean, what’s the point, right?
I talk to listeners every single day.
That isn’t how I operate. It’s a disservice to those that realistically listen. I am not making listeners up in my head. When I ask them to write to me all the time, some are happy to. I do it for this reason, specifically. I’m building a crowd. They’re a group of folks who like our style, not huge or anything. But enough to feel “important.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
9 times out of 10, when folks say, “it doesn’t matter,” they simply mean it doesn’t matter to them. It often matters to someone else. I quit saying that. It’s most likely not true. I’m trying my best to avoid things that aren’t true. But it really does not matter with “stats.” My happiness and fulfillment have nothing to do with some company’s metrics. I don’t work for them.
Bandcamp partial plays are one example. I’m guilty myself of giving folks partial plays and I’m sorry. I don’t know how to keep from it. If I see a band camp link somewhere, I click on it. It plays in a little dumb browser thing. Then, if I like it, I click on it again. Sure I get taken to artists page, I get to read stuff while I listen, I get a selection of things to listen to. But the music restarts because you made me click your song. Lol. Partial play.
That’s just one misinterpretation of stats. Here’s the deal, stats are deep. They often don’t say what they seem to be saying on the surface, like all the time. Anyone who reads stats on a high level doesn’t get excited about the way things “feel.” They have data. But the value of the numbers is often not slapping you in the face. It takes digging and shifting perspective. Most folks aren’t doing that last bit.
They give you the tools, not the talent.
Companies give indie musicians small business tools. A ton of indie musicians without experience are stuck with a surface level understanding of the numbers. This works well for those companies. They can upsell, offer consulting, even artwork, maybe a web site. Haha.🤣
Key thought.
To put it bluntly, the fewer people the musician thinks are listening, the more vulnerable they are to scams. So, they aren’t going to make it look like folks listen on the surface, it would cut into their profits. It’s exactly why I quit distrokid. I do not care about how many. I care about one at a time. Metrics are useless for me.
It helps to know what you’re after.
I would get metrics and emails all the time of shit they wanted me to do or buy to increase the numbers. Felt like a slot machine, I quit. I don’t even care about numbers, I just care about being in peoples’ phones when they need a song. It turns out, the grand revelation for me, it doesn’t matter. Numbers don’t matter when I’m writing and recording tunes. It’s actually one of the few things in the whole world that doesn’t matter; indie musicians’ stats. So over time, they went away.
Did you like the most popular music growing up? I didn’t.
It’s even likely that I’ll like the music more if I am not thinking about numbers while making it. But try telling Spotify that. There’s suggestions from them for writing music that makes your lyrics pop up higher in Google. AI analyzes it and categorizes it and even says if it’s likely to be successful. They even make AI songs you can listen to and base your next song off of. I flat out reject all that shit and where it’s going.
AI is only as smart as we are.
The thought that we could develop AI that knows what a hit will be when humans have never been able to do that is bonkers to me. I mean why? Sure I’ve written something and someone says “that’s a hit.” But they were kidding, and they were wrong. About how I look at AI song projections.
If you don’t know, no one knows what a hit will be until you throw it to the wolves. There might be things you can do to season the steak a bit. But the wolves not liking it or devouring it? You can’t tell until you give it to them.
It’s about responsibility.
The responsibility of the artist is to make a message or scene that’s important to them and get it out somehow. Someone is going to relate to that, almost always. Sure it’s tough to find them. There’s a lot of people and geography to contend with. But what else are you going to do, look at numbers and hope for the best? Maybe spend some moolah on a playlist, a review, or even a write-up? (They’re totally free here, [email protected])
…and maybe an artist’s intuition.
Folks do not regard an artist’s intuition. The artists themselves often neglect it. It’s a shame because my intuition often tells me who to play for. Without it, I’d be stuck looking at metrics or something.
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