Working in music can feel like a 24/7 party, but professionalism always matters.
There are a lot of bad things said in regards to the music business and how it can sometimes appear to be an endless party where adults can act like perpetual children as long as actual young people continue to support their craft. There may be some truths to that, but as a whole, the industry is filled with people who know how to focus when it counts. That doesn’t mean the temptation to indulge does not exist, nor does it suggest that professionals always refrain. If anyone knows how to have a good time it’s music professionals, but it’s how people handle those moments that determines their career trajectory.
Commit this to memory: Control your high.
What is a high? A high is anything you do to cut loose. That can be drinking, smoking marijuana, eating fast food, combining all three, or doing something else entirely that makes you feel good and helps you unwind. Whatever that thing is that you think of when work is at its worst, that is your high.
A high can be good. Everyone deserves to relax and have a little fun after working hard. As long as no one gets hurt, including the individual, people should be able to do whatever they please to enjoy life a bit.
The problem is, not everyone can control their high, and some find themselves in a losing battle with the thing they thought was an aide. Addiction is a beast like no other. It has claimed countless industry lives, both on the artist and professional side. Attached to the monster, but also a creature in its own right is depression. There are more killers out there, but these two are in a league of their own, and many see the opportunities working in the music industry presents as a means to ignore the pain in their lives.
Let’s be clear: You should have a good time. There are perks to working in entertainment, and one of them is the opportunity to experiment with a variety of lifestyles and behavior.
If you want to drink, you should drink.
If you want to smoke, you should smoke.
If you want to do anything that does not harm yourself or others, that is your decision.
AND – If you want to success in business and live a long life, you must learn to do all these things in moderation.
You have to control your high because you cannot afford to have it control you, and that is what will happen. If you are lucky, there will be people along the way who help keep you on track, but you could as easily meet people who encourage behavior detrimental to your well being. You have to look out for you. Your life depends on it.
Let’s face it: There is too much content. Try as we writers might to believe our work the best, there is no denying the seemingly endless entertainment options vying the finite amount of time people have in the day to day lives. Watching a video or listening to a podcast may take longer than reading an article, but some consumers see it as being better because both videos and podcasts allow for multi-tasking. It is not hard to listen to a conversation and work at the same time, but reading three-thousand words on an artist who will likely appear on a podcast or release new music soon is another story. Reading requires focused attention, and that is in increasingly limited supply in 2018.
Great up and coming artists are a dime a dozen, but great up and coming artists who can attract and hold consumers’ attention long enough to click a link, let alone read an article are far rarer. Even rarer still are publishers who see coverage of smaller acts as something worthy of their time or funding. There is a discussion to be had as to why this is bad for everyone, including the publisher, but for now, let’s focus on the conversation at hand.
In writing about an up and coming artist, you are hoping to reach two audiences: Established fans and curious consumers. The former will likely share your story, but they’re not as likely to click unless promised something exclusive or otherwise new. The latter will most likely only click if the name sounds familiar or something about the post itself stands out. The trick is in being unique while simultaneously following the lead of what is already popular in culture. For example, memes.
You cannot guarantee how many times the publisher will share your content, but you can tweet all you want through your account. Before sharing your story, take some time to craft clever and original memes inspired by the artist from your article. Do not mention the story, but instead stick to the established joke format used by every other person on the internet. Whenever possible, mention the artist, but only if it makes sense in the context of the meme. If it does not, you can always tag the artist as being in the associated photo.
Taking memes seriously as marketing tools may seem silly or foolish, but in the world of social media memes are a cultural currency that holds immense power, especially among young consumers. A great meme will attract shares and retweets, which in turn promote the artist and your identity as creator. You will receive followers, which may or may not abandon you later, as well as some brief fact time with countless people familiar with the band you are strategically promoting through meme creation.
With a little bit of luck, the memes you create will go viral amongst the artist’s already established fanbase. That may mean ten shares or ten-thousand, but know that every single one counts. The engagement generated by your original content will help to integrate you and your work as being a part of the fan community and not something produced by an outsider hoping to inspire a quick spike in traffic. That familiarity is priceless because it is what will ultimately drive clicks and shares of your story. Every artist community may be different, but the golden rules amongst them all is that fans support fans. Be one, and the rest will have your back.
Here’s an example:
Two weeks before covering up and coming pop-punk group Hot Mulligan I began drafting ideas for memes and similarly shareable content related to the band and their upcoming album, Pilot. It was around this time that two new memes started to circulate online, including what is now known as ‘Savage Patrick.’ The meme, which uses a photo of Patrick Star from Spongebob Squarepants, is used to express a ‘savage’ comment or behavior. In reviewing the lyrics to Hot Mulligan’s then-current single, “All You Wanted By Michelle Branch,” I discovered a line that seemed to fit this idea perfectly. The resulting creation was this:
A few days later, I created another meme, this one borrowing from a viral 2-image series known as the “Sleep On” meme. That meme performed even better than the one before it. It looks like this:
Both Hot Mulligan and their label shared each tweet, as well as several band members through their accounts. Fans soon followed suit.
When my article was published a days later, I returned to those two memes and added links to my story through threaded tweets. As the shares continued, so did exposure to my article. Additionally, several accounts that had followed me in the wake of the memes engaged with tweets about the post without needing to see the threads. The fan community recognized my posts as being from someone they knew to be familiar with the group they loved, and they didn’t think twice to help a fellow fan spread the word.
If all this wasn’t enough, it’s worth noting that both Hot Mulligan and their label appreciated the extra content I created. As silly as it sounds, a meme can often reach more people than a video or a song link, and a great meme shared by passionate fans can do more to encourage engagement with unfamiliar talent than all the well-written words in unread articles ever could.
Journalism is here to stay. Memes, for better or worse, are here to stay as well. Embrace them, master them, and then use them to further your readership. Even if you fail to create a significant surge in traffic you will undoubtedly attract more followers and, in time, those connections will help to grow your audience as a whole. It’s all part of the evolution of this industry. Adaptation is not an option, but a requirement. Don’t wait — create.
Never underestimate how fast the world can change. The move from home phones to cell phones, to smart phones took less than twenty years. Our primary means of consuming news changed from print to digital in what is ultimately the blink of an eye as far as the history books are concerned. Heck, less than a hundred years ago it took week for a message to be sent from one country to the next, but now in the digital age we can send mail to space and back again within seconds.
Music is no different. Columbia Records, the oldest label in the world, launched in 1887. In less than 150 years the industry has undergone more evolutions than anyone can count, changing much faster than most realize. Within the 60 years you could have recorded a single and drove it from radio station to radio station in hopes of getting it played. Today you need an entire team of people who understand radio to even have your song considered.
And let’s not even deep dive the changes in music journalism. The image most carry of a young writer rubbing shoulders with their rock idols a la Almost Famous is a thing of the distant past. Today’s writers are more often than not laptop junkies who maintain a healthy photography hobby on the side (or they’re photography junkies with a writing hobby – it’s 50/50) who make next to nothing writing articles read by anywhere from tens of people to millions. Every one of them is constantly searching for the next original thought or undiscovered gem that might catapult them a bit further into the arena of those who actually get paid to write about music.
While I encourage you to always keep your passion for the next big story strong, it’s important to know that as much as things seem to change there is a lot that remains the same. One of those things is playlists, and in the digital age it is easier than ever to cultivate and engage with a community through playlist curation. In fact, the Music Business Association recently called playlists ‘more popular than the album.’ Ouch.
The biggest problem you’re going to face when deciding to integrate weekly playlists into your writing is deciding which one of the big four streaming companies are you going to build your content on. Spotify has the largest share of the market by a vast margin at the moment, but Apple Music, Tidal, and Amazon each have millions of monthly subscribers. Ask your readers what they use and follow their lead.
As for the playlists themselves, the easy access to most music throughout modern history makes gathering simpler than most daily chores, which is all the reason you need to create as many playlists as your mind and collaborators can imagine. At the very least you should be creating weekly discovery playlists based on the coverage you plan to run. Take all the reviews and editorials you’ve got lined up and channel them into an eclectic collection of sound to help further promote the focus of your work. In doing so you’ll not only better engage your audience, but you’ll also make a lot of publicists and independent artists very happy.
But you should never do the bare minimum unless it’s absolutely necessary. Get creative. When the possibilities are endless you can be both extremely niche and shamelessly generic at the same time. Collect the 25 best love songs of the last 25 years right alongside a list of every song played during a car chase in a Fast and Furious film. Invite musicians, industry professionals, actors, and anyone else of interest to create playlists for your audience, and use those playlists to promote any coverage of that artist person you have on your site.
In an age where the options for consuming news and entertainment are endless the best tactic for reaching consumers is to play into their own interests and behaviors. People are more likely to start their day with music than a quick search of your latest blog posts, so take your brand and focus to them through the streaming playlist curation. If you can establish yourself as a great playlist curator people will seek out your other work. You can even add links to the description that promotes specific content on your site.
It has never been easier to showcase your taste than it is now, so quit hoping you 1000-word discovery of the week essay will get a million reads and build me a list of every song and artist my life is missing.
James Shotwell is the Digital Marketing Coordinator at Haulix. He is also the Film Editor for Substream Magazine and the host of the Inside Music Podcast. If you enjoyed the words above James would like you to follow him on Twitter.
Running a music blog is no easy task. Not only do you need to be constantly creating new content, but you also have to recruit people to help build your brand without the ability to offer them any sort of compensation beyond the occasional concert ticket or album advance. For some, that will be enough, as they realize the world of writing is an uphill battle that is unique for every individual. Others will complain, and they wouldn’t be wrong for feeling that was the proper way to react. Unpaid work is never fun, especially when there is no guarantee of anything further developing in a professional sense, but for some crazy reason there are hundreds, if not thousands of people around the world doing their best to meet the ever-growing demands of music blog content calendars both big and small.
As a site owner, finding the best contributors for your publication should be amongst your top priorities. You most likely want to write as well, and you should, but in order to make a meaningful impact on the industry at large you will want to have a talented team at your side. We cannot give you specifics on findings these staffers, as the number of talent pools found in various pockets of the internet is practically limitless, but we can help you navigate the often tricky review and interview process that goes into selecting new contributors. If you follow the advice outlined below we guarantee you will not only find more talented contributors, but also reliable ones. Take notes….
Ask all applicants to explain how they would describe your site and the content found on it to someone who had never previously heard of your outlet.
In the seven years I’ve spent being part of the editorial team at various websites I have seen a wide variety of contributor applications. Some come from journalism students hoping to engage a part of the industry their college paper does not cover, but most are passionate music fans who were inspired by ‘Almost Famous’ or some site they’ve read all their lives that is likely run by another seemingly regular person that they’ve decided writing might be for them as well. Many of the applicants have never written for another site, and if they have it’s a site equal to, or smaller, than your own. They, like you, are simply trying to find a way to climb the hierarchy of music journalism to the point someone offers them hard cash for their words, and they are looking at your site as a potential next step for their career. They may also be looking at several other similarly sized sites, which is why it’s important for you to ask them what they feel your site is all about before bringing them on. You want contributors who understand the reason your site exists, as well as what sets it apart from the competition. You also want them to have some idea of how their unique perspective will improve your efforts, and the only way to know if that is the case is to ask them.
Ask the interviewee to describe your company in 30 seconds or fewer. Don’t fault them if they can’t get it right the first try. They shouldn’t be expected to know everything up front, but they should have a strong grasp on what it is you do, what you cover, and the type of content you run on a day-to-day basis. Specifics are a plus, but again – don’t fault them for being vague.
After you’ve heard their ideas, tell them your personal description of what you do. Draw comparisons to what they said, and then ask what they feel they bring to the table knowing what it is you do. Their response will tell you not only how well they listen, but also whether they have a strong interest in helping build your brand or simply want to further develop their own career.
Ask yourself, “Would I read their writing if they wrote for the competition?”
When I first launched my own music blog, I thought quantity was just as important as quality. I believed the only way I could compete with bigger music sites was to run the same amount of content, which often meant covering the exact same stories in the same overly short way others did. It wasn’t about crafting thought-provoking posts, but rather doing whatever it took to generate a few extra clicks on any given day.
There is not necessarily anything wrong with running your site this way, but I’ve found it’s ultimately a very unfulfilling way to run a business (and make no mistake, your blog is a business even if it doesn’t generate income). The reason I started reading music blogs may have been out of a simple desire to learn more about the artists I loved, but the reason I stayed with any one site was largely due to the quality of the writing. I grew to love certain writers, and in time I started to seek out their reviews and think pieces more than I did any one site’s RSS feed. For me, it’s the conversation inspired by a post that makes any piece of online journalism great, and generating engagement in today’s crowded digital space requires writers with original, high quality thoughts to share. Quantity is nice, but it takes a distant second place to quality every single time (unless your main type of content is disposable puff pieces, such as listicles or celebrity gossip. That is a whole different monster we can discuss at another point in time).
When reading over applications, ask yourself whether or not the samples provided by the writer would excite you as a reader. Think about what it would be like to come across their writing on one of the music blogs you frequent, and ask yourself if the words you are reading would be enough to spark a future conversation, or if you would think to tweet/share their writing with your followers on social media. If the answer is no, pass on that contributor. If the answer is yes, bring them on board (as long as they meet all other requirements).
Involve Your Staff
Community and camaraderie are key to the success of practically any business, including those that exists solely online. You may never have the opportunity to sit in a room with your entire writing staff and discuss your content plans for the coming month, but you will more than likely create a digital space where something very similar this activity can be replicated. For my sites, private Facebook groups have always provided this space, and every staffer I have ever worked with used those groups to pitch stories, develop ideas, network, and further develop their business acumen. The relationships developed through these online portals will lead to better content, lifelong friendships, and leads on employment within the industry that can help you, as well as everyone involved with your site.
With all this in mind, it should make perfect sense to involve your staff in all future contributor applications. You don’t want to bring someone on board who cannot work well with the team, and you certainly don’t want someone who has any kind of negative history with someone else on your staff. Your contributor pool, though physically separated by hundreds of miles, is a community that is only as strong as its weakest link. Before you add anything to an already proven team of talent, make sure everyone involved feels that the new addition will help further develop their efforts. If they feel differently, listen to their reasoning before making any decisions. You may still choose to move forward, which is your right as the owner, but let your staff know their opinions and feelings matter as well.
Check all applicants’ social media feeds
This one may seem obvious, but the idea of reviewing someone’s social media content prior to bringing them on board with a company or team has been around for less than a decade at this point. The age of social media is still very much new, and the ancient world of business has struggled to catch up with its quick evolution, but as a music publication it’s incredibly important that you are aware of what your contributors are posting online. People can present themselves any way they choose through email, but just because their resume and credentials check out does not mean their personality or attitude will as well. Every person you bring on as a writer becomes, in some small way, a reflection of your publication as a whole. No matter where they post, be it on your site or their own Twitter feed, if there is something connecting your brand to their name their words can and will be seen as a reflection of your publication. You can save yourself a lot of unnecessary grief by reviewing a person’s social media feeds prior to bringing them on board as a contributor. If you see something that makes you uncomfortable, don’t be afraid to ask them about it. They have a right to do and say whatever they want, but you have a right to say what they’ve chosen to convey does not align with the goals or purpose of your publication. Stand your ground in these situations and remember that contributors’ actions do not only reflect on the publication, but also on you and the other team members. You are a community, and as I said before you are only as strong as your weakest link.
James Shotwell is the Marketing Coordinator for Haulix. He is also a professional entertainment critic, covering both film and music, as well as the co-founder of Antique Records. Feel free to tell him you love or hate the article above by connecting with him onTwitter. Bonus points if you introduce yourself by sharing your favorite Simpsons character.
