Attempting to cover the moment we are in right now is more difficult than most understand. Things are happening on a minute to minute basis across social media, and the demand for a steady stream of content often takes priority over time that would normally be reserved for research and content development.
With the way the industry works today writers are expected to churn out reviews and coverage at a rate never before experienced to an audience that increasingly lacks the time and attention span to consume it. Regardless, the formula for success in music writing remains the same:
To win readers and earn subscribers you need timely, in depth content that is thoughtful and well-prepared. Have a point a view and share it through facts, imagery, and video (whenever possible).
Balancing the demands of your audience with you needs as a creative is one of the more difficult parts of writing. One path to success, which few seem to recognize, is the fact no one ever told us we could only cover something once. If you have more information to share, or if you opinion on something has changed because you have a new understanding of the art, then share it.
All great writing inspires conversations, and the thing about great conversations is that they are rarely one and done. If you meet someone you can converse with over a shared interest you tend to talk about that thing again and again until you find something new to talk about. The same goes for your relationship with readers. They have followed your work because they like the things you like, so why would you hesitate to continue having any one conversation with them? Follow the story, share the experience.
For example:
If you reviewed the new Kendrick Lamar record last week, but this week you find yourself fixated on one track you feel needs further expiration, write about it.
If you have been following the big local band in your area on their rise through the underground whenever they have news, but right now they are just playing shows – cover the shows. Write about the scene and how they influence it. Take us deeper into their world and through doing so make us want to be a part of it ourselves.
If you are feeling passionate about anything then you need to find a way to write about it again and again until you have nothing left to say. When that happens you wait until they do something new or you learn to see things differently and begin all over again.
Furthermore, the more you cover an artist the more likely it is that they and the people who represent them will take notice of your work. This could lead to additional opportunities, not to mention the chance that person or their team shares your work through official channels.
The sole risk in writing about something more than once is diminishing returns, which only arises in situations where supplementary articles are not as thought out or researched as what came before. Maintain consistency and you can cover anything you want as often as you want.
In closing: Be thorough and be yourself, always.
James Shotwell is the Marketing Coordinator for Haulix. He is also the host of the Inside Music podcast and a ten-year veteran of the music industry. Follow James on Twitter for hot takes on pop culture and photos of his pets.
If you’re interviewing bands, reviewing albums, or posting news on your blog, you need to have some sort of time-stamp on your piece.
See, other writers make posts and articles about bands and albums, and they might come across your website during their research. If your article has no time stamp, however, it’s damn near worthless.
If you interviewed someone but failed to include what YEAR the interview was conducted, how could I ever cite your article as a source? When did the interview take place? Last week? Last year? 2012?
Dates are important. When strung together, they create a narrative. The same band involved in two robberies in the same year – that’s a story. A band hinting at a new album on Facebook two years before the label sends a press release is news-worthy because of dates.
Think about it – if a band announces they kicked out their guitar player, and you have an interview from two years prior with that guitar player, you can now add something EXCLUSIVE to your news post. While everyone else is just reposting a press release, you’re able to say, “when I talked to that guitar player in 2013, she had this to say…"
Also, site owners: make sure you use the whole date. There was a time recently when Alternative Press didn’t include the YEAR in their published date. Just month and day. The year is pretty important when talking about something big, like say, former As I Lay dying vocalist Tim Lambesis doing an interview about his murder-for-hire trial (that was published in 2014, in case you were wondering). There’s no reason why any writer should have to email an outlet and ask, “hey, when was this published?”
This is music-blogging 101, folks. It ain’t rocket surgery.
So when you’re hacking away at your WordPress theme or whatever for your music blog, be sure to keep the time-stamps in there. They’re worth it not just for future reference, but for preserving the history of all this music media we work on every single day.
Seth Werkheiser is the quiz master of metal trivia at Skulltoaster. He’s also the founder of some music sites you may have heard of, including Noise Creep (2009) + Buzzgrinder (2001). He’s anti-Facebook, anti-clickbait, and anti-growth hacking. You should most definitely follow him on Twitter. Yes, right now.
Christmas is just days away at this point, and as a music news writer you have no doubt noticed a major drop in the number of press releases and pitches hitting your inbox. Many PR firms, as well as many record labels, take off the last few weeks of the year, if not longer. It is a long-standing corporate tradition that is both a gift and a curse to blog owners, and so far this year seems no different. On the one hand, you have less emails to keep up with and far more time to relax. That said, the lack of breaking news almost always means a dip in traffic, which is the kind of thing that keeps most serious editors awake at night.
Though this certainly won’t prevent you from worrying about the longterm impact from the drop in traffic try reminding yourself when things get slow that these dips impact virtually everyone in music journalism. Culturally speaking, there is very little emphasis placed on entertainment news and the tour plans of emerging musicians around this time. We as Americans are conditioned to view the time immediately before Christmas, as well as the days leading into the new year, as something intended for family gatherings, get togethers with old friends, and generally strengthening the bonds within their individual communities. People are not reading your review the new album from Before Their Eyes because they do not care, but rather because they have been trained through years of advertising, lessons from parents, and countless other avenues to focus more attention on themselves and their immediate surroundings. You are likely the exact same way, even if you don’t notice it. The only difference between you and them is that you understand what it is like to rely on the number of unique clicks given to any one site or page in order to make it through the day without hating yourself.
I wish I could say that the holiday dip gets easier to handle with each passing year, but sometimes I believe the opposite may be true. When you first start out, the importance of day to day traffic is not as big as, say, how you perform over an entire month. You are happy that anyone is reading your work at all, or at least you should be, so dips come and go without much thought given to the reason for their occurrence. As you begin to build your professional profile however, the frustration you feel towards negative changes in traffic only continues to build. It is at that point that traffic becomes a true addiction for most bloggers, outpacing alcohol and prescription pills in the rate at which they can make or break a person’s day. You begin relying on numbers to justify your work rather than the feeling of accomplishment writing about music well typically provides. When that happens, and it hits almost everyone who finds the smallest bit of success, it is hard to not feel like the world is telling you they no longer care. You feel as if you are a hobby, or maybe even something less, and that the vast majority of internet users would be perfectly fine living life whether or not your site ever existed.
Of course, this is all big and lofty stuff that holds little real weight, but in the mind of a creative person trying to use their voice to share their vision or perspective of the world around them it can feel like a 10-ton boulder weighing on their shoulders all day long. The dip inn traffic sets off an internal struggle between the belief one is doing what they were put on this planet to do and the horrifying notion they may have chased a fruitless hobby to the point of no return. This is admittedly a selfish thought, but that is the way the mind works for many writers. They feel every change in traffic directly correlates to something that was first birthed in the deepest canals of their brain. Every success is because of them, but so is every failure, and allowing themselves to believe that is true can often worsen an already fragile sense of self worth. Writers typically believe they are good, even if they won’t admit it to others, but it is a lot easier to believe with data. When data says differently, that initial blind faith is hard to maintain.
My battles with the holiday traffic dip have been epic since day one. Like many young writers, I believed the easiest way to create more traffic was to have more posts. More content would equate to more unique readers, at least in my inexperienced mind, so I would spend long hours writing about artists – many of whom I did not even care for – who had for new or even recent updates that we had previously not run. I was a news madman, but for all my effort the results were typically about the same. A day with twenty articles and a day with forty articles would only be separated by about 500 uniques, which made the value of those extra twenty posts incredibly small. Ever worse, I knew how much time with family and those I love had been sacrificed in order for them to be created. I was losing on all fronts and feeling even worse about myself than I had just knowing the dip existed.
Two years ago, things started to change, but certainly not as fast as I might have hoped. Instead of driving myself insane by sacrificing large amounts of time for content that very few people would enjoy, regardless of that content’s quality, I decided to use the holiday slowdown as an opportunity to plan the year ahead. Admittedly I did not plan as well as I might have liked, but for the first time in over half a decade of blogging I had found an outlet for my frustrations that allowed me to constructively combat my own demons, as well as the drop in uniques, all while focusing on the one hobby/job/passion/interest I have carried the last decade of my life. It was not perfect by any means, but it was more productive and beneficial than any of my previous late December breakdowns, and I am hoping to improve upon those efforts in the weeks ahead while I set to planning what this blog will do in the new year.
When we started the month of December I had no plans to write this article, as we wrote a similar entry last year, but as I noticed students posting about final exams winding down and saw numerous friends begin complaining about traffic I had a change of heart. I saw myself in those were frustrated, and I wanted to reach out in hopes of easing their worried minds. Let me tell you right now that anyone thinking that the dip they see in traffic around this time is a direct result of something they did is wrong, and that perspective is coming from someone who has spent many holidays being hard on themselves for not producing stronger traffic during Christmas Break. You are worth more than you know, and so is the work you are doing to promote the art and artists you love. That is true whether or not your analytics surpasses your expectations, and it always will be as long as you do not allow yourself to get lost in data. You didn’t start writing to become obsessed with who is or is not reading you work, so don’t let it distract you now. Be the best writer you can possibly be and the rest will follow.
Believe me, young writers, when I tell you that the world has not forgotten about you. The audience you have built remains dedicated, your work remains consistent, and the support you have from the rest of the blogging community is as strong as it has ever been. Instead of letting the holiday slowdown throw you and your emotions for a loop, accept that traffic dips and focus your efforts on creating a more productive new year. Don’t waste time with stories no one will read or social media efforts that will find only minimal traction and look to the future. Build a content calendar, draft requests for 2016 album releases, apply to SXSW, and/or something else altogether. Whatever you do – stay positive. The world is not ending and your talent is not going unnoticed. People simply have other priorities right now, and in less than two weeks things will return more or less to normal. Just breathe.
In just over a month I will turn 28, and at that point I will have officially been working towards my goal of being a career-long professional in the music industry for a little over a decade. I started by promoting and booking for a local venue, which lead to street team work for a variety of indie labels. From there, I left for college and pursued a degree in music business while also running the campus radio station and launching my own music blog. Upon graduating from college I continued to build my blog while seeking work and, after securing a job, moved from Michigan to Boston to continue pursuing my career. That job eventually fell apart, but I luckily secured the role at Haulix I hold today before that time came to pass. I don’t know if I will ever want to work at another company after the wonderful experience I have had here so far, but if there comes a time when that is what I must do then I will find the strength to move on. I have no choice. The music business is a hustle or die industry, and even a decade into my work I feel I must hustle just as hard as I have every day before today, if not harder, in order to continue having a place in this business to call home. It’s stressful, but it’s what I signed up for, and if you’re reading this now you probably agreed to the same.
When I was younger, making sacrifices in the name of music was a no-brainer. By the time I started booking and promoting concerts I had already consumed numerous books and essays about life in the music business. I had also watched Almost Famous about a hundred times, which at the time I believed would one day serve me well (it hasn’t). All this was done because I knew music was the place for me, and I wasn’t going to let the fact I grew up surrounded by cornfields and country roads prevent me from leaving my mark on entertainment. My parents were supportive, but also understandably cautious. They had lived far longer than me and knew all too well about the dark side of entertainment. They saw their heroes fall from grace, as well as good artists go unnoticed. They had read how music, like film or television, chews up talent and spits it out with no regard for the welfare of the human possessing said talent, and though they were happy to see me drive to succeed they were concerned I too would be used and discarded. While I don’t think that has happened to me yet, there have been times when it felt like it could. Whether it was the period when my full-time job in Boston lost funding and couldn’t afford to pay its staff, or the countless times a website I was associated with went offline for seemingly no real reason, my career has been littered with moments when it seemed like all hope was lost. Still, I dug in harder than ever before and kept working. I kept grinding in the face of no pay and no industry future because I believed – like I do still today – that hard work pays off.
Recently, and by that I mean this past weekend, something changed for me. After years of putting my career and the desire to leave a mark on the entertainment industry above everything else in life I finally broke while on an otherwise normal day-cation with my fiancé, Lisa, and my parents. The original plan was for my folks to visit us in Boston, but due to the death of a distant relative my parents had to make a last minute change and visit New Jersey instead. We were initially going to call off our plans altogether, but Lisa and I decided to make the 4.5 hour drive down because it had been several months since we were able to visit anyone in our extended families. You see, while we may live a happy life in Boston, it has come at the cost of being half a country away from our families in the midwest. This was another sacrifice made in the name of music, and though it has rarely weighed on me over the last half decade this day was different, and I think every day moving forward will be different as well as a result.
The tipping point came in a music store of all places, at a time when I wasn’t even thinking about my life or career. Lisa and my mother were ready to leave, so they asked me to find my father and tell him we were planning to head up the street. As I scanned the aisles, I couldn’t see the man I’d known my entire life. I walked up and down before catching someone that looked like him in the corner of the shop. As I approached, I caught myself stopping momentarily because the man I was seeing had an almost complete head of grey hair, or at leas the back of his head was almost completely grey. I was about to turn and walk away when the man turned and, as you can probably guess, revealed himself to be my father.
That was it. In that moment when I realized the man I thought to be ‘too old’ to be my father was actually my dad something inside my broke. My dad may have turned 50 earlier this year, but in all my years on this planet he has always had a full head of dark brown hair. We joked about his incoming grey hairs whenever they would appear, but it wasn’t until this moment in Jack’s Music Shoppe in downtown Red Bank, New Jersey that I realized my father was getting older. In that fleeting moment my brain finally grasped the concept of our fleeting existence, and I knew in my bones for perhaps the first time ever that a day would come when my dad was no longer among the living. I realized that his time, as well as mine, was growing shorter by the passing minute. We were dying, and we always had been, but for whatever reason my mind and soul chose this exact moment to come to terms with the fact the amount of time I have to spend with my father is slipping through my fingers at an alarming and completely unstoppable rate.
As this wave of immense emotion rolled over me I felt tears begin to form in the corners of my eyes, but I tucked them away before they could see the light of day. It wasn’t until Lisa and I were in bed back in Boston that I actually had to sit and take in everything that had crossed my mind in the preceding hours. When I did, at three in the morning, the sobs poured out of me like a child who just lost their favorite toy. Lisa sat with me, telling me that she felt some kind of inner turmoil weighing on me, and she held me until I could find the power to stop shaking. We talked about life, death, and the people we had lost along the way. We talked about the possibilities of eternity, and what it means to be conscious. We talked about a lot of things far too personal to detail here, but the one thing we never discussed was my career in music.
I’ve always known that I will one day cease to exist. That fact had dawned on me at an incredibly early age when, on the day of my birthday, my grandmother on my father’s side passed away. I recall crying in my father’s arms in the dead of night pleading with him to find a way to let me avoid death, and he was honest in saying that was impossible. He told me instead that death would not come for me for a very long time, and that the same was true for him. I believed him, and even though I still feel unsettled by the rush of feelings I had in Jersey over the weekend I still believe that to be true. With the exception of that one grandmother, most people on both sides of my family live long, fulfilling lives. I can only hope the same fate befalls my parents and I, but of course there is no way to know just what life holds in store.
And that is why I felt compelled to share this story. The grey hairs on the back of my father’s head taught me more about what is important in this life than anything I had seen, heard, or been taught throughout my existence. In that one brief moment I realized that I, nor anyone else, can be Peter Pan. I may have a career in an industry that thrives off making the feeling of youth last forever, but eventually everything I know will turn to ash, including the bones, muscles, and tissues that make me a person. Everyone I love will eventually pass from this existence, and try as I might to believe one philosophy or another I have no idea what comes after our brief time on this Earth. All I know is that when I saw the grey hairs on my father’s head I could not have cared less about my place in music history, or even music today. All I could think about were the sacrifices made to get to where I am, and what I realized is that most of the things I had to cut out of my life related to the people in it. Whether it was moving across the country for a job in a city where I don’t know a soul, or simply spending every waking hour blogging instead of enjoying the company of friends and family, I had lessened the time I have with the people I love the most for a selfish goal that would mean nothing when I died, and that thought has now kept me awake for days.
Music is a wonderful industry to be a part of, and it’s filled with brilliant people whose presence in your life is a gift you can never repay, but if success comes at the cost of losing time with those who already mean the world to you then I’m not sure that success in this business is something I still want. No job is worth losing the time we have with those we love the most, and starting this week I am taking a very hard look at how I can make changes that allow me to better focus on the things that really matter in this life. I hope this story will inspire you to do the same.
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 on Twitter. Bonus points if you introduce yourself by sharing your favorite Simpsons character.
Every music writer today, regardless of experience or genre preference, deals with stress on a daily basis. Whether you’re fretting over the quality of content posted, the happiness of your fellow staff, the happiness of your readers, or worried you may have simply not posted enough, there seems to always be something worth losing sleep over. At least, that is how we see things. Writers, just like site owners, have a big problem with internalizing every single thing that could possibly frustrate them and never taking the time to actually deal with any of it. We just keep going, day in and day out, with the hope that one day we will feel the increasingly heavy weights on our shoulders being lifted off. We don’t know when that will happen, and most probably couldn’t tell you a single scenario where they would actually be able to stop stressing for good, but it’s a lie that has helped countless creatives push through and it will continue to serve its purpose for the foreseeable future.
Having spent nearly a decade of my life writing, it wasn’t until I had already put five years of hard work in that I really began to notice the impact stress and its constant presence in my life took on everyday existence. My brain had rewired itself over time to revolve around the internet and what I saw as the time of day when posting ‘must’ happen. The first thing I thought about when I woke up was whether or not any headlines had broke while I was asleep, and the last thing I did before bed last night was a scroll through my RSS feed for any late breaking headlines. “If I could just be on top of the next story,” I thought. “Then I will be satisfied.”
What I eventually realized, and what I still struggle with today, is that there is no true end point for creative people. Our drive to create content the world enjoys will never be satiated with a single post, or even a single day’s worth of great content. Our pursuit is one that seeks for to create high quality work over an extended period of time, and no amount of day-to-day success is ever going to subdue that desire. The best we can do is learn to live with our drive rather than letting it rule over us, and that begins by learning to relax. I know that may sound like a foreign concept to many writers reading this now, but it’s true. If you cannot relax then you cannot create your best work, and if that happens that constant itch to create something truly great will slowly begin to eat you alive.
Before your passion gets the best of you, use the tips below to shake off the stress of creating content and find what I assume I probably some much needed rest. You deserve it.
It’s never a bad idea to have a plan. In fact, it’s a damn good idea.
I wish someone had told me when I was just starting out that life as a writer is 100x easier when you have a plan. More specifically, life is easier when you have a content calendar that outlines every major feature and piece of content you will need to create in the next several weeks, as well as the deadlines to complete each item. Doing this periodically makes it easier to plan your day-to-day work load, which in turn lowers your stress. You know what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, and exactly how much time you have to get everything accomplished. For added help, I suggest making daily to-do lists as well. I use Asana to make mine, but you can use whatever works best for you.
Even if you have a plan, be careful not to take on too much at once.
When I first started making calendars and to-do lists I thought it best to try and see just how many things I could accomplish on any given day. I would make lists with twenty or thirty tasks, and anything left incomplete at the end of the day would be the first thing tackled the following morning. What I didn’t realize at the time, and what I hope to save you from now, is that leaving so many tasks unfinished made it impossible for my mind to fully shutdown at the end of the day. Whenever I wanted to get up from my desk and walk away I would see them, mocking me from the page, and I would feel as if I had somehow failed myself by leaving them incomplete. Sometimes this forced me to stay up late, cranking away on subpar content because at least it would be completed, but other times I would walk away online to find the need to do more work keeping me up at night. No one was telling me I wasn’t doing enough other than myself, but that was the only voice I needed to hear to feel inadequate.
Educate yourself
The more you know about how the independent music and digital journalism world works, the better prepared you’ll be to conquer it. This is the entire reason the Haulix blog you’re reading right now even exists: Education. Every member of our staff learned about the industry through trial and error. No one held our hand or showed us what to do. We simply woke up every morning and dedicated ourselves to improving what little skills we had and in time things slowly began to improve. Looking back now we realize that was the hard way to learn about life in music, so we created this blog to make life in music easier for future generations.
Step away from the laptop. Put down your phone. Walk outside. Breathe.
Chronic stress is the response to emotional pressure suffered for a prolonged period over which an individual perceives he or she has no control. This is a good way to explain how most writers feel in the digital age. We know we can create great content given time and space, but there is a constant demand from the world at large to produce more and more content and it’s easy to perceive that cry for posts as a call that must be answered. After all, it’s because of our readers that we creatives have a purpose in the first place.
Before you can give your readers what they need you must first care for your own well being. Planning and organizing will get you far, but in order to truly shake off the stress and worries of life in writing you need to disconnect. You need to close your laptop, put your phone in ‘airplane’ mode, step outside, and breathe. Take a walk, take a nap, catch a movie (that you don’t review), or call a friend and catch up. Find something that has nothing to do with your writing and let it be the only thing you focus on for a period of time. Your mind needs time to rest, just like your body. You can only push yourself so far before your work will begin to suffer, and if you continue to push beyond that point things will only go from bad to worse for everyone involved. Trust me – it’s okay to unplug. Just do it.
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 on Twitter. Bonus points if you introduce yourself by sharing your favorite Simpsons character.
This morning I was listening to the latest episode of Inside Music and checking for any remaining edits that needed to be made when an article from The Awl caught my attention. The title of the piece was “All My Blogs Are Dead,” and within two paragraphs author Carter Maness had me on the edge of my seat. You can find the whole piece here, but I wanted to focus on this key portion for the rest of this post:
“Most of the media outlets I’ve written for have folded and then were flat-out deleted. In 2009, I had started blogging for AOL Music’s Spinner and The BoomBox, averaging three posts per day about indie rock and hip-hop. By 2010, I was writing approximately two print features and twenty blogposts per month on local music acts for New York Press. After that, in 2011, I joined the boutique MP3 blog RCRD LBL as the site’s lead editor/writer, publishing five posts per day. None of these outlets exist in 2014 beyond stray citations, rotten links and Facebook apparitions.”
When a music blog dies, the content created for that publication will remain online only as long as the person owning the URL continues to pay the site’s hosting fees. In my experience, that time is often quite short, and as soon as the metaphorical switch is flipped to shut down the site for good all of your hard work disappears faster than the blink of an eye. The internet time machine may save a post or two for you, if you’re lucky, but more than likely the bulk of your hard work will vanish from existence. This brings us to the same question Maness addresses when writing his article: If it’s deleted from the internet, did it ever really exist?
I’ve been writing about music for almost ten years, but I have only been presiding the site I currently contribute to most often for the last seven. The site where I got my start, the now long-forgotten High Beam Review, stopped posting new content int the fall of 2008. By the spring of 2009 the site was entirely offline, and with it any proof I had contributed content of any kind to a site other than the one I was writing for at that very moment. Fortunately, that site was one I owned, and though I since sold it to a media group it still exists today. All the content created over the last seven years still exists as well, though given the number of times the site’s design has changed I’m not sure how some of the older content would look when viewed on the current layout. Still, it’s there, and until the site dies it will remain available for everyone to see.
But what happens when the media company that now owns my site decides its a property no longer worth their time or hard drive space? Will I even get a warning? If I do, how long will I have to collect what is essentially the entirety of my professional experience up to this point and preserve it for future generations by other means?
I have no answers to these questions, and even before reading Maness’ piece today such inquiries had crossed my mind several times. The best solution I have developed thus far is to maintain a professional portfolio site, which contains links to all the content I create around the web. Those links are only good for as long as the sites they link to are active, but for now its the only means I’ve found aside from copy/pasting years of work onto a separate site. I’ve also begun keeping all the drafts I create on my own word processing programs, but without the sites the content ran on existing I have to wonder if anyone would believe such ramblings were actually published in the first place.
The future is a scary place, and for writers there are few thoughts more terrifying than having the bulk of your published work wiped from existence, but we cannot allow our fears of a potential future prevent us from taking action now. Create backups of your work, and be sure to maintain a digital portfolio whose URL you control. The only one who is going to look out for the livelihood of your content online, especially the more said content ages, is you. It is your responsibility to preserve your work, and I am urging you to begin doing so as soon as possible. Establish a system of preservation and stick with it. Your career will thank you.
James Shotwell is the editor of the Haulix blog. He is also the founder of Under The Gun Review, co-owner of Antique Records, and host of the Inside Music podcast. When not writing and talking about music, James can usually be found eating pizza or going to the movies. Follow him on Twitter.
Hey there, everyone! Glad to see you found time in your busy schedule to spend a few minutes browsing our blog. The feature you are about to enjoy was written with music bloggers in mind, but its message can be applied to anyone hoping to make a big impact with web traffic around the month’s biggest holiday.
This blog exists to promote the future of the music industry, and to do that we need input from people like you and your music-loving friends. If you have any questions about the content in this article, or if you have an artist you would like to see featured on this blog, please contact james@haulix.com and share your thoughts. We can also be found on Twitter and Facebook.
It’s officially the month of February, which means we have less than two weeks until the most despised, commercial, and shallow holiday of all time is upon us. Yes, Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, and if you’re a blogger worth their weight in digital text then you’ve already begun brainstorming content you can run around the world’s biggest Hallmark holiday. If you haven’t thought to begin planning yet, you might want to, but before you do that you should read the rest of this post.
Having been writing about alternative music for over half a decade at this point, I’ve grown accustomed to seeing a flood of similar content make its way through my feeds every time the second week of February rolls around. Be it lists of the best and/or worst love songs of all time, or a collection of the most romantic moments in certain films, it seems everyone in pop culture writing believes the best way to reach readers is through regurgitated list ideas that offer one or two variations, if that, from every other list found online. I don’t entirely disagree, but I do think we are all doing a disservice to our readers by settling for the first few ideas that come to mind. We all know Whitney Houston sang what is arguably the most romantic love song of all time, and we also know that no one will ever top J. Geils’ anthem for the heartbroken. We also know that Jesse Lacey wrote quite a few songs in the early years of Brand New that may or may not have been his own version of a love song. All of this has been listed, debated, and covered to death. It still gets traffic, but so does sharing the number one clip on YouTube on any given day. If you’re okay with easy traffic, fine, but if you want to create exciting content then you need to think a bit more outside the box.
I’m not putting down listicles, and I sure as hell don’t want to make you believe that discussing the songs that do or do not evoke a sense of romance is stupid. It’s not. These conversations have been had throughout the history of pop culture, and as far as I can tell they will continue for as long as there are multiple artists creating art simultaneously. We all engage with art in our own way, and we all find the songs that mean something special to us for reasons entirely our own. We might relate to the romantic anthems played on the radio, but tracks like “My Heart Will Go On” and “Tiny Dancer” are rarely the songs that hit closest to home. They’re thematic staples, and as such they elicit a similar reaction from almost everyone who hears them. They’re safe, at least to an extent, and in my opinion covering them is rather boring. There is something to be said for giving people what they want, but there is a lot more to be said for someone who tries to give people something they don’t know they need. That’s what great writing does, and as crazy as it sounds Valentine’s Day is the perfect time to forge real connections with your readers through original content.
Why is now such a prime time to connect with your audience? The answer is actually quite simple: Love.
You see, we all have an idea of what love is and we go through lives trying our best to find someone that we believe compliments that idea best, but at the end of the day the numerous way we as a culture define love is almost too varied to measure. Some see it as co-dependency, while other see it as giving all of yourself in the name of another’s happiness. Still others see the whole thing as a marketing scam, built by corporations and engrained into society at large through massive marketing schemes. I’m not here to say whether any of those ideas are right or wrong, but I am here to encourage you to share you idea of love, regardless of what its definition may be. People everywhere wonder through life asking themselves if they truly understand what it means to love or to be loved, and it’s only through sharing our own thoughts and experiences that we as a global community will be able to really grasp its meaning. That’s not to say your content will change the world if you’re simply being yourself, but it might change someone’s perspective on life, and if you can do that there really is no limit to your capabilities as a writer.
Let me give you an example: Last year, my friend Dan Bogosian wrote a wonderful piece for Consequence Of Sound about his relationship with Saves The Day, as well as the person responsible for introducing him to the band’s sound. It’s a great piece filled with emotional ups and downs that I must encourage everyone to read, but if you don’t have time I’ll summarize by saying that Dan’s experience with the music of Saves The Day has taught him not only a greater appreciation for life, but also for his relationships with others. Through reading his words, I too found a new appreciation for the people in my life. I was carried back to the times when friends both close and long since forgotten introduced me to music and films that would go on to change my life. I thought of the people I thanked and the ones I did not, the ways we grew apart, and the impact distance can have on even the closest of friends.
I wasn’t present for Dan’s experiences with his friend or his times seeing Saves The Day live, but reading his words it’s impossible to ignore his love of both. As he struggles to understand why things change over time, he touches on universal concerns we all share about our relationship with those around us, and in doing so he forges a connection with us. We too know those feelings, though not because of the exact same circumstances, and learning how someone else got through those times influences the way he live moving forward.
When you’re planning and hopefully drafting Valentine’s Day content this week, think of the experiences and memories in your life that taught you lessons about love. Find the songs that set the perfect mood for that first kiss you’ll never forget, as well as the album that helped you forget the lover who couldn’t be trusted. Reflect on all of this and choose the stories you’re most comfortable with sharing, then proceed to write until you cannot write any more. Pour yourself into these pieces, letting readers know why you do or do not believe in love and the music that helps cement your belief. If you can do that, people will respond. They might not comment at first, but they will carry your words and thoughts with them. They may spin the same songs, or they may relate to the situation being described and think of songs they know that fit the mood even better. Whatever the case, they will connect with you, and forging that connection is the first step towards creating a lasting and rewarding relationship with your audience.
Hello, everyone! Welcome to the one and only Journalism Tips column that will run this week. We have been working hard on diversifying our posting efforts, so beloved columns like this one are going to be running a little less frequently in immediate future, but hopefully in time you’ll understand why we made the changes we did.
This site exists to promote the future of the entertainment industry, and to do that we need input from people like you and your entertainment-loving friends. If you have any questions about the content in this article, or if you have an artist you would like to see featured on this blog, please contact james@haulix.com. We can also be found on Twitter and Facebook.
I spent the first five years of my writing career doing everything in my power to build the most read music blog in existence, and my way of gauging success almost always boiled down to the data gathered by Google Analytics. The number of unique visitors, page views, countries of origin, landing pages, bounce rates, and everything in between became the various scales by which I measured my wins and losses. Good days were only considered as such if we rose above a target traffic point, and bad days were anything that fell short. Feature content was only created if it played into what was trending in recent weeks, and if any attempts at originality-be it a potential recurring column or a random exclusive with a rising talent-failed to bring in a modest boost to traffic such ideas were never attempted again. After all, time is a previous commodity, and the efforts spent on creating that one piece of content could have drafted a dozen or more news posts that catered to a far larger and more diverse audience. Those posts wouldn’t necessarily have performed better, but at least they would be casting a greater net with which to hopefully reach out target market.
If we’re being completely honest, even at my peak I was about a hundred miles from reaching my original goal of building the greatest music site. My team and I never really deserved it, or at least not entirely, and it wasn’t until I was a few years out of college that I began to understand why. We weren’t creating content we were passionate about because we felt the things being said were not being expressed by anyone else, we were writing with the sole purpose of boosting our average monthly readership, and in doing so whoring ourselves out to whatever label, publicist, or artist needed promotion in the moment. We had very few original thoughts to share, yet we were churning out thirty to fifty posts any given day of the week. No one ever copy and pasted press releases in their entirety, but if you called the majority of our posting efforts a collection of press release summaries you would not be too far off base.
To be fair, the place my team and I found ourselves in is not unlike the position many music blogs around the web are in at this very moment. The age of social media and the immediacy of sharing has lead to a huge upswing in the amount of content being created, but try as science might no one has been able to find a way to increase the length of any given day. Young writers and sites feel pressure to compete with the large amount of content being created by their peers because they believe not doing so will cause them to go unnoticed. They get into a mindset that believes more content means more opportunities to market, which in turn means a higher likelihood of clicks from new visitors and maybe, just maybe, those random clicks will become regular visitors as time goes on. Heck, they may even like your Facebook page, as if the number of Likes a site has in any ways coincides with the quality of their content.
Really though, who said anything about quality up to this point? People trapped in the analytics mindset are not concerned with quality as much as they are quantity, and that goes for content as much as it does the people who read it. They want more readers and more clicks, but they are not willing to build those numbers over time. Who has time? We live in the age of immediacy, and any digital effort worth its weight in coding knows you need to grow or you will shrivel and die on the third and fourth pages of Google search results. In order to keep digital irrelevance at bay, sites churn out post after post of regurgitated promotional phrasing in hopes some small fraction of a band’s fan base misses every other headline boasting similar media and clicks the link to their article instead. It’s a long shot, but that is why sites create so many different posts each day. They believe thirty attempts to reach thirty different groups of music fans are better and, for some reason, more rewarding than creating a genuine dialogue with one, three, or even five of these groups through original, thought-provoking writing.
What no one really says about Google Analytics, or any platform that measures site traffic for that matter, is that none of the technology associated with tracking web performance can gauge the happiness of the content creators. These tools can only give you data, and unless you are a robot that is not enough information to gauge the successfulness of any endeavor. You have to be happy with yourself first, as well as the work you are creating. If anyone tells you they got into music to be the best ever and they don’t need any sense of personal satisfaction to be content as long as the goal of being most popular is achieved they’re lying to both you and themselves. Success without personal satisfaction is a soul-draining experience that will leave you depressed and alone. No one wants to work with someone who is afraid to be themselves, especially if that person has never been confident enough in their beliefs to share them with the world. That’s the entire reason people start music blogs – to share their views and opinions with the world. To begin such a project for any other reason would just be foolish.
Before I decided to stop concerning myself with the numbers being reported through analytics tools and focus on the content I was creating I was fairly certain I would have to walk away from music forever before I turned 30. Years of generating hundreds of posts every month and seeing minimal growth, if any, had drained every bit of desire I had to continue pursuing writing. In truth, I had lost sight of the reason I got started in the first place. I had replaced my desire to be unique with my desire to be popular, and in doing so lost the fire for writing that initially lead me to launch my own site. I had become more concerned with how others viewed me, as well as how many of them gave me their time, than whether or not I was comfortable in my own skin. I didn’t care about being me or saying what I wanted to say, just that people wanted to read the words I wrote.
Looking back now I know that running a site the way I did was a disservice to myself and my team, not to mention the people reading our work, and in the big scheme of things those efforts wasted a lot of time that could have been spent asking tough questions and taking worthwhile chances. I’m trying to make up for it now, but no amount of future writing can make up for the time and digital space wasted with articles that never really needed to exist in the first place, and knowing I’m responsible for such a large amount of largely useless content really bums me out. I made a promise to myself to create less disposable writing in 2015, and so far I like to think I’m staying true to my word. The number of posts we run on my site has dropped, as has our traffic, but the sense of pride felt by our entire team for the work being done is better than it has been in years. We wake each day excited for the work ahead, and we communicate regularly with one another to help develop and refine original ideas. When the day ends, no one clicks over to Analytics. We check in once a week to see how things performed, but otherwise we focus on supporting one another and believing in the content we are pushing out. We don’t run anything that feels like it wouldn’t be worth clicking tomorrow, and as a result we’ve seen a nice boom in engagement from readers. Turns out, if you give people something worth discussing, they often hang around and have a discussion. Who would have thought?
Everyone is going to have their ideas on what makes a music site thrive, but take it from me when I say obsessing over analytics will only lead you to ruin. The only way you are ever going to succeed in this business, let alone be able to live with yourself as a professional in entertainment, is if you learn to be comfortable being you. I hate to sound like your parents or a guidance counselor who cares a bit too much, but you and your opinions are what makes you that unique butterfly we all tell ourselves we are, even though we know most people are fairly similar. Expressing the thoughts and opinions that make you unique is the only way to gain a true following, and until you are able to recognize that you’ll be swinging in the dark hoping to stumble on click-worthy headlines. I’ve been there, and I wouldn’t wish that position on anyone with a serious passion for writing.
Be you, and be comfortable with expressing who you are. Everything else will follow in time.
Hello, everyone! I know many of you have the good fortune of not needing to attend school or show up to work this week, but that is not the case for everyone. The Haulix team, for instance, plans to work straight through the new year. We will take time off for Santa Claus, of course, but otherwise we will be working our days away. That may sound harsh to some, but truth be told it really doesn’t feel like work when you love what you’re doing.
This site exists to promote the future of the entertainment industry, and to do that we need input from people like you and your entertainment-loving friends. If you have any questions about the content in this article, or if you have an artist you would like to see featured on this blog, please contact james@haulix.com. We can also be found on Twitter and Facebook.
We are currently only a few short days away from the arrival of Christmas, and as a music news writer you have no doubt noticed a major drop in the number of press releases being hitting your inbox. Many PR firms, as well as many record labels, take the last week of the year off, if not longer. It is a long-standing corporate tradition that is both a gift and a curse to blog owners. On the one hand, you have less emails to keep up with and far more time to relax. That said, the lack of breaking news almost always means a dip in traffic for site owners.
While you are fighting the urge to scream about your drop in traffic, try reminding yourself that these dips impact virtually everyone in music journalism. Culturally speaking, there is very little emphasis placed on entertainment news and the tour plans of emerging musicians around this time. Americans are conditioned to view the time immediately before Christmas through the beginning of the new year as something intended for family gatherings, get togethers with old friends, and generally strengthening the bonds within their individual communities. People are not reading your review the new album from of D’Angelo because they do not care, but rather because they have been trained through years of advertising, lessons from parents, and countless other avenues to focus more attention on themselves and their immediate surroundings. You are likely the exact same way. The only difference is that you understand what it is like to rely on the number of unique clicks given to any one site or page in order to make it through the day without hating yourself.
I wish I could say that the holiday dip gets easier to handle with each passing year, but sometimes I believe the opposite may be true. When you first start out, the importance of day to day traffic is not as big as, say, how you perform over an entire month. You are happy that anyone is reading your work at all, or at least you should be. The frustration comes after you have established a voice and developed a healthy, perhaps even somewhat reliable monthly traffic welcoming tens or even hundreds of thusands of uniques. It is at that point that traffic becomes a true addiction for most bloggers, outpacing alcohol and prescription pills in the rate at which they can make or break a person’s day. When that happens, and it hits almost everyone who finds the smallest bit of success, it is hard to not feel like the world is telling you they no longer care. You are a hobby, or maybe even something less, and the vast majority of people would be perfectly fine living life whether or not your site ever existed.
This is all big and lofty stuff that holds little real weight, but in the mind of a creative person trying to use their voice to share their vision or perspective of the world around them it can feel like a 10-ton boulder weighing on their shoulders all day long. The dip inn traffic sets off an internal struggle between the belief one is doing what they were put on this planet to do and the horrifying notion they may have chased a fruitless hobby to the point of no return. This is admittedly a selfish thought, but that is the way the mind of many writers works. They feel every change in traffic or the frequency of comments directly correlates to something that was first birthed in the deepest canals of their brain. Every success is because of them and every failure too, which can often add to their sometimes fragile sense of self worth. They believe they are good, but it is a lot easier to believe with data. When data says differently, that initial blind faith is hard to maintain.
My battles with the holiday traffic dip have been epic since day one. Like many young writers, I believed the easiest way to create more traffic was to have more posts. More content would equate to more unique readers, at least in my inexperienced mind, so I would spend long hours writing about artists – many of whom I did not even care for – who had for new or even recent updates that we had previously not run. I was a news madman, but for all my effort the results were typically about the same. A day with twenty articles and a day with forty articles would only be separated by about 500 uniques, which made the value of those extra twenty posts incredibly small. Ever worse, I knew how much time with family and those I love had been sacrificed in order for them to be created. I was losing on all fronts and feeling even worse about myself than I had just knowing the dip existed.
Last year, things started to change, but certainly not as fast as I might have hoped. Instead of driving myself insane by sacrificing large amounts of time for content that very few people would enjoy, regardless of that content’s quality, I decided to use the holiday slowdown as an opportunity to plan the year ahead. Admittedly I did not plan as well as I might have liked, but for the first time in over half a decade of blogging I had found an outlet for my frustrations that allowed me to constructively combat my own demons, as well as the drop in uniques, all while focusing on the one hobby/job/passion/interest I have carried the last decade of my life. It was not perfect by any means, but it was more productive and beneficial than any of my previous late December breakdowns, and I am hoping to improve upon those efforts in the weeks ahead while I set to planning what this blog will do in the new year.
When we started the month of December I had no plans to write this article, but as I noticed students post about final exams winding down and I noticed close friends leaving the city with their sights set on wherever it is they call home I watched my analytics slowly begin to trend downward. The initial rush of self doubt hit me like it always has, but for the first time in my memory I was able to recognize it for what it was and not what my pessimistic sensibilities wanted to believe. I could see that the industry was slowing down, not interest in my work, and that I had not misstepped in any way. Still, I could not fight the urge to entertain the notion that if I did something different this year that maybe traffic would be different as well. I brainstormed a number of ideas, and even went as far as pitching a couple listicles to various publications, but before anyone got back to me I backed out of every opportunity and wrote this instead. To do anything else would be to repeat the same cycle yet again, only this time under the foolish guise of not accepting what I knew to be true.
Believe me, young writers, when I tell you that the world has not forgotten about you. The audience you have built remains dedicated, your work remains consistent, and the support you have from the rest of the blogging community is as strong as it has ever been. Instead of letting the holiday slowdown throw you and your emotions for a loop, accept that traffic dips and focus your efforts on creating a more productive new year. Don’t waste time with stories no one will read or social media efforts that will find only minimal traction and look to the future. Build a content calendar, draft requests for 2015 album releases, apply to SXSW, and/or something else altogether. Whatever you do – stay positive. The world is not ending and your talent is not going unnoticed. People simply have other priorities right now, and in less than two weeks things will return more or less to normal. Just breathe.
Hello, everyone! This post is a little later than usual, but we’ve been traveling in preparation for the upcoming holiday season. Things will be back to normal tomorrow.
This site exists to promote the future of the entertainment industry, and to do that we need input from people like you and your entertainment-loving friends. If you have any questions about the content in this article, or if you have an artist you would like to see featured on this blog, please contact james@haulix.com. We can also be found on Twitter and Facebook.
Every week I speak with at least one young writer who believes the world is their oyster and nothing can stop their rise to the highest heights of the music business. At the same time, I also hear from writers with anywhere from two to ten years of experience who, despite being extremely talented, have been unable to land a full time role in the entertainment business. If anything, they have a handful of freelance gigs or perhaps even something part time, but generally speaking neither of these situations provide enough financial support for the individual to have only one job, let alone plan for the future.
You can hopefully piece this together on your own, but all of those veteran writers mentioned above started their pursuit of full time industry employment with little to no doubt in their mind that success would come in time. Most probably underestimated how long it would take to find that success, but their drive to chase their dreams was present nonetheless. The story I know best is my own, so allow me to further illustrate this point with a tale from my own journey to the job I have now.
I started writing about music during the fall of my Sophomore year at Ferris State University. By spring, my passion had lead me to leave the site that gave me my start and step out on my own, which began with a blogspot URL and quickly turned into the webzine I still help run to this day, Under The Gun Review. Our first year was amazing, and by the time we hit our one-year anniversary we had already begun averaging at least 25,000 uniques a month. For a kid from a town with less than 3000 people, I thought we were on top of the world, and I soon began telling my parents that blogging would be the thing that eventually helped me find a career in music. They were cautious, as I probably should have been, but they supported me because they knew I was passionate about my work.
By spring 2010 I was getting ready to graduate from Ferris and blogging as much as I possibly could every day of the week. UTG was bringing in over 100,000 uniques a month and I was still confident that someone would soon call to offer me a role in the industry. Much to my surprise, my phone didn’t ring. In fact, no one contacted me through any means of communication with a job offer. Even the jobs I had applied to did not get back to me. Like millions of college graduates every year I was standing on the other side of an investment in my future worth tens of thousands of dollars with absolutely no leads in the industry I had spent nearly half a decade preparing to enter.
The first few post-college months are still a bit of a blur, but I know for a fact I wasn’t working in music. I had a few phone calls with companies, and even landed an interview with a label based out of Chicago with a reputation for ‘running the streets,’ but after being offered $25,000/year to move to one of the largest cities in America I knew my search was far from over. I still wrote, however, and that was the one constant I had in my life. I also had a series of horrible jobs, including a temporary role as a male secretary for a company specializing in products that were made for woodworking factories, as well as a holiday season spent as an assistant manager at Hot Topic. Both of those roles felt like a soul-draining, time eating hell, but I needed money and a flexible schedule in order to keep chasing my dream.
By the time I finally heard from an upstanding company who wanted me to work full time in music I had been out of college for nearly a year. The job was a 1000 miles from home, but it offered benefits and enough income to support myself, which was far more than what any other company had offered me up to that point. This includes when I foolishly sold my site, UTG, to the people at BuzzMedia (they never paid me at all, but that is a story for another time). My parents were cautiously optimistic, but they helped me get a car and gave me enough cash to stay afloat until my first paycheck came in. My friend Kate, a Boston native who lived 30 miles from my new gig, offered my her couch.
At this point in life I felt like I had finally made it. I thought I had found a company I could call home for years to come and that there was no reason to worry any longer about whether or not the music industry would welcome me into its elite club of full-time professionals. As it turns out, however, that assumption could not have been more misguided. Within six months of starting my new job the company hit financial troubles, which meant many employees were not paid on time. The business was technically a startup, which are notorious for experiencing temporary problems with funding, so at first I didn’t pay much mind to the fact my check came three days late. Then it happened again. And again. The fourth time these troubles arose during my first year they decided to furlow everyone, which is worse than not getting paid on time because it means the company doesn’t technically have to pay you the money they already owe.
You might be asking your monitor: Why would this guy stay at a job with so many ups and downs?
The answer is actually quite simple: It was still the music business.
Ever since the rise of Napster the one lesson engrained in the mind of every music business student is that times are rough and the industry is far more cutthroat now than ever before. As a result, myself and countless others have put up with companies treating us poorly because we felt it was some kind of twist ‘rite of passage that would separate the truly passionate from those looking for fame and/or fortune. I stayed with that first company for years despite knowing their almost constant money troubles, and the only reason I did that was because I thought those kinds of ups and downs were commonplace in a world where digital piracy was rampant, The truth, however, was that I was working for a failing business that did not know how to save their sinking ship even though they had accrued more than $30 million in funding over five years. They did not care about me as much as they did covering their own asses, but I did not realize that until the job I have now (here at Haulix) came around.
Once I entered negotiations with Matt Brown, the founder of Haulix, I knew something was different. Matt wasn’t obsessed with the bottom line, nor did he have an office far bigger than he would ever need. In fact, he had no real office at all. Haulix was a lean business from day one, putting all money into the product and spending as little as possible everywhere else. They didn’t even have a marketing person until I came on board, and knowing the industry average for such roles I can tell you they got me for a steal. I did not mind though, because money has never been a huge motivating factor for me. I was just happy to have a job with a company I not only knew very well inside and out, but also one I believe in. I believe in Haulix. I think what we’re doing is both necessary and incredibly important, which gives me a great sense of pride in everything I do. That is worth more than any annual salary elsewhere could afford, and it’s something I have probably told Matt I am grateful for more times than either of can count.
The reason I tell you all of this is because, like you, I was once confident the music industry would notice my talent and welcome me with open arms. As I grew older I realized the only way to get on the radar of anyone in the business is to take matters into your own hands, and even then there is no guarantee you will find the type position that you desire. Even if you do, it may take some time before the opportunity presents itself, and you can believe me when I say the wait for that time will feel like centuries. The key to making it through is a combination of drive, passion, and patience. You have to keep working, whether you are being paid or not, and you have to keep believing in yourself. When it feels like the world does not care and no one is listening, use the passion such an idea ignites in your soul to create something so compelling it demands the full attention of strangers. Whatever you do, just keep going. Keep fighting. Keep dreaming. Keep chasing the goals you have had since your teenage years until that fire inside you dies, and then move on to the next thing that captures your imagination. Just as sharks can never stop swimming without dying you cannot stop chasing your dreams without running the risk of living life unfulfilled. That, in my opinion, is a fate far worse than death.
Keep your head up, dreamers. You are not alone. To quote the band Vanna, “I believe in you if you believe in me.”
James Shotwell is the blog editor and social media coordinator for Haulix. He’s also the founder of Under The Gun Review and the host of the Inside Music podcast. His work has appeared on numerous websites and in several major publications, including Alternative Press, AbsolutePunk, and Rolling Stone. He tweets a lot, and would love it if you followed him on Twitter.
