After another wild and unpredictable year, the music industry at large is taking a break, and you know what? You should too. You deserve it.
It’s finally happening. After 12 long months of pandemics, pipeline issues, discovery algorithms, and more social media content than anyone cares to think about, the annual music industry slow down is upon us. For the next three weeks, the best majority of the music industry will be on some form of vacation. As one industry contact put it, “Ask yourself: Is this a December issue, or is it a January email?”
Hopefully, news of the slowdown brings a feeling of relief. But we know that’s not the case. You still have things to accomplish! Other people may be taking a break, but you have something to do! Your to-do list is long, and you will finish it before the holidays. At least, that’s what you keep telling yourself.
Or maybe you still have to work. My team and I will be working through the holidays, as will many other industry professionals. There will be fewer meetings and fewer emails, of course, but the wheels of entertainment never fully come to a halt. There are always support tickets to answer, databases to update, press releases to prepare, songs to write, etc.
Whatever the case, it’s fine to feel the way you feel. The holidays are difficult for everyone, But they are a time for the rest of reflection, even if you have to work! Over the next few weeks, there will be things you cannot accomplish. There will be people you cannot reach, contact you cannot complete, and calls that go on returned. Good! Let those people rest. They’ve earned it.
Please do what you need to survive and scratch that creative edge, but I must urge you to approach the next three weeks with an increased focus on the rest. Make time to think about the things you’ve accomplished and the things you are working toward at the moment. You probably can’t believe all that you accomplished over the last 12 months. You’ve done so much, and you’ve yet to do so many things that will be incredible, no doubt, but right now, your power is limited. Take that as a sign and rest. Do that in whatever form is best for you, but walk away from work. You’ve earned it.
The holiday season is upon us, and in no time at all businesses across the industry will go dark so employees can celebrate this time of year with their loved ones. It’s a beautiful thing, especially in an industry notorious for long hours, but for a few professionals it’s also maddening. Allow me to explain…
While many music professionals are able to setup out of office replies for the holidays there are still bloggers, podcasters, and a wide variety of media people in between with audiences who demand a constant feed of fresh content. When the industry goes dark for the holiday these poor souls (including yours truly) find themselves clicking through every pitch they receive in hopes of discovering something worth writing about. More often than not they settle on additional editorial content, generally in the form of telling you the best stuff you might have missed, and they pray it’s enough to keep clicks rolling in while the snow falls.
There is a saying in journalism that you should seek to tell stories you would want to read. If you should find yourself writing something you have no interest in reading it is highly likely those who find that article will feel the same. As much as fresh stories in a feed can be good for business is it really worth whatever investment of time they require if next to no one cares to read them?
People care less about entertainment news around the holidays than they do practically any other time of year. Don’t take this personally though, as it is true for virtually every publication. Entertainment and entertainment news is the distraction we fill our days with when doing things we would otherwise avoid if we could, like work. Holidays are communal escapes, offerings friends and family the chance to do things they want to do, therefore lowering the need for distractions.
To put it another way, the demand does not exist because the need for something that brings joy is met through other (arguably far more important) means.
This year, I want to challenge all music writers out there to try something different. Rather than beat your head against your keyboard in between clicking refresh on your RSS feeds just try and take a little time to experience what the rest of the world does this time of year. Schedule tweets and make whatever necessary posts you feel you must make to maintain appearances, but as soon as that is done shutdown your computer and experience this thing call life. Talk to the people who support you and tell them of your vision for the new year. Ask people what they have been up to with their time, and make it a point to really listen to their words. Be present, and remember you will never have two holiday seasons that work the same way. The people around you now may not be there next year, so don’t take a minute for granted.
This won’t be easy, but I have good news: The music industry will still be here when you get back. I know you will feel like you are slipping behind, but there is rarely a single headline in the last ten to fourteen days of the new year that drastically impacts the music landscape. You know this as well as I do, so quit lying to yourself and accept that it is okay to spend a little time offline. Who knows? It might even do you good to unplug.
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.
