As the world becomes more interconnected, we have the opportunity to both cooperate and compete with absolutely everyone on the planet.
While the possibilities are endless, the stakes keep rising and the attention economy becomes ever more relevant. As it gets more and more important to catch people’s attention, it also becomes harder and harder to do so.
I can tell you from 2 years of learning about algorithms and how to win at social media, it’s a death trap. I’m not saying no one should do it, but it’s a waste of energy more often than not.
Trying to make it big on social media doing what you love will lead you to slowly despise what you are doing. Trying to monetize just for the sake of monetizing is a full time job except that there’s no guarantee of a payoff.
In the end, it’s not all that different from meme coins, it’s a gamble except instead of gambling your money, you gamble time and energy.
If you think it’s for you, go for it!
Otherwise, I think “having a social media presence” is more than enough, and that presence doesn’t need to be work, as I am discovering.
My new approach to social media is to make the things I want to make and share the parts that are fun to share in the best way I am prepared to share them.
That means instead of hiding my music for some elusive release date far in the future, I’m sharing demo quality work and slowly improving upon it, and giving glimpses into the process until I have something more polished. I’m studying different skills in public, from guitar scales, to DAWS to video editing to learning photo settings.
I guess I’ve been convinced by artists of the past that the air of mystery was a vital component for an artist, but just like the myth that artists have to be miserable to make great art, I’m calling bullshit. It’s about how inspired it feels.
And so every day I ask myself “What do you want to create?” And I look at some options.
There are a few riffs I want to turn into a song…
A few songs I want to try recording…
I want to get comfortable with looping music…
I could make a video of an existing song…
Or a short video and add some music afterwards…
Or today, I looked at my YouTube channel and said “I could make better thumbnails than these!
And so I spent a few hours testing things out and came out with these:
The music was made around 2010-2012 and recording in 2019. There’s naturally a nostalgic feel to it for me and some people have called the music nostalgic so without realizing it I went for an effect that made the videos look like old photos.
I wanted a consistent theme for the videos so once I found something that worked I used it across all the videos.
Then I made a canvas background for my songs up on Spotify. It’s a video so you’ll have to go check it out but it’s a similar nostalgic effect
I spent a long time trying to figure out the image for YouTube shorts, and I’m not too satisfied with them but YouTube shorts only allow you to use an image from the video itself and add very simple text with limited fonts
The concept is “Jams and Dreams” because most of my shorts are either jams or dreams, with dreams being something I recorded on the spot, a flicker of inspiration and made a video for in the same day, and jams being highlights from a livestream I did and added some effects or simple editing.
I guess maybe I will make the text a little bit smaller so it’s not as overwhelming because the font isn’t all that beautiful.
So I spent all day “branding” but it didn’t really feel like branding because all I did was try to develop my taste in visual aesthetics and shared the result. Kinda felt more like leveling up my art game.
I’ll keep building my social media presence like this, doing whatever inspires me each day and sharing it wherever most applicable. It seems to have killed my chances of blowing up overnight , but those were almost non-existent and unsustainable anyway, and I’ve noticed people respect me a lot more when I respect myself which can only be a good thing.
Please check out the songs and follow my music channel if you haven’t already!