Filed under: advice, art, music | Tags: #4, Garage Band, MySpace, Queens, Reverb Nation, singer songwriter, strategy
This week I found out I had reached the #4 spot on the Singer Songwriter charts in Queens. This kind of success doesn’t come around very often in my life so I thought I’d share what I did to make it happen.
You know what I did?
Absolutely nothing.
Not one single thing.
Last week, I got a notice that, since I hadn’t logged on in so long, Reverb Nation was going to suspend my account. So I logged in. That’s all I did. I didn’t upload new songs. I didn’t change my profile pics. I didn’t upload a video. I didn’t enter a contest or message my “fans”. But a few days after I logged back in, I got the notice that I was in the top ten of singer songwriters in Queens. However this achievement happened, it had absolutely nothing to do with me or any action I took.
In all these decades of making various kinds of art, this random ranking is pretty much how it goes. Something out of the blue kicks off a good thing and I get a lot of congratulations for something I really didn’t do anything for.
What I did do, starting about fifteen years ago was upload some songs I’d written and recorded, to a website. Or maybe even more accurately, I put some songs up on several websites. My MySpace account was called Emily’s Experiments and I put some songs there that I’d been messing around with on my brand new Garage Band software. I put some songs up on Reverb Nation too because I wanted to be able to direct people to a single song, linked from my brand new blog. (That was this blog, 15 years ago.) I thought maybe all these things would be a big internet hit but it didn’t go that way. It almost never does.
But my strategy for creations on the internet has developed into just putting up as much stuff as possible and then waiting. I’ve tried doing more, of course. I’ve tried big promotions, new platforms, new pics, whatever marketing whizbangs I can imagine and none of that stuff has been nearly as successful as just having a lot of stuff out there and then having someone with more power or followers link to it, or something of that nature.
The New York Times linked to a line from my Hamlet Project back in May of 2022 and my little Hamlet Project and its 2934 lines/entries got a bunch of traffic for a few weeks. A little video I made for Tik Tok did no numbers there but when I put it up on YouTube it went quickly to a thousand views, largely because they’d just started a new program for extra short videos. I’ve had other videos that did nothing on YouTube or Facebook and then they took off on Tik Tok. My strategy has become to put stuff up in as many places as possible and just see what happens.
Is this a reasonable strategy?
Well – I’ve been on Reverb Nation for fifteen years and usually I rank something like 268 and then one day I open an email and discover I’m number four? I mean, it’s cool and all – but also, it took fifteen years. That timeline doesn’t work for most people. Also, I’m back down to number eighteen now that things have calmed down a bit.
The one thing I may really have going for me is that I am a stubborn cuss who never quits making art and never quits hoping something will stick to the wall. And the thing about that strategy is, every fifteen years or so, it works.
This post was brought to you by my patrons on Patreon.
They also bring you the podcast version of the blog.
It’s also called Songs for the Struggling Artist
You can find the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Every podcast features a song at the end. Some of those songs are on Spotify, Apple Music, my website, ReverbNation, Deezer, Bandcamp and Amazon Music.
*
Want to be there for all the ups and downs?
Become my patron on Patreon.
Click HERE to Check out my Patreon Page
Or you can subscribe to my Substack
*
If you liked the blog and would like to give a dollar (or more!) put it in the PayPal digital hat. https://www.paypal.me/strugglingartist
To help me pay off my trip to Crete, donate on Kofi – ko-fi.com/emilyrainbowdavis
Leave a Comment so far
Leave a comment
Songs for the Struggling Artist 