Me and the Visibility Challenge
When I embarked upon reentering music with the objective of recording and releasing three albums, I had realistic expectations about how popular my music would become. While I am certainly hopeful that my music resonates with as many people as possible, I am not expecting to “make it” in the sense of high commercial success. I’ve spent the last year and a half educating myself on the music distribution and promotion environment, and I understand the limitations. My genre, electronic music, is a) not mainstream and b) saturated by real and AI-generated content. As of this writing, my streaming and follower counts are quite modest, which is also not good advertising on the streaming outlets.
On top of this, I’m breaking some cardinal rules of music visibility and promotion. Perhaps the biggest: I’m a non-touring musician. A primary method for generating a following is to perform live, engage, and excite people at these venues. Build a buzz and expand upon that live exposure into music streams and sales. Why don’t I tour? Well, a few reasons.
The first is personal - when I met my wife decades ago, I was a full-time cover musician playing mostly in dive bars in a sinking industry by that time. With an early professional career, she was not the type of person to follow me around every night hanging around with drunken people until 2am. We were getting well passed our adolescence. I was also burnt out by that mode of doing music: I had long aspired to perform all-original music in Boston but found myself stuck in the “make money now” treadmill of playing mostly other people’s popular music in cities and towns across New England. Music touring simply doesn’t agree with some lifestyles.
My second reason for not touring is age: I’m an older “new artist.” I don’t really have the eternal Rolling Stones energy to tour at this point (I would argue that some geriatric rock performances are a little sad to watch), and my appearance doesn’t fit the mold of the edgy, twenty-somethings that dominate new independent artist media. I am normally in bed by 9pm. Hell, I don’t even have the obligatory arm tats.
My third reason for not touring is that my music (in my opinion), is not suited for live performance. While many purely electronic artists, including several of my favorites, pack arenas and stadiums with screaming fans doing it, I personally don’t want to stand on a stage and just turn knobs and push buttons like a DJ. It is not performative enough for me after the physicality and instrumental aspects of my old night club days. Again, all due respect to other artists who are thriving in it. I could play a few keyboard parts along with a live drummer, bass player and all the pre-recorded keyboard tracks and modulate those tracks during concerts, but this is just something that doesn’t interest me.
Touring is often used to generate a social media connection base and audience. I’ve begun with a very modest one. During my professional office career, LinkedIn served as a buttoned-down (colleague) connection tool, but those connections are limited for converting to music and aesthetic interests. I have a Facebook base of several hundred people (small scale by artist standards), and I did leverage that for some nibbles on my streaming music, but it’s not exactly thriving. Due to cost and level of effort limitations, I’ve not penetrated some of the younger social media sources: I have no video and few photos, and therefore a very weak TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram presence from a practical SM standpoint. I will need to pony up and engage professionals to support this in the future, but it’s considered a big no-no in public promotion to be short on audiovisual media. Oh well, TBD….
Then there is the price of not already being popular: It’s common knowledge among independent musicians that the algorithms that rank and push songs from Spotify to Apple Music and others are stacked toward songs that ARE viral, against those which are not.
Not to be deterred despite these factors, I engaged a handful of vendors that pitch and promote indie artist music to Spotify, SiriusXM Radio, and other DSPs. Thus far, the SVP of a pitching company considered my music worth of SiriusXM with no bites yet, and Whatever That Was, the one uptempo song on my album, was accepted for a curated, JBL bass test playlist on Spotify for rotation in October. I continue to pursue placements for my material in a very big world. Down the road, I will explore placement for “sync” options - synchronizing music with visual media like TV, film, commercials, video games, etc. - and background music, as well as music therapy applications.
For now, I need to let my music speak for itself. At least I am realistic. Onward.