Whoops…
…looks like I forgot to write blog posts announcing my last couple of singles! Let’s be honest, though: you weren’t relying on blog posts for single awareness (insert Singles Awareness Day joke). You know it; I know it; the mailman knows it. But that begs an important question: if not for announcing “news,” what exactly are these blog posts for?
Shit man, I don’t know. It’s probably just a thing I do because I like writing and crave attention.
Seriously, though, I did take a bit of an intentional hiatus from posting after realizing that my readership is not super high. It’s not that the effort-to-return ratio is too skewed or anything; these posts don’t usually take me more than ten or fifteen minutes to write, and if even a few people take the time to read, then it’s all gravy, baby! I satisfy my need to creatively write, you receive a little bit of INSIDER INFO and a lot bit of INSANITY - everybody walks away happy. Even so, though, I can’t help but wonder if there’s maybe some formula to posting I haven’t cracked, or a better way to market the posts themselves, or…something.
These are the circular, endless musings of an indie musician in 2023.
But, musings aside, what’s new?!
Well, I have, in fact, dropped a bunch of new singles over the course of the year. If you’re here for a REACTION VIDEO (ZOMG!) to how those singles have fared in the wild, well…you’re out of luck. But I’m happy to provide some quick thoughts with my fingers. Mmm, finger-thoughts. Feel free to go check out the streaming numbers for yourself on Spotify if you want the hard data; as far as my qualitative analysis goes, though, my biggest takeaway-slash-surprise-that-maybe-shouldn’t-have-been-a-surprise is that the straightforward, easily classifiable songs have performed way better than the, uh, more challenging ones.
Spending too much time staring at the numbers is a dangerous game. But I’m a dangerous man.
Those challenging songs - Bad Ideas, Flowers For A Rainy Day, and even Get Lost, I guess - are a lot harder to classify by genre and find easy comparison points for (ie “This song would be great for fans of ____!”). Why does that matter, you ask? Well, those tools are the only real way to market this shit. To be honest, I think Bad Ideas and Flowers are among my catchiest and most accessible songs, and yet they struggled to get any traction at all. I thought Bad Ideas, my pop-rap jam, might appeal to fans of Lil Dicky, Charlie Puth, etc., and I thought Flowers, a piano rocker, would be easy to sell to the Ben Folds and Something Corporate crowd. Nope. Then again, according to Spotify only ~1k-2k people in the world have heard those songs, and it seems pretty unlikely that my perfect audience just happened to be part of that tiny subset, listened, and was like “I hate this.” And if I accept that as true, then I just need to…get better at ad-targeting (::sigh::).
We’ll talk more about the full album later, but this sneak peek of the cover art is your reward for reading. See? You get prizes!
On the other hand, Works of Art and Chimney Rock, two lovelorn acoustic-bro sad-ballads, have done great numbers. The cynical (or business savvy?) move would be to start mass-producing more songs in that genre, but I’m no cynic, and nobody calls me business savvy and gets away with it! I’ll keep plugging along, rapping when I feel like it, genre-hopping like Dylan going electric (that’s kind of a bad example, but I can’t think of any notorious genre-hoppers off the top of my head), and releasing whatever I please without any thought for what might best perform.
Analysis over. Thank you for reading.
Up next: potentially one more single, just because I did the art already and I think it’s cool af, and then a full-blown album release, with vinyl and everything! And after that? My god, after that there could be anything at all.