Try Hard
When working on a release there’s a big job, one that has nothing to do with writing, composing, mixing etc. Telling people about it so that when it comes out there’s an audience to listen.
It’s not easy, and 99.99% of the time it’s a task that has no positive result, especially in the music world. There are just millions of others clamoring for attention.
The other problem is that this task falls on manipulating social media, which now days is just a toxic dumpster fire of people trying to prove just how how horrible humanity can be.
So, given that promotion is useless and involves social media, I’m just not going to be doing any of that any more. I’ve given up Twitter, Facebook and if you follow me on Instagram, you probably notice i just share random photos that are really quite pointless, but I digress.
I’ve also just noticed something lately, there’s just too much promotion happening. This isn’t to say there’s an inherent problem with that, there isn’t, and if it works, then excellent, but it doesn’t work for me.
I’ve tried doing everything “by the book”; emails, Facebook posts, Twitter campaigns, released through a label, none of it actually moved the needle in terms of growing an audience. I decided that with this new EP, I wasn’t going to do any of that again.
When this project started a very long time ago, it was just me posting MP3 files then letting a few friends know about it and they would listen, and that was it. It was simple and easy and I didn’t have to spend cycles wondering how to promote this project to grow the audience.
Going back to a time where I can just work on the music, completing a project and then uploading it somewhere is really what I like doing, it’s where I find the most satisfaction (finishing a project). If people discover it, then I’m super happy about that and am quite grateful, but I just can’t see myself investing any more time, resources or energy in what really comes down to achieving outside validation for this project. I felt like a “try hard”, and that is a very uncomfortable thing, for me.
I will just continue to contribute to the noise and find the satisfaction of finishing a project and let the rest of everything else that goes along with making music not be my problem. I’ve got enough stuff on my plate anyway.
