i’m at peace with the harsh truth: whatever i do, i won’t be able to market myself and whatever i release will be just a tiny grain of sand (with 10 monthly listens per month at most) in the beach of today’s hypersaturated and aggressively marketed music scene, or rather a landfill of mediocre turd polished and promoted to the hell and back.
i’m fairly confident regarding my output, but i will never be able to market myself.
it’s not because i’m ashamed of “pushing” it. i believe it’s a “proper job” to swim through this friggin valley of pain. i will never find the energy to shoot a video, edit it, color correct it, post it, share it myself (even though i did those professionally as a dayjob for almost a decade) let alone sending demos to tens of labels (which mostly try to sell you their PR package nowadays).
(also f*** submithub)
i know some people that handle their own PR and trying to breakthrough, are spending 4x more time into this compared to their music. i don’t have the time (or the luxury, meaning money and bills that pay themselves) to do this. i don’t have the budget to hire someone else to do this. i just accepted the unpleasant fact of not being able to reach the surface on this ocean of noise. i know i’ll sink, and i’m okay with it.
this all sounds doom and gloom but, the moment i accepted this, i was super relieved. i produce for myself now, and i just release my own stuff so that my family, a couple of close friends, and maybe some fine people here can access them conveniently. if i’m able to play a couple of gigs in London every year, that would already be much more than what i asked for. if i can make 10 strangers dance to my tracks (if ever, let alone per year), i’d call it a solid win. the world and most of the people living on it are already fubar, so i’m keeping my sanity by setting the bar very very low. so low that it almost doesn’t matter whether i can jump over it.
sorry i’m not presenting this as an advice. i just wanted to share how i cope with it.
I really appreciate the perspective, it all sounds valid to me.
I can really relate to everything you said, and this sentiment specifically. some of my actual tactile art that had the best offers, I kept because I was attached to the work and it was too difficult for me to price - other artwork for various reasons, I gave away, also (at times) at my own peril. This has been an issue that has come up many times in my life, for me self promotion is only one side of the coin.
I really wanted to make sure that people heard it, but didn’t want to just peddle it anywhere with hardly any reason to.
I mean, sure, it might be the greatest thing I’ve ever made- a rare mixture of the eclectic feeling of Aphex Twin’s most notable works, while still comfortably being dreamy like Boards of Canada’s best work.
My friends who’ve heard it have become too nervous to look me in the eye. Even people that don’t really care for electronic music have said that its their favorite release of music. Which certainly feels great, but that doesn’t mean anything if you don’t have a means of sharing the knowledge of the release.
I even tried creating a promo code: “Fake”(for 30% off) in hopes that it might help promote the release.
I loved the acoustics of a particular kitchen in an apartment in Boston, but they made me live in the apartment for a year before I’d be allowed to record there- so I had to recoup some of the expenses
I like the sound of spammy, rhymes with Sammy, the name of my grandfathers pig. Both of which have passed now albeit the pig a very long time ago. It also rhymes with shammy which is a misappropriation of the French ‘chamois’ for cloth. Which is a pig in a cloth, if ever did see one. And I don’t think I ever did.
