[This is an epically long post – over 3000 words – it ought to be at least two or three posts, but I’m far too busy writing a PhD to give this the kind of attention it needs and deserves in terms of editing, tidying and whatnot. So make of it what you will… that said, it may be helpful if you’re trying to get your head round the various arguments about Spotify]

With the recent increased scrutiny placed on Spotify thanks to their tendency to give millions of dollars to berks who give a platform to conspiracy theorists and transphobes, it has also amongst my musician friends reignited the discussion about Spotify’s economics. Something on which I’ve been pretty vocal over time. So I’m going to try and summarise that here, and then offer some thoughts on streaming and why the argument against Spotify is not an argument against streaming. And therefor why I hope that any collapse in Spotify’s position in the market (it’s WAY too early to make that call, but we can hope, right?) would possibly offer us a chance to rethink the economics of streaming.

So, Spotify’s problems, summarised – Spotify began by realising that they needed two things to get an edge over everyone else in the race to be the first ‘all you can eat’ streaming service – a catalogue and a platform. The catalogue they kickstarted by doing equity deals with the Major labels and the platform they got (I can’t find the reference for how this worked, but I definitely remember it being talked about at the time!) by – I think – doing a deal with 7 Digital who built the first version of Spotify in exchange for the being the exclusive ‘shop’ within Spotify – yup, when Spotify first started, you could buy most of the music that they played inside the browser window. So the idea that Spotify pointed you to a sales opportunity and had no mobile app made it a very different proposition with a very different set of affordances. At that point, the ‘Spotify is more like radio’ argument was a whole lot more compelling that it is now. Which is not to say that there aren’t millions of Spotify users who use it like radio, just that the number of prior experiences and economic transactions that it has subsumed is way, way more complex than it was in Year 1. (it’s worth noting that Spotify weren’t the first to try the same thing – an almost identical app called Datz was built, and had a press launch but it turned out their attempts to get the majors on side involved a whole lot of lying to each of their negotiators who rather awkwardly actually talked to each other ahead of the launch, and the whole thing collapsed spectacularly).

As Spotify evolved into some kind of ‘total music solution’, removing the sales platform not long after the deal with 7 Digital ran out, and adding a mobile app and offline storage as soon as they could, their economic model (which made sense in relation to radio, but was problematic in terms of cannibalising sales revenue) didn’t evolve. It just got more opaque. News emerged of bands and territories and labels negotiating different deals, of Spotify lobbying to reduce statutory royalty payments for streams, and despite having been to at least three talks where it was explained in depth, I still couldn’t tell you in any great detail how Spotify calculates who gets what. However, there were winners – it became a new form of ‘viral’ success to have a playlist hit, one track that landed on a massively subscribed playlist and made good money for the artist. What was also apparent, perhaps like radio in this respect, was that there was minimal lateral movement from playlists to wider awareness of the artist. Spotify itself didn’t really engender that kind of audience building.

Which brings us to the problem of communication – Spotify for a long time gave no analytic detail to artists. Following a campaign by, amongst others, Cellist Zoë Keating, they eventually made some available, but it still wasn’t all that easy to access depending on which aggregator you used to get your music on the platform, and there was still no way to converse with your audience. That aspect of fan/audience/community building has always remained well out of reach of the platform itself. There were many stories of artists leveraging Spotify to build audiences, and for those who owned their entire catalogue and publishing, the economics were in some cases quite reasonable.

However, the simple fact remained that the purpose of Spotify, economically speaking, was built around the re-leveraging of IP/value in existing catalogue. Getting people to pay again to listen to works they’d already bought. For the Major labels, almost all the value they have is in music we already love. They are looking at a humungous volume of songs and albums that we already love, that have already made, collectively, billions of dollars in sales and royalties, that have been milked via reissues, reformatting and remastering for decades, that can now without any manufacturing at all, be turned into a steady trickle of income that collectively amounts to a hell of a lot of money, especially if you have equity in the company, get a preferential royalty rate AND a shareholder payout. You get paid for your own work, and a cut of the profit on everyone else’s, as well as – I assume – a much deeper access to analytic detail across the entire economy.

So bands that had effectively made all their money and for the last couple of decades were making extra on licensing and CD reissues, suddenly had a way of not only reselling, but monetising usage. Experience pricing is what it’s called in some circles. You’re not paying for a product, you’re paying to access an experience. Paying by the amount of time (or, crucially, the number of times) you access a particular piece or song. It’s notable that Spotify pay per play, not by minute of play – this has both increased the number of tracks on an ‘average’ album considerably, and shortened the length of pop songs too. Affordances, eh?

So, there’s essentially no meaningful way to contact your listening audience on Spotify, the money only works at scale, in an economic model that was designed to leverage back catalogue value not recoup recording and marketing budgets, the calculations were opaque and favoured the majors (meet the new boss, same as the old, coked-up, wanker boss) and throw in a few scandals around fake artists and arms dealing and you’ve got yourself one toxic fucking stew of wholly untenable ethical wrongness. Except because of the deals with labels, many, many artists were unable to extract their catalogue, and because of the near-monopoly Spotify had on the conversation around streaming (if not the entire market – they’re the biggest player, but Apple, Amazon and to a lesser extent Tidal have a chunk too, as well as some other smaller players) a lot of artists were terrified to pull out and were in no position to actually talk honestly with their audience about what was going on and why the economic model was potentially ruinous for their creative endeavours.

As someone who was in control of my entire audience, who knew virality was a ridiculously long shot, didn’t want to make music designed for playlists and NEEDS to talk to his audience, I pulled my music off Spotify almost exactly a decade ago – the basic argument is a fair trade one – the company sucks in every imaginable way, and I didn’t need to have anything to do with it. I also pulled all my music of Amazon and a host of other platforms, and have refused to use either service for the same amount of time.

But, alongside that has been an ever increasing level of frustration with the nature of the argument against Spotify and the way that it becomes a bunch of essentialist garbage about ‘streaming’. I’ve almost certainly stumbled into this particular mess myself on more than one occasion. So let’s talk about streaming.

Spotify’s model uses streaming as its technological foundation, but Spotify is not synonymous with streaming. Streaming at its most basic just means that the file that is being decoded into music is hosted elsewhere. That’s all. To that extent, Bandcamp is also a streaming service – the fact that most of my Bandcamp listening happens through either the web browser or the mobile app is made possible by Bandcamp’s essential nature as being in part a streaming service. That streaming in no way undermines their economic model, in fact it’s pretty integral to it given how easily it makes accessing the deeper recesses of your Bandcamp collection, as well as browsing other new work with a view to buying it.

Where Bandcamp and Spotify diverge in their use of streaming is the economic model around that streaming. On Bandcamp, the music that I’m streaming is either free for me to hear because the band or small label have made it so I can hear it, or it’s music that I’ve bought and I own. And by own I mean it’s mine to access and play over and over again for as long as I want without paying any more money to keep accessing it. I can download the file in as many different formats as I want, play them on any device without interference, and the amount I paid for it in the first place is the only exchange of money needed for that to continue.

In contrast, Spotify sells two things – first of all it rents access to the catalogue – you can either pay for that with time by listening to adverts, or you can pay to remove those ads and have access to it all for a monthly fee. That money you pay doesn’t go directly to whoever you listen to, but it goes into the central pot of Spotify earnings that is then divvied up amongst the rights holders, with the Majors getting their bit first and everyone else getting theirs based on a pecking order and the percentage of the total Spotify streams that their work represents.

What you also get for your money is a cloud of metadata built up around you and your listening habits. Some of it you control –

• playlists,
• bookmarks,
• previously listened to work,
• stuff you’ve favourited,
• curated playlists that you’re subscribed to

and a load that you have less direct control over –

• the content of those curated playlists,
• other data scraped from your social media profiles and traded for the targeting of ads or music promo,
• the ways in which Spotify maps your music community and includes their preferences in what it recommends you listen to,
• and people just buying access to your ears in various ways.

These are all variously super useful or annoying depending on how well you perceive their algorithms to work at finding your taste, and how comfortable you are with their particular way of cataloging and bookmarking the work that feels like your collection.

If you stop paying, or suddenly get super tired of listening to ads and decide to delete your account, your access is gone. No matter how much you’ve previously paid, you no longer have access to that music. You are only ever renting access to that music, and there’s no point at which you have paid ‘enough’. No point at which it becomes yours beyond the walls of the service. There are myriad unlicensed ways of extracting music from Spotify, easiest being just recording the music as it plays into a DAW, but there’s absolutely no way of taking your catalogue of work elsewhere or even transferring the metadata in any useful way. (it’s worth artists being a little more aware of this when they get frustrated at people not quitting Spotify soon enough – it’s a big break to drop all of that metadata and start again elsewhere, especially if it’s a completely different economic model you’re suggesting!)

So what you’re paying for is no longer about ownership of music. It’s about experiencing music, and you pay based on what you listen to.

It’s super important to realise how hard – impossible, even – it is to usefully compare these two ways of paying for music in the short term. So much of the commentary around the economics of Spotify fails to understand who is massively advantaged in experience pricing and how much of the way we’ve always listened to music is now suddenly economically active as well as generating highly valuable metadata, in ways it has never been before. The reasons for this I’ve already explained. But what’s also ignored is how the fact that people who keep listening keep paying you impacts the longer term economics of any given track or album.

So what’s the big deal? The experience economy surely extends the economic lifespan of recorded music way beyond the extremely short shelf-life of the vast majority of music under the old system (especially when we factor in just how epically limited shelf-space was in record shops before digitsiation made it possible to access the vast majority of the history of recorded music via some means or other).

The problems for me are as follows. The first one is Spotify’s expressed and repeated action that demonstrates a desire to pay as little as is humanly possible for the rights to music. There’s no ‘how much do we need to comfortably run this service while still making the lives of musicians better?’ – the basic economics is transnational capitalism as its most fucked up, with opaque bilateral deals, lobbying and a bunch of shit that’s basically fraudulent, before we even get to the justification for giving $100M to fucking Joe Rogan to spout bullshit.

So their payment system, which works for the Majors as a way of leveraging extra money on music that people already love, makes it exceedingly difficult to justify the even modest recording and promotional budgets on which the vast majority of indie music industry machinery is built. Let’s not kid ourselves that being an indie musician has ever been easy, or a place where you’re likely to do well. But in an economic field where there are myriad ways of funnelling money into the pockets of those most in need of it, Spotify fails. If your response to this is ‘ah well, that’s how capitalism works’, then I wish you all the ill-effects capitalism has to offer. I want better than that for the world, so it’s a piss-poor excuse.

Secondly, in order to keep you wedded to their ecosystem and keep you paying, Spotify stays as an intermediary between you and your audience, making direct communication super difficult, and/or expensive. Sure you can take out ads and target your previous listeners, but there’s no reason that should be the case in a service that’s already made billions out of your work being on there. Again, capitalism isn’t a good enough excuse for shitting on broke musicians.

Thirdly, absolutely no thought has been given to how communities form around music beyond the aggregating of massive listening data. Which works to connect you with more music in the system, but it doesn’t allow human relationships to cross-over into relationships of mutual discovery. The trust relationship Spotify is built to enhance is our trust in its recommendation engine, not our trust in each other to find and talk about music, and certainly not our trust as artists in our audience to do that. This isn’t an even vague part of Spotify’s remit, but from where I am, fostering human relationships based on care, conversation, trust and accumulated experience and wisdom is vital to every context in which I’ve ever found out about music, from hanging out with friends through to what I learn from my own subscribers on Bandcamp.

So how does this reflect on streaming? It doesn’t. There’s nothing inherently bad about streaming. There are streaming services that pay masses more than Spotify does. There are other possible economic models that make experience pricing way more meaningful and viable, and there are ways to enable fan communities to function as communities rather than an algorithm-generated blob of metadata.

There are experiments with new ways of doing this that are worth looking at – Resonate, while not actually functioning in a way that I find useful yet, is a cool and helpful way of thinking about fair trade experience pricing and the transition to ownership. At least one of the bigger streaming companies has suggested it will switch to a model of dividing up what you pay to the people you listen to – no more communal pot to pay for the free/ad streams out of other people’s paid accounts. FairMus seems to be an experiment in this model – it seems like a supremely obvious one to me – I can’t see any decent reason why this wouldn’t be the model from the off, but it’s another reason to hate Spotify. I have no desire for my subscription money to go to making rich people more rich while the broke-ass band I’ve listened to for three hours this week only gets pennies.

I have no innate problem with experience pricing – as a man of a certain age, I am still a fan of ownership, I like the long term implications of buying things on Bandcamp and being able to download them, them being mine, but that’s a cultural thing, not an ethical one. Ownership doesn’t really matter, and I love the fact that experience pricing makes it possible to get paid for people loving your music more. It’s not true at all that the more you pay for something the more you love it – that’s another weird myth that’s totally undone by the number of favourite albums I and many other have that we bought for 50p in a discount bin – but it does make sense that the opposite is possible, that my money is somehow divided up amongst the people I listen to most.

But that’s not the whole picture. There are artists whose music I barely listen to who I still want to give money to for their work. Not by ‘tipping’ them but by buying their work. I actually really enjoy being able to encourage people who make interesting work to keep doing it even when it’s not what I am in a position to listen to all day long. I don’t think that the estates of Miles Davis or Jimi Hendrix or The Beatles  need any more money from me no matter how much time I spent listening to them. With a product-based economy, I’m continually investing in new work, and I can do it at the point of departure for a project, and it’s not spread out over the next few years. So the economic return is front-loaded, but may actually end up being smaller in the long term than via a fairer trade experience pricing model.

So maybe what we need is both. I know a LOT of people who have told me over the years that they use streaming services to predominantly play music they already own. This points to the inherent conservatism of older people’s music taste – genuine new music foragers above the age of maybe 25 are fairly rare as far as I can see. They are a significant chunk of the music buying market, because they have disposable income, but the majority of their peers are spending their money on vinyl reissues or Sonos systems, not investing in new artists. I’m not one to put much extra weight on what ‘the mainstream’ does, simply because it’s never been a place where epically creative work has been the norm, and while it did for years sustain a middle class of performing musicians who are struggling today, that’s as much about the cost of living and the significant relative drop in the cultural standing and meaning of music against other forms of entertainment as it is any internal collapse in the music industry. If you want to campaign for musicians to live better, your energies are probably best used arguing for rent control and UBI rather than railing against the significantly less impactful internal economic squabbles of the music industry.

So streaming is OK with me, Spotify very much isn’t. Should you use another streaming service? I’ve not yet seen one that interests me as a listener, but I’m really not sure what I’ll do the next time I want to buy an album that isn’t on Bandcamp – I used to shop on Google Play, but as I won’t shop on Amazon and iTunes is a giant ball-ache to use, I’m not sure where I’ll go. It’s getting harder and harder to just buy non-Bandcamp music for a sensible amount. We’ll see where that goes.

If you’ve made it this far, well done – email me and I’ll send you a download code for something lovely on Bandcamp.

As is the way with Internet things, just as it happened with that Joni Mitchell quote a while back, there’s a Vince Gill quote that’s circulating as a meme again after a few years away. The actual quote is apparently from an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in February 2012, and begins ‘I still want to have hit records’, which points to a slightly different set of concerns than the bit that’s circulating.

The quote in the meme is this, “The devaluation of music and what it’s now deemed to be worth is laughable to me. My single costs 99 cents. That’s what a [single] cost in 1960. On my phone, I can get an app for 99 cents that makes fart noises — the same price as the thing I create and speak to the world with. Some would say the fart app is more important. It’s an awkward time. Creative brains are being sorely mistreated.”

Now, remember that this is from 2012 – the streaming economy was in a wholly nascent form, and the idea of railing against a download costing 99¢ seems absurdly quaint in these days of micropayments and disappearing songwriter royalties. Continue reading “More Nonsense Music Economy Quotes, this time from Vince Gill (in 2012!)”

As is usual at this time of year, here’s a selection of my favourite records this year. Thanks to the Bandcamp Friday initiative, I’ve bought more music this year than certainly any time since my late teens, possibly ever. Over 200 albums, in fact. Some of them came via Bandcamp subscriptions (the option to subscribe to an individual artist for a set annual or monthly fee, the same model as the subscription I offer), but many were single album purchases.

These are not the only albums I really enjoyed this year, but a selection of my favourites and the ones I listened to most…

Dishevelled Cuss – Dishevelled Cuss

Pop-punk greatness from one of my favourite guitarists on the planet. Dishevelled Cuss is Sugar to Tera Melos’ Hüsker Dü:

Jasper Hoiby’s Planet B

Jazz with electronics and speech samples from the genius Danish bassist:

Pulled By Magnets – Rose Golden Doorways

Anything Seb Rochford releases is cause for celebration, but Neil Charles’ bass on here is just extraordinary. Doom jazz? Not sure what to call this, but it’s brilliant.

Throwing Muses – Sun Racket

I’ve said quite a few times that I can’t think of another band of their vintage that are making the best music of their careers and doing it without even the vaguest hint to nostalgia. Kristin Hersh is one of the greatest guitarists, songwriters and makers of records of her generation.

Field Music – Making A New World

I bought a LOT of Field Music Music this year, filling in my collection each Bandcamp Friday. This was their new one, and it’s outstanding. The cleverest pop band on the planet, without ever sounding remotely smug.

Beauty Pill – Please Advise

Chad Clark has been making pretty much flawless music for well over two decades. I love following his journey and learning new things from everything he releases. Another absolutely killer mini-album here. He’s a sonic wizard, with some of the best production and arrangement ideas happening anywhere in music right now:

Stillefelt – Stillefelt

three of Birmingham’s (the UK’s?) finest improvisors making absolutely glorious experimental, minimalist, ambient music. Love this so much.

Liz Frencham – Love And Other Crimes

Liz is one of those artists whose self doubt drives them to be better and better. I wish she could hear her music the way we do, but I’m also grateful for the incredible music she makes being just the way she is.

Michael Manring – Small Moments

A new Michael Manring album is cause for an actual party, such is their rarity. But when it’s this good it’s so worth the weight. The absolute master of solo bass, making music that renders the bassness of it utterly irrelevant to the experience of listening to it. Just incredible.

David Binney and Kenny Wolleson – Basu

I think possibly the only club gig I went to this year was David Binney, with Billy Mohler in LA. This album with one of my favourite drummers, Kenny Wollesen, is a glorious slice of jazz, improv and electronica

Azusa – Loop Of Yesterdays

My metal album of the year, Liam Wilson on bass, incredible changes of mood and emotion. Deeply inventive, expressive metal.

Ren Harvieu – Revel In The Drama

I’ve listened to this LOADS this year. I met Ren at UnConvention in Manchester in March, bought her record soon after and absolutely love it. Scott Walker, Tori Amos, Everything But The Girl, and all kinds of other amazing influences combine into something totally beautiful and original

Lobelia – Positive Songs Project 1 and 2

For all it’s horrors, the Pandemic created space for my amazing wife to record some of the best songs of her career. I REALLY need to go back and remix a load of these (don’t mix vocals on headphones, kids, you’ll overdo the reverb something rotten), but this is glorious music.

Hope And Social – S.E.N.T Vol 1

Hope And Social making records by chain letter. Such a great idea and such genius execution.

Billy Nomates – Billy Nomates

Found randomly via a Tweet from somone at 6Music. Post Punk Electronica with some killer bass grooves.

Yvonne Lyon – Growing Wild

I’m unashamedly a MASSIVE Yvonne Lyon fan. Such a great songwriter, and here she digs into the experiences of growing older and wiser.

Colfax – The Jupiter Expeditions

Quite a few of my collaborators in different fields released music this year, and this record by Daniel Berkman is just marvellous – old school electronica with field recordings and vocal samples. Wonderful.

David Torn – Fur/Torn

A solo Torn album on Bandcamp. There ought to be LOADS of these, given how much great music he’s dropped on Soundcloud over the years. But this one is marvellous. One of the most important guitarists in the history of the instrument.

Harry Styles – Fine Line

Obviously not on Bandcamp, but special mention to Harry Styles for making an absolutely killer pop album. The first time I heard Adore You, I was blown away by its brilliance. Love this insane video:

There were other things I really dug this year, other music that I bought that I’ll spend more time with over the coming months and be in love with by this time next year, but for now here’s the Good Stuff that got me through the shittiest of years.

Today is Bandcamp Day – the day that Bandcamp waives their revenue share, giving it all back to the artists and small labels who sell their music on the site.

Bandcamp, in a paragraph: 

For those that don’t know, Bandcamp is the Farmer’s Market of music online. Music and merch from independent artists the world over, in glorious HD formats, with the vast majority of the money going to artists. Counter to pretty much every other digital music business model, they don’t make a penny until we make many, many more pennies than they do. There are no fights to pay musicians less, like the Spotify lawsuits, no attempts to take rights away, or keep musicians away from their listeners. It’s the perfect Fairtrade music platform. It’s also where I host my subscription offering – that’s the best possible way to support what I do and get everything – head to stevelawson.bandcamp.com/subscribe for more on that.

Anyway, I’ve released a few new things for today. The first is one of my favourite projects I’ve ever been involved in. Beautifully Disturbed is a duo live album with trumpeter Bryan Corbett. Bryan is an incredible musician, and a truly brilliant improvisor. I feel deeply inspired every time we play together. Here’s the album – it’s only £2 on Bandcamp, so you can use the rest of your money to buy other things, or you can pay more if you feel so inspired.

Next up, I asked my subscribers which of the three albums I should release from my recent Italian tour, and because the spread was across all three of the albums, I decided to make all three available Pay What You Want. PWYW means you get to decide what you can afford. You can spread your money out across whatever it is that you want to buy. Give it all a listen, and see what grabs you:

There you go. A ton of new stuff from me for your lovely ears.

If you want some recommendations, my bandcamp collection has everything I’ve ever bought there, and will be updated through the day as I buy new things today! I’ll be reinvesting 20% of everything that comes in to me in new music.

A few thoughts on this YouTube subscriber swap thing that’s going around… (in case you’ve missed it a LOT of musicians have been promoting the idea that we should reciprocally follow one another to help reach the 1000 subscriber limit so we can start monetising YouTube channels, and then play each other’s videos on mute to gain revenue) 

FWIW, I’ve been on YouTube for 14 years, have just shy of 2K subscribers, have other videos on there posted by bass accounts that have generated hundreds of thousands of views, but IF I’d been monetising my account from the start (that wasn’t even possible back then – at least a third of my views on there were from before there was ANY money in YouTube), my total number of views would’ve made me significantly less than $500. In 14 years. Maybe a few bucks more if I could’ve persuaded people to watch ads on them.

See, you get paid almost nothing on YT for your music. Like, effectively nothing. You get paid for people watching ads. So you’re asking the people who are watching your videos to spend hours and hours collectively watching bullshit so you can make pennies. If that’s a byproduct of you doing what you do anyway, knock yourselves out. Go for it.

But making ‘content‘ so that you can somehow start from scratch while quarantined to make any money at all through YouTube views, AND trying to get that happening through a network of other people who are also trying to make content and aren’t even following anyone based on whether they actually like what they do??? Are you high? If your understanding of who you are is that you are an artist trying to sell your work, this is not your business.

I get that you’re trying to come up with strategies to make this work at a time when we’re REALLY struggling to stay afloat, but getting people to spend hours watching stuff they aren’t invested in so you can make pennies is not a good use of our time in quarantine. It’s not good economically and it’s not good spiritually, and it’s not even remotely likely to make any sensible money for anyone but Google.

If you already have stuff on YouTube and want to earn some scraps for it, sure get registered for ad revenue. But honestly, it’s not worth anything unless THAT’S YOUR BUSINESS. Like, a full time job. A quick google search suggests that 7 MILLION views a year (it’d be a hell of a production/marketing task to get 1% of that on content you own the copyright on – remember, you won’t get paid for videos of cover versions unless you license/register them, the writer will) will pay you LESS than I make a year from 260 Bandcamp subscribers.

I’ve said it god-knows how many times, the streaming economy has no response to this. The major labels and streaming companies COMBINED initially donated less to help musicians through this than Bandcamp earned for them in one day of waiving their fees and promoting it as a day to help. One day. Rihanna has donated more than her entire industry combined, just because she gives a shit. (Spotify have since announced $10M of matched funding donations to three music-focused charities )

An economic model designed to massively prioritise paying people for already-famous music that doesn’t require a marketing or production budget is never going to be a sustainable ecosystem for a mass of creatives to earn a living. Stop trying to make fetch happen. If you’ve had a viral hit on a playlist or two on Spotify and have made some money, that’s brilliant. I want my friends and colleagues to make money, but it’s not sustainable across the system, and trying to game YouTube with some ‘follow for a follow’ nonsense is not going to suddenly get you all the kind of resilient audience who are willing to watch ads to see your stuff that is needed to make money off this.

Last thing – every person I know who is making SERIOUS money off YouTube (or is using YouTube as a significant part of their marketing funnel to a business that makes money – not the same thing) has studied this stuff to a significant level. They aren’t just great musicians or teachers or gamers or whatever. They are deep into marketing techniques, into the kind of video they need to make to get views, they study click through rates and patterns, interpret YouTube stats about viewer retention, they are constantly tweaking that shit to make it work.

My advice? Make the best art you can. Focus on the art right now. YouTube aren’t throwing anyone a lifeline. Everyone’s at home watching video, and you’re competing with people who’ve been in this game for a decade, have teams and a strategy. Just make great art, and make a case for the people in your audience who REALLY CARE ABOUT WHAT YOU DO and have the means to pay for it to help support it.

Reciprocal follow-me-back strategies have been around since MySpace, and they always suck. They are never pro-art, and result in a bunch of pushy, aggressive people seeming way more popular than their art deserves because they chase the follow-backs, not because they have anything worthwhile to share.

In short, the massive problem with this is that it assumes the the number of followers that it says you have on your YouTube page is more significant than the community of interest that the number is supposed to represent. Follow for a follow is a low-grade simulacrum of an actual community that are invested in what you do and care about it. It represents how many people were needy enough for their own follower count to go up that they would also click yours. You and your art deserve much, much better.

Do your art
Shout about the stuff you love
Invite the people who can afford to to support art – not just your art.
Stay safe.
Wash your hands.