The truth about artist development?
It's bad for business
by Nathan Dohse
During a gold rush, the richest man is the guy selling the shovels. And he doesn't care if you strike gold. In fact, the more you dig, the more shovels you break, and you keep coming back to him for more. Wouldn't it be nice if you could get more people out to your little plot of land digging for the gold with you?There is an entire economy built around your insecurity as an artist.It speaks to you in workshops and webinars. It finds you in your Instagram feed at the exact moment you're wondering why your music isn't connecting. It has a $10K offer for you, a framework, a course, a blueprint. It will tell you the reason your career isn't working is because you haven't built your artist brand yet. It will not tell you the truth, because the truth is bad for business.The truth is this: no amount of ad spend or content can force people to like a song.Before we go any further, we need to establish something that almost nobody talks about: the “music industry” and the “artist development industry” are not the same thing.
It’s an important distinction because of what it means for the artist's role in their own economy. We all know artists don't want to be selling or promoting all the time, and it’s actually best for everyone if they don’t. Artists want to make art and share the art they make with anyone who would gain a meaningful experience from it. When those people start to form into an audience, that audience can be commodified. And the best way to maintain artistic integrity is to put a buffer between that commodification and the creation process.This is how the music industry actually works. The income stream is directly related to the consumption of music in some form. The artist lets other businesses license their art and access the audience in order to sell things. The venue sells the ticket. The label sells records and additional licenses. The streaming platform sells a subscription. Everyone in the music industry only wins when the song wins. Their financial incentive is aligned with yours.The artist development industry makes its money solely from the artist's personal investment. All the coaches, branding consultants, marketing & content strategists, make their revenue from your day job, and what do you have to show for it when their ideas don’t work? Nothing. Their financial incentive is rarely aligned with yours. It is pointed directly at your wallet, and it is most effective when you are uncertain, which is most of the time.You are an artist, not a brand.Traditional branding strives to create a human emotional experience from the purchase of a brand's product or service. An "artist brand” or “personal brand” strives to turn a human emotional experience into a purchase of a product or service.While nuanced, the moment an artist's emotional authenticity becomes the product being sold, they are no longer free to just make the art. Making yourself into a brand doesn't accent your humanity. It commodifies it.Yet, turning the artist into a brand is the key tactic for these gurus and they implement two strategies to do it. First, the Influencer model that targets your ego with vanity metrics. It’s pitched as “they need to fall in love with you as a person before they’re gonna care about your music” and “you need to build a whole world for them to explore” or “lore”. Second is Direct To Consumer/Fan (D2C) models pitched as "actually making money," and “it’s called the music BUSINESS for a reason” targeting your need for consistent income.The "influencer" pitch hinges on vanity numbers that rarely matter to an actual career. It teaches you how to make engaging content that is removed from the music. Your follower count goes up. Your likes and views go up. Even your comments about how funny you are, or how cute you are, or how tragic you are go up. But how many folks go listen to the music? Very few, because the music isn't why they're there in the first place. These strategies work because they can be taught whether the music is good or not. But a true artist's reputation is not built on a personal brand or personality. It is the body of work and the emotional response people have to it. You can’t manufacture that. You have to earn it.In general business practice the direct to consumer funnel is made specifically for brands that sell one or two products or services and don’t need large distribution to produce a profit. In theory this is great for artists and this model seems to work as a direct to fan strategy, creating a funnel to find the "super fan". Subscription channels like Patreon or merch drops are presented by artist development strategists as foundational steps toward a real launch. This is because most people can build a 200-person subscription on people supporting a "starving artist" narrative regardless of whether the art is good, and because those 200 people exist and are paying you, it seems the strategy is a success.The lie is that D2C is a stepping stone to bigger things when in reality it’s just a hamster wheel. You’re running ads and making content to find “super fans” and then being beholden to new output to keep them subscribed. All to barely break even on the cost of the ads, content, and coaching. The people paying aren't actually interested in the art. They're paying for the feeling of supporting someone’s dream.The best gurus teach you both. Build your audience through engaging storytelling or "world building" and then sell subscriptions or products that they will buy because they like you. Some even go so far as to have you selling other products (like influencers do) and consider it being a full time artist. Who wants that?With these strategies these bad actors can manufacture moderate outcomes without any one liking the music. But both require constant output with little time for creativity, and in order for it to work the coach demands you go 110% right away. This sense of urgency creates confusion, panic, and desperation, which is the key motivation for you to hire them for help. For the few clients who do break through, it's because the music was great and usually launched through organic performance first, and the subscription and the branded world building was just a distraction that gets quietly abandoned the moment they're actually busy being artists.My question is, how many artists have neglected the time to make meaningful art in order to create a super fan funnel for 200 donors and an “artist brand” that looks more like a discount influencer than a super star only to burn out and quit. How many of them could have broken through if given different advice?Labels, for all their flaws, at least decide whether they believe in the music before they invest. They will tell you straight up that no amount of positioning fixes music that isn't connecting. That’s why they drop a flop immediately. But the artist development industry at large is not incentivized to tell you that. Because telling you the truth is bad for business.Does this mean you never hire anyone for help during your artist development phase? No. We all need help sometimes and there are plenty of great support systems within the artist development industry. But here’s the key point. Don’t hire anyone without them first giving you a thorough, honest review of your music. What they actually think of it personally. What they see working and more importantly what isn't. Because anyone not willing to tell the artist the truth and who still takes the money is unethical. They are the bad apple that ruins the bunch for those of us who actually care about helping artists launch into the music industry.You can borrow my shovel anytime.In 2014 I built one of the first online courses for independent release strategy. A curriculum of 350 tasks across five pillars: operations, marketing, branding, booking, and publicity. In that era you needed everything happening at once. Singles, videos, press releases, interviews, tours, all coordinated. It was essentially project management for indie artists, and it worked. They built foundations locally and regionally while growing in their craft.Then TikTok hit in 2020. The most talented artists on our roster skipped 349 of those tasks by just sharing their art. Suddenly instead of pitching for press they were getting interview requests. Instead of self-booking tours they were opening for headliners.And the worst part, or the best depending on how you look at it, they were getting scooped up by real managers. Which was our scale plan, to transition from retainer to proper commission based management. Except we weren't positioned to move with them when things took off. I finally learned the hard way, I didn't actually work in the music industry.When the most effective release strategy basically collapsed into "make stuff and share stuff," running a 350 task curriculum for money started to feel dishonest. So I stopped.That is when I launched EAGER. I stopped taking retainers or charging for marketing advice and moved back into actual creative collaboration as a songwriter and executive producer. If the best strategy was to make the best stuff possible, and then just share it far and wide, then I wanted to be part of making it.There is such freedom in being able to share everything I’ve learned about releasing music without having to try and coax the artists into putting me on retainer, or hiding it behind a pay wall. So here we go.The ShovelMarketing 101 teaches you to introduce a problem and sell the solution. But people hate ads, the only reason they tolerate them is because they actually have that problem and need a solution. For an unknown act, defining that problem is nearly impossible.So, I want you to remove the word "marketing" from your vocabulary and replace it with "share."Social media channels are exactly that: media. They are entertainment. They are a stage. Your job isn’t to solve a problem, it's to simply be entertaining. And the audience knows what to do if they like what they hear. They save the video. They add the song. They comment "is this out yet?" That comment is the most valuable thing that can happen, a real human being making a real connection with your song in public. You are not there to promote. We’re not trying to sell anything here, because remember, the artist doesn't sell things. Share your art, that’s all we’re here to do. This reframe could potentially alleviate your cringe feelings about utilizing these platforms effectively.The “influencer” course is going to tell you relatively the same thing but they’ve twisted what it means to be entertaining. Why "your story" is so central to their strategy is because people like stories. They like charismatic personalities. Actors, comedians, and dancers. So you can build an audience by doing those things but it doesn't mean they like your music. So what’s the point? Now you have a bunch of people engaged with you, low key annoyed when you just play your music and not doing your little skits.So how do you know if you’re actually entertaining or not. The performance feedback loop is simple and honest. If the content isn't connecting, look at the structure. Is it contextual to the platform? Meaning, did you create the content in a similar format to what is working for other artists strictly sharing music? Is the music itself the most engaging part of what you're sharing? Even if the content only gets a moderate amount of views, if people are engaging the music then you are entertaining. From that point it’s a matter of getting better at the context and staying consistent. If people are not engaging and you feel the context is right you have to take a hard look at the music.That is the diagnostic sequence the gurus skip. They're perfectly happy, even giddy, if the engagement is primarily on the channel and not the music. Because once it transfers to the music, you’re in the music industry now, you don’t need them anymore, and they get fired.What actual development looks like.What I am about to describe is not a secret. It is the same method label A&R departments have used for decades. The platforms and stages have changed. The underlying reality hasn't.It all starts with the creation process of the music. The first step is to find honest creative collaborators who challenge you and help you grow artistically and then stay committed to a final output that is a high-quality master competitive in your genre. If you find that, you are well on your way in your development journey and can execute without hiring anyone else. When I’m a part of that creative team, this is what I suggest we do.We write a large volume of songs before recording anything. Demo the strongest material. Test the demos on social media and at live performances, not to promote, but to find out what connects. Build an audience list from the people who respond to the music specifically. Use that data to select which songs go into full production. Produce masters that are excellent and unmistakably human. Don’t release until you have a substantial audience who will stream on day one. Then release consistently every 4 to 6 weeks for a year.The spine of this is simple, and it is old, and it works because it is honest about talent and doesn’t hide behind gimmicks. But details matter and I’m gonna tell you all of them over the next three essays...One More Thing… You just joined a marketing funnel.Marketing 101. Problem: You're tired of the onslaught from gurus preying on your insecurity and desperation. Solution: Find the people who will tell you the truth and focus on making great art.So you've been marketed to, and the actual pitch was right there in the opener. I'm not here to sell you shovels, I'm here to introduce you to more people digging for gold.But in the spirit of honesty here’s everything that’s coming next for you if you decide to stick around. This is part one of a four part essay. Part 2 covers the Creative Development process I use when executive producing a project for my production company EAGER. Part 3 covers tactical details for sharing your music effectively; the conversion rate math, the audience capture setup, the text hook strategy, the release timing. And Part 4 is my views and predictions for where the music industry is headed from algorithm changes, community building, and of course AI.I guess I’ve ruined my chances to sell you a course, cause everything I'd put in a course I put in these essays for free. But here's how you can get involved with EAGER. Stay on the text list and I will tell you when we have opportunities like artist retreats, song shares and reviews, creative development and recording slots with myself and our producers, available co-writing sessions, or opportunities from partners aligned with my values. These opportunities are highly curated and selective, because that is the only way to protect the integrity of what we're building. I will tell you if the music isn’t good enough, how to make it better, and then, if EAGER is the right fit, we will help you make it better.I’m not an influencer trying to build an audience to watch me dance, I’m here to collaborate and make art. If that’s in alignment with you, I’m glad you’re here, if not, please sincerely unsubscribe.
digging for gold - essay #2
By Nathan Dohse
A gold prospector doesn't pick a spot and start blasting. First they stake a claim on the plot of land that calls to them. Then, even with the claim staked, they don't dig deep. They explore. They sift. High volume, low investment, letting all the topsoil wash away until bright specks appear. Only then do they start digging, and even then it's still sifting between the digging, back and forth, until they have collected enough ore to send away for testing. Once confirmed they have found certified gold, then, and only then, they build the mine.This metaphor describes a true creative development process. If you skip any step, you can end up with an expensive hole in the wrong spot.Stake Your ClaimBefore you even start writing a single song, it’s important to know whose land you are standing on. This isn’t defined by a genre. It’s definitely not a “brand”. It’s You. Your stories, your influences, your perspective on the world, the experiences only you have lived through. That is your claim and nobody else can stake it. This doesn’t always start on an instrument. Usually it starts in a journal, or a story you tell every new friend as they get to know you.If you want to write something that moves people deeply, it starts by writing something that moves you so deeply you have to share it with everyone. That feeling is the fleck of gold you are looking for. Most songs you write will not do that. Because you are in an exploring phase. Maybe that breakup you went through isn’t all that interesting after all, it was, just a breakup. Sure it’s on your mind, maybe you have big feelings about it, but if you’re honest, you’re actually turning to other artists' songs to get you through it, and there isn’t a burning need to write the words yourself.When you eventually find the experience that forces itself into a song in a 30 minute writing session, wakes you up in the night with a lyric or melody, and turns every blade of grass and stormy sky into a metaphor, that experience is worth revisiting over and over again. That's the sign to start digging deeper. Let that experience become a consistent theme in your writing. Many successful artists claim to have only ever had one real muse, drawing inspiration from it for a lifetime. Yet, newer artists tend to feel that once they have written about something they have to move on. That instinct is worth questioning and where your collaborators come in. If something is actually worth spending the time to write a song about, it better be worth writing 100 songs about it.Digging and SiftingWhen I am executive producing a record I want the writing team to bring me at least 32 songs to sift through. Which is a lot of songs to write on your own. When you are deep in a theme it can be hard to be objective about it. You know there is more to say but you cannot always see the angle. That’s when it’s time to bring in collaborators, or to stick to the metaphor, more friends with shovels. A collaborator who knows your story can find it faster than you can because they are not inside it the way you are.The best co-writing teams are people who already know your stories and the themes you are working to explore. When collaborators understand your background, sessions are spent creating instead of just introducing yourself over and over again. Sessions become more objective over time. Your key collaborator, the producer, is keeping the big vision consistent while you rotate through a small group of co-writers who bring in fresh perspectives and voices. This continues as we build a meaningful body of work. And from that body of work we start to find the nuggets worth collecting, these move to a fuller demo phase.Recently we started a project with an artist and one of the collaborators said “wow, this song is really great, let’s make it the worst thing we do together.” I love that. That is the goal. We are always trying to beat the last thing we made with a better version. That way when it’s time to select the best songs we can let the other one’s fall away. No guilt, no second guessing.The creative process benefits from momentum. While releasing songs one at a time is beneficial, and we’ll explore why in the next essay, creating songs one at a time is not. Even demoing benefits from working on more than one song at a time. It allows you to find motifs in your performances and ideas that tie your body of work together. To do this effectively I would try to write five or six songs before demoing two or three, and using that momentum to make real progress. This helps you make hard decisions before any money or studio time is spent. My job at this stage as executive producer is to be objective in a way the artist cannot always be. You are too close to your own material. I am not. That distance is the most useful thing I bring to the sifting process. By exploring a theme in more than one song we can avoid picking songs based on sentimental value alone. If one of the most moving relationships in your life was with a grandmother who has recently passed away, write four or five songs about your time with her: one nostalgic and uplifting, one that expresses your grief. This allows us to pick the one that is actually best.Sometimes a theme surfaces that clearly means something to the artist but songs have not been written well enough to demo yet. Some subjects take time to understand. If the artist has not lived inside a particular experience long enough to write about it honestly, that muse needs to wait. It will be there for the next record. Forcing it into this one does not serve the song or the artist.Beyond gut feeling, I am also taking inventory. Do we have enough uptempo tracks? Are we heavy on ballads and light on songs that groove? Is the tempo and energy balanced across the 16 or does everything live in the same emotional lane? Is there continuity in the experience we’ve created for the listener? This is what it means to create a body of work.Collecting and TestingWhen I am producing demos I am really only concerned about two things: the voice and the lyric. Maybe an instrumental motif if the artist is an exceptional instrumentalist. Everything else is secondary at this stage. Whether the artist likes it or not, I am already thinking about TikTok. I am thinking about how we are going to communicate this song in 15 to 30 second clips. That means the vocal has to be compelling enough to stop a scroll and the lyric has to be specific enough to make someone feel seen in just a few lines. If those two things are not working, the production around them does not matter.A demo that cannot showcase the artist's voice is not ready to go out. If the artist is struggling to deliver a confident and engaging vocal performance, that is important information. It might mean more time developing the vocal before we go further. It might mean the song needs to be reworked to find their sweet spot. Either way, we do not move past it by dressing it up with production.As soon as a demo is finished it goes out for testing. We do not wait until all 16 are done. Each one gets shared on social media and at live performances as it is completed, and we start watching how people respond immediately.What I am watching for is emotional connection. Are people engaging with the theme of the song? Are the comments about what the song means to them? A comment on a video that got 100 views that says "this is exactly how I feel" or even just "is this out yet" is worth more than ten thousand views from people who thought the video was funny or cute or utilized a trend, but the comments don’t mention the song at all.This is also where creating a body of work pays off in a way that is hard to explain until you have experienced it. When you have spent countless sessions exploring the same themes over and over with your collaborators, something happens. You stop having to think about how to communicate the idea. You just know. When it comes time to write a text hook for a 20 second video clip, the words are already there because you have been saying them in different ways for months. The theme is so deeply understood that distilling it into one line feels natural rather than forced.“World Building” and “Lore” are created in the writing process, not in your marketing strategy. And when you’ve done it well you don’t have to manufacture it or expel tons of energy ideating what that world or lore should be. The world you’ve created by expressing your true experiences will organically develop around you as you begin to share these experiences with the world.And the testing phase is a direct reflection of that feeling you had when you first wrote the song. It’s so moving to you that you want to share it with everyone. The most valuable signal at this stage is someone wanting more of it from you and even willing to give you their phone number in exchange for hearing the full song and we’re gonna give it to them. They give you their number, you text them the song, and the text list you are building here is an audience of people who responded to these specific songs, and it is the only audience you can actually rely on to show up on release day.Testing has a down side. Not everything comes back certified gold, and in that moment, hours of time digging and sifting feel wasted. But if the demos are not connecting, you can be grateful you did not force them into production. You go back to sifting. More writing, more demoing, more testing. The testing tells you the truth. Listen to it.I will go into much greater detail on the testing process in the next essay. It is far less creative and quite distracting if your creative process isn’t sound. Properly testing your creative work requires unfaltering confidence. So don’t concern yourself with strategies or release plans until you feel very strong in the work you’re creating.Building the MineThe songs that performed in testing move into full master production. This is the expensive part, and it is the part we do last, not first, because everything before it was designed to make sure we are working on the right songs. At each phase we cut our output in half. 32 songs becomes 16 demos. 16 demos become 8 masters. 8 masters is one song every six weeks for an entire year of consistent releases.With AI generating mediocre yet convincing masters that spam the middle tier of music consumption, the bar for what a human master needs to be has never been higher. The performance has to be undeniable. The arrangement has to be dynamic. The instrumentation has to be original. And the emotional depth has to be real in a way that is impossible to generate. It has to be undeniably human, and that costs money. The time and talent required to make deliberate choices at every level of a recording has real value. But thanks to our testing we can invest with confidence in finally building the mine.Safety FirstA mine without structural support collapses. It does not matter how much gold is in the walls. The structural support of a release is the audience you built during the testing phase. Without them showing up on day one, the algorithm does not move, the momentum does not build. I have watched this happen too many times. The songs are good. The demos showed real signs of life. But the release lands soft because the audience was not there yet. The impatience won. They started working the mine before the structure was in place and the weight of it caved in.
Consistency, endurance, and patience are not soft virtues. They are the beams that hold the mine open long enough to work it. This is what artist development should actually be. Not manufactured world building. Not fools gold in a content strategy. But a willingness to work each step with excellence to completion.Make Stuff. Share Stuff. Stay Eager.Nathan Dohse // EAGER // [email protected]
Make Stuff . Share Stuff - essay #3
By Nathan DohseI saw an ad selling branding services that used Chappell Roan as a case study. The claim: she became successful because she built a visual brand rooted in drag queen aesthetics, and without it, "Pink Pony Club" would never have been a hit. The proof was a video of Roan performing the song in a public park, solo piano, simple top and jeans, maybe five people watching. The implication being that no brand meant no success.The timeline does not support that.The song's first viral moment had nothing to do with her visual identity. It spread because the queer community recognized themselves in the lyrics and passed it around. The "brand" at that point was Roan lip syncing to her guinea pig Gogo on TikTok. Vulture named it Song of the Summer before she ever performed it live or wore a single piece of drag-inspired clothing.The drag aesthetic first appears in "Naked in Manhattan," but it is light. More thrift store queen than drag queen. The full visual experience did not arrive until her first headlining tour in early 2023, three years after the song dropped.The real lesson: she wrote a great song from an authentic place, for a community she belonged to. That community found the song on their own. Their organic support gave her the resources to build the visual world she had been carrying in her head from the start.The brand did not attract the audience. The music did. Then the audience created the conditions where the artist's vision could properly exist.This is the flaw in brand and content marketing strategies. They are all reverse engineered from the wrong starting point. Show me one artist whose success story is "I followed this one guy's rollout plan and it worked and now I'm successful." They do not exist. Because success in the arts is almost always rooted in happy accidents and unexpected miracles. The story is more often: "I had tried everything and nothing was working and then suddenly, this thing no one anticipated took off and we were just along for the ride from there."Share StuffThe motto I created for EAGER is Make Stuff, Share Stuff, Stay Eager. The first two essays focused on making stuff, more specifically, making really great stuff. This one is about the sharing.The motivation to share the stuff you have made must come from a completely altruistic place. At the core of it, it must be centered around: I made this thing that I love and I want to give it to the world in the hopes they will love it and it will be meaningful to them in some way. If that is not your motivation right now, stop sharing anything at all and get back to the drawing board until you make something that instills that motivation in you.The first time you share something you have made and someone responds having been moved by it, that should be a monumental moment for you as an artist. For most, that is the push they need to share every single day. But some folks need a little more perspective for the days when no one is moved and your share does not reach anyone at all.If I ran a promotion telling artists that if they send me a video every single day, I would pick one lucky artist to perform in front of 125,000 people at Coachella, hundreds of people would commit to it without fail. But if I remind you that every day you post a video to TikTok you have the potential of performing in front of 10 million people, committing to that shot at luck does not feel worth it for some reason.So let us confront that part of the equation. Yes, your stuff can reach people one at a time and has the potential to change a life with each person it reaches. And we live in a world of algorithms where it could reach all the wrong people or no one at all, and the more you share, the more it feels like playing the lottery than connecting with other humans. So while our motivation is to connect with humans, let us also treat this like playing the lottery.But there’s another reason why your stuff might not be connecting that has nothing to do with luck. And it’s the way you’re communicating. If you are constantly trying to get people to take action you are not sharing, you are promoting. When you make a piece of content that directs people to a presave link, or pushes them to go stream somewhere, you’re not sharing your music, you’re making an ad. And people don’t like ads and that’s why the algorithm isn’t pushing your content. Keep doing that and you’ll never get lucky.Before moving forward make sure your motivation is in the right place. Say this to yourself and check if it is true:“I make content to share my art with the world. I am grateful when it reaches anyone who has a meaningful experience from it. I believe there are millions of people it could impact in that way, so sharing it every day is worth the effort to let a little bit of luck carry it to them.”Understanding AlgorithmsWinning the lottery means going viral, but there are a few steps we need to take to know we’ve actually got a lottery ticket to play. To explain this properly, let’s take a moment to break down what an algorithm is and what we are working with.When TikTok launched, instead of using a social graph for the algorithm it used an interest graph. It basically took Facebook's ads algorithm and used it as the base of the app. Instead of showing you content based on your friends and the pages you followed, it shows you content based on previous content you engaged with. It shows you things you are most interested in. Instagram and Facebook quickly switched to the interest graph algorithm.Our job in sharing music with an interest-based algorithm is to give it the information needed to show it to the people who would find it interesting. That first takes knowing who that is, which is why in the creative development process we spent so much time honing in on themes and various perspectives of those themes. We should now know not only exactly what audience each song is for, but who the larger audience is across all the songs. By really digging in to find the reasons we create stuff to begin with, we intrinsically understand the reasons why anyone will care about the stuff we create. That’s where the text hooks and captions come in. They are used to drop key words to the algorithm to give it the direction it needs.The text hook is the line of text over the video that stops the scroll. It needs to do two things at once: drop the keywords the algorithm needs to find the right audience, and say something specific enough that when that audience sees it, they stop. Not a description of the song. A direct address to the person it is for. "Divorced dads who got cheated on, this is probably your theme song." The algorithm reads "divorced," "dads," "cheated on," and "song" and finds the people those words describe. Those people read it and feel like someone wrote it about them. That is the whole job.The same theme you wrote about from a hundred different angles in the writing room gives you a hundred different text hooks. Try different sections of the song, not just what you think the hook is. The second verse often connects deeper than the chorus because it surprises people. Alternate between vulnerable first person and direct second person. "I did this" versus "if you have ever done this." Both work. Neither works forever. Keep rotating and watch which angle lands with your specific audience.
Do not use text hooks that are already trending. They reach people because the trend is familiar, not because those people are the right audience for your song. The algorithm will store the wrong data and you will spend months trying to correct it.
In theory the lyrics in our songs can carry the heaviest weight of this information to the algorithm. Just like Pink Pony Club did. Chappell Roan does not need to write a text hook saying "this is for every queer small town girl who walked into her first gay bar and finally felt like she was exactly where she was supposed to be." The lyrics accomplished that on their own and resulted in Pink Pony Club reaching the right audience going viral through user generated content. This is what it means when other creators use your song to create content in mass rather than an individual video you make going viral. Trying to seed a trend like this can be very distracting, even the paid services meant to do this rarely work. If a trend type idea comes to you as a content piece, do it, but don’t over think it. Organic connection to a song is even more important for this to happen.As far as the video goes, all you have to do is be thoughtful about the first three seconds of each piece of content. That is honestly the only part of the video that matters. If you can make the first three seconds interesting enough to stop scrolling long enough to investigate what the video is, they should quickly be able to realize it is about a song. Your text hook or lyrics should make it clear it is in their FYP because it is a song they would find interesting. At that point they should either turn the volume up to listen or save the video to come back to listen later. If they stick around for any other reason, like a long story or a gimmicky attention-grabbing trick, it is not for the music and you have probably grabbed the wrong person.Hook strategy changes as fast as the platforms do. Sitting down to write a content plan feels useful until you see something working the next day that makes everything you wrote feel outdated. That is why consistent observation beats strategy sessions every time. When I see something connecting I drop it into the EAGER artist group chat and say "try your own version of this."But let’s be honest, Pink Pony Club went viral in 2021 and TikTok had not yet reached complete saturation. In today's world, she may have had to write that text hook a hundred different ways and post them a hundred different times from ten different accounts.Saturation is the key component here. I want to be very clear about something: you are not shadow banned. Your algorithm is over saturated. You shared something, and when the algorithm processed the data in your share, it came up blank on who to show it to. That is where luck comes in.In this over-saturated market, if you are doing the work to communicate properly with the algorithm and your music is genuinely engaging, you should be getting confirmation of that by a video with 1,000 views getting four or five comments of people resonating with the share. The algorithm has the right information, but because it is oversaturated it does not actually need your content at the moment so you stop at 1,000. You are basically getting a message from the algorithm: "The FYP for your specific audience is full, come back again tomorrow."As you continue to share at volume, now you are waiting on luck that everyone else trying to reach that same audience took the day off. When the algorithm is in need of content for that specific audience and the first 1,000 people it shows yours to engage in a meaningful way, it finds the hole in the FYP and pushes your video to ten thousand more people. When those folks also engage, it pumps to 100,000. As long as your video is getting better engagement than the other millions of artists fighting for the same hole in the scroll, it keeps going. That part is not skill. It is timing and luck, and there is no way of knowing when it is going to happen.One benefit from high frequency besides the chance of getting lucky is that the algorithm is storing information on your account and slowly dialing in the audience over time, making getting lucky more likely. When you hit 5,000 views instead of 1,000 it logs who and why.This is why going viral for the wrong reason can be a death sentence.My least favorite kind of content is the artist complaining about making content. I find it so ironic when an artist shares their song every day, finally gets fed up, makes a video about how dumb it is that they have to make content, includes all the right keywords for reaching other frustrated artists, which is a very large audience with a fairly small number of creators targeting it, and then of course goes viral for the first time in their career. And now the algorithm has stored the data for their account of the very worst audience possible: a bunch of other jaded, frustrated, often mediocre artists.When you see this content, do not engage with it. You do not want that in your feed, you do not need it for your mental health, and you do not want it stored in your account. And don’t surround yourself with artists who aren’t as committed to finding their audience as you are. The negativity is contagious. Find a community of artists who will encourage you and you can all share what’s working or not working, shoot content together, brainstorm text hooks together. You don’t need a guru or strategist for this. Observation is the best education. Community is the best teacher. I have found through EAGER that the artist text chat contains better content ideas than any sit down strategy session I do with the artists on the roster.Brick By BrickWhen I say we share the music, I mean we actually share it. More than just snippets and teasers online. Let anyone hear it any time they want. Not behind a paywall or subscription. But do it thoughtfully. Make sure you can reach them again.How I set this up is using an app called Laylo, but any texting or audience collecting app works fine. At the start I have us build organically, without automation. When someone comments on a video I respond and say "I will send you the song, check your DMs" and send them the Laylo link and explain that we are collecting their info in order to send them new demos when they are finished and to update them when the song actually releases. When they join Laylo I send a link to a private playlist built in an app called Disco. This app is meant for sharing within the music industry on the back end. It holds the metadata for songs, the playlists can have the artist's visuals on them, and I can see how many views the page gets and how many streams each song gets. That is all the real data I need.I only send this to people who have engaged with the music directly. I do not want Uncle Bill on here who loves AC/DC but wants to show support to his niece who sounds like Gracie Abrams. Because I am trying to use this list to spark the Spotify algorithm, and the Spotify algorithm only measures user data. When Uncle Bill streams his niece's new song, Spotify will then recommend it to AC/DC fans. AC/DC fans do not care about Uncle Bill's niece and they will skip. This gives the song a bad rating in the algorithm and lowers its performance. If Aunt Sally is also there to show support and she loves Frank Sinatra, now it is going to AC/DC fans and Sinatra fans and the algorithm just stops trying. It does not have enough data to accurately redistribute the song to the right audience so it stops redistributing altogether.If you sound like Gracie Abrams, everyone on this list should have Gracie Abrams in their listening history. When the first song drops and all these folks run to stream it, the Spotify algorithm has a very clear picture of who to redistribute the song to, and the track can experience a 10x lift in just a matter of weeks.
The ThresholdIn order to get that kind of boost you need 500 people to stream your song in the first 24 hours.Hit it and Spotify pushes your song to Release Radar for listeners of similar artists. If those listeners engage and replay it, Spotify moves it to Discover Weekly. After Discover Weekly gets traction, you enter the song into Discovery Mode, which can redistribute it at a 10x ratio. I have personally watched this take an artist from 25,000 monthly listeners to 600,000 in under six months.Miss the 500 streams on day one, or muddy that data with the wrong audience, and the chain does not start. The song sits there. The algorithm does not punish you. It just does not move without a signal.So before you release anything, the question is simple: do you have 500 people who will stream this song tomorrow?Not everyone on your list streams on release day. Using Laylo and the private playlist together I can test how engaged the audience we’ve collected is. When we finish a new demo or even a master I’ll put it on the playlist and send a text out letting folks know to go give it a listen. This lets me know how quickly they will take action on an ask from the artist. Based on what I have seen consistently across artists at this stage, you can expect roughly 10% of your text list to engage on any given release. That means to get 500 first-day streams you need to be prepared to collect 5,000 people on your text list.Most artists read that and immediately want to find a shortcut around it. There is no shortcut. You either have 5,000 people who opted in because they heard your music and wanted more of it, or you do not.Winning the lotteryIf you find the lane where the content really starts to move, and I am not talking 10,000 or even 100,000 views, I am talking 500,000 plus, we go into release mode fast. If you are testing a demo you call the producer and tell them to clear the studio. If you are moving closer to 1 million you start considering distributing the song for release in the next couple of days. I have had a song on all platforms in 14 hours, so it is possible. At that point you are in the comment sections sending folks directly to the release. And if you are not able to move that fast, it is no problem, because you are going to hit that 5,000 person text list by sticking to the original plan anyway.Once that first song drops it is time to keep the algorithm as warm as possible. Releasing a song every four to six weeks is the perfect way to do that. So make sure you continue to make progress on the body of work while testing your demos and improving your ability to make content consistently.One More Thing…Everything in these three essays is what I use at EAGER when executive producing and releasing a project. The reason I can share it openly is that none of this works if the music is not exceptional. And making the music exceptional starts with everything in Essay 2, long before any of these numbers matter.Essay 4 is the last one. I am going to go into more business-focused strategies to create a more sustainable process and ways that artists can best position themselves for changes that are sure to come over the next decade. I hope it serves as a reminder that even though it might feel futile while doomscrolling, right now is the best time there has ever been to be pursuing a career in the arts.Make Stuff. Share Stuff. Stay Eager.Nathan Dohse // EAGER // [email protected]---Post ScriptAt a certain point, maybe the growth is not there as much as you hoped. The body of work is complete but the list is not really moving. It does not mean you should not be proud of the work and celebrate it. My suggestion at this point is to release the body of work all at once. No singles, no drip. That strategy is specifically to serve an algorithm we do not have to juice. Forget it. Throw a big album release show, bring your community together to celebrate the hard work, let friends and any fans you have gained along the way bolster your confidence and give the music its rightful place in the universe. It does not mean the project was a failure. Maybe the universe was not ready for what you had to give, and maybe you just did not get lucky when you needed to.The biggest song I was ever a part of did not hit until a year after it was released. I had tried all the branding, all the marketing. We used ads to get the artist to 50,000 monthly listeners, the budget was significant, and still we were only getting 1.1 streams per listener, meaning listeners came, streamed, and never came back. But after this song connected with the right audience I watched as the Spotify algorithm took the account to 600,000 monthly listeners. That song broke 10 million streams and a second did the same as the algorithm grabbed onto it and pushed it to the newly found audience at the same time.I knew when I first heard the song it was a hit. The artist actually lost hope in it after some creative differences in the production, but I still believed in it. During a period between recording projects I wrote the first version of this content strategy and we worked with a marketing company in Nashville to execute it. We got things rolling with a different song, making casual lip sync videos with text hooks just speaking to who would relate to the song. A few videos connected really well. Then we went to the hit song, dialed in on how we were communicating to the platform and the audience. The second and third videos we posted both went to 1 million views two days apart. The hook was targeted toward romantic partners, a classic country trope of mismatched partners, sweet women who partner with roughneck men. The women found it first. The comments took off saying "honey, this is us" and tagged their partners. The song was country rock so the men took to the genre and vibe while the women took to the lyrics. The song was already out so the audience flooded it. It jumped to 100,000 streams having been at 10,000 from ads we had been running.So if you are proud of the work you have done in the past, continue to implement this strategy with it now. Share your music in the same way you would with everything new you make.Or maybe after releasing the music into the universe it becomes clear there is a different creative direction for you. The genre needs to change, or the themes you felt so passionate about are not so important to you anymore. The lack of success of the project may be a blessing that your future is not beholden to a body of work that no longer represents you. In that case, take it down if you want. You are in charge. Be the artist you want to be no matter what.
stay eager - essay #4
by Nathan DohseEvery gold rush attracts two kinds of people. The forty-niners, who showed up with a pan and were willing to actually dig for it. And the cacklers, who showed up to stand near the people digging and found a way to get a cut just for being there. The easier a rush gets the more cacklers show up, and right now the music industry is easier to access than it's ever been, so we've got more cacklers than ever too. With AI flooding everything it's getting harder to tell the difference between the artists and the cacklers.Someone told me when I was getting into music that only 1% of hopefuls make it to a full time career, and even then it usually only lasts about five years. Over the last decade and the five hundred artists I've worked with, that number has held up. What's changed isn't the odds. It's the terrain. If the forty-niners band together, outwork the cacklers, and keep making things that are actually exceptional, we don't just survive the saturation. We claim more ground than the cacklers ever could, because they were never digging in the first place. If we respond to this moment instead of reacting to it can create an artistic renaissance that has been much overdue in the 21st century.The Market Has Never Been BetterAlmost every time I start on a new project for an artist I'll ask for what they're currently listening to and more often than not they'll tell me someone I'm not familiar with. I go to research them and they have millions of monthly listeners. I used to feel like I was out of the loop until I realized, this is the democratized music market where algorithms can expand or silo your music library without you necessarily knowing it. This is a good thing for building community and developing a fan base.The data is in. This moment right now is the best time to pursue a career as an artist. Independent music now accounts for 50% of Spotify's total payouts, the first time in history that's happened, on a platform that represents roughly 20% of global recorded music revenue. The broader market research from MIDiA puts independent ownership at 46.7% of the entire recorded music industry, on a market that just hit $31.7 billion and has grown for eleven straight years. That 46.7% independent share beats every single major label individually. The gate is basically gone.Many folks in the artist development industry will tell you that there isn't a meaningful ROI in recorded music, and that's usually to sell you on some other strategy, but they're just dead wrong. In my previous essay I laid out the path to launch a meaningful streaming campaign. When successful, Spotify's algorithm is capable of generating an independent artist over $5K per month in streaming revenue. That's Spotify alone. This is a feasible goal for any artist who is patient enough to gather the right size audience before they launch.The InvestmentCommitting to the investment it might take to launch this kind of plan is daunting. And I'm gonna shoot you straight and lay out some realistic numbers for you so you can get a perspective of what it might take.Producing eight masters runs between $20,000 and $35,000 when working with full time professional producers. Spend less than that and you are likely making recordings that cannot compete sonically, which increases skip rates and kills the algorithm before it starts. On top of that, budget $5,000 to $10,000 for visuals, marketing, photos, and artwork across your first two release cycles is definitely advised. Some of the marketing strategist will try to convince you your marketing budget should be equal to your production budget, that's only because they include their fees in that number. The actual amount is much lower if you can avoid their grift. I'm confident these four essays are enough to save you those tens of thousands of dollars. The full annual operating cost for this strategy runs $25,000 to $35,000 a year, and if you are starting from zero with no existing audience, be honest with yourself that this could be a five year process. That's three or four cycles of releases before the ROI is in range.Those numbers are not meant to scare you. They are meant to help you spend the money on the right things. And if that number makes you want to throw in the towel, pause for minute, we will discuss ways to forgo some of the expenses through meaningful artistic development. Because here is what it looks like on the other side of that investment. At 250,000 monthly listeners you are generating roughly one million streams a month, which translates to about $3,000 after producer royalties and management. That is enough to fund your own production cycle and sustain the annual release schedule indefinitely. At that point labels and investors start paying attention, not because the number is massive, but because you built it without their money. Every one million streams is roughly $5,000 after distribution. The math works if you give it the runway it needs. Let me show you what this actually looks like with real math.The MathPeople who found your demos, gave you their phone number, and have been waiting enables you to start with 500 qualified listeners on day one of your first release. That first day of streaming triggers the algorithm and your audience often gets a 10x boost, taking you to 5,000 monthly listeners in the first two weeks via Release Radar. Let's assume your listeners are consistently engaged and coming back to stream at a rate of 2.5 streams per listener. Through Discover Weekly by the end of your first six weeks you could very feasibly be to 10K monthly listeners, with 25K streams on your first song. If engagement continues, this can likely be repeated across the first three releases. Once you surpass 25K monthly listeners you are eligible for Discovery Mode, which you start on your first release. This will continue increased distribution of that song, again triggering Discover Weekly on the other two songs. But, the multiplier does not stay at 10x forever. It often halves with each release as the algorithm settles into your audience, stabilizing at 1.25x usually by release 4. After a flawless release cycle of 8 masters you are ideally approaching 200,000 monthly listeners and have generated roughly $30K in streaming revenue across the year.That math only holds if the engagement stays positive across every release. The 2.5 streams per listener means your audience is not just showing up on release day and leaving. They are coming back. They are streaming the catalog. That is why the quality of every song matters and why releasing eight strong songs beats releasing one great song and seven filler tracks. The algorithm is watching every stream, every save, every skip. One bad song that drives skip rates up can flatten the multiplier and stall the whole chain.Most artists will not hit these numbers on the first project. But it does happen, and it's worth shooting for, and when it does the math compounds fast. By the end of year one the artist has recouped their initial investment. But the second project should already be deep in production long before single eight drops. This means financially you need to be prepared to fund both projects without relying on the income stream. By project three the investment starts to shift. The recoupment of project one must be reinvested to fund the third project which is starting its production midway through project two's release cycle. The revenue from project two funds making project four completely but also recoups 50% of its own investment. This is your first streaming revenue that can be applied to your own personal income, without reinvesting it into the project. By the completion of project three's release cycle, your streaming revenue has recouped all initial investment and is funding all future productions in advance.This has always been the math that major labels rely on. Labels used to sign ten artists, fund five albums each, and wait for one to compound through the cycle. And the 9 that didn't recoup by the third record's start of production are dropped. The difference is that an independent artist who runs this play book keeps the royalties, owns the masters, and does not owe anyone a recoupment check.But labels are rarely funding project one anymore. Over the past decade the strategy has been to just watch. They wait until project three, when the math is proven and the audience is real, then they come in and buy the rights to future projects and the back catalog with a stable ROI based on existing streaming revenue. Then they apply their distribution muscle and start the compounding cycle over at a much higher baseline. The artist who understands this stops chasing a label deal on project one, builds the asset, proves the math, and lets the labels come to them on project three with far better terms.Collaboration Over CapitalSo, how does an artist accomplish this without the $60K - $90K to fund the first three cycles? Patience and collaboration. As we all continue to work towards excellence in our craft, for every artist trying to be the best performer and entertainer they can be, there are songwriters and producers working just as hard. The first goal, is to find those collaborators who will work with you on either discounted rates, or in partnership as part of the revenue share. If a producer and artists split the master ownership 50/50 for the first two release cycles, the artist will be able to pay for project three at an appropriate rate.Some producers might need convincing that a partnership is worth their time. I know I do. What I'm looking for more often than not is an artist who will commit to the creative development plan through the song development, demoing, and audience building phases and I will adjust my fees accordingly to their level of talent if I believe they can create exceptional songs and performances. If they are collecting an audience and it looks to me like we are going to be able to hit our 500 day one listeners, I want to be invested in that project.I want to be very clear about a couple things. This type of total investment in an artist is very rare and usually reserved for artists who exhibit a profound level of talent and unique creative expression. Usually a collaboration agreement will be some cash investment from the artists with a higher producer royalty and a producer rate recoupment schedule. But, it is best for an artist's career to own their masters and only have standard producer royalties and recoupment schedule that would match a major labels production agreement. So self funding is absolutely the better path when possible.When I am working on production agreements for the producers on the EAGER roster, everything is negotiable, the cash investment and the revenue share. The goal in those negotiations is to make sure we reach a deal that leaves everyone excited, no one overextended, and everyone fairly compensated throughout the course of the agreement.The AI ProblemNow the big question. How long will algorithmic support last? There's one thing we can be confident in and that's that algorithms aren't going anywhere. They are a proven source of guaranteed consumption. But saturation is quickly becoming a problem and there's a new culprit. What we have to be honest about is that generative AI output is very adequate at creating mediocre music. Because that's exactly what the LLM models are created to do. They learn from everything, great music and terrible music alike, and spit out the average of all of it. It's generic and predictable. It is difficult, even for those who are adept in the models and music knowledge to get anything unique. The biggest issue with generative AI is the volume. We know that in this moment tech bros are prompting 2K songs per month, running thousands of dollars on ads, and pushing spam into the algorithms, and sadly, it's working. They can trigger the same algorithms we are working to trigger through sheer volume that is unrealistic for actual creatives. So while over the past decade it was possible to get lucky with the Spotify algorithm with a mediocre song, all that space in the feed reserved for luck is now occupied by generative AI spam. A exceptional artist can easily push past this spam threshold with a high quality and stable data set like you get through a patient and targeted audience building plan.
The OpportunityDisruption always creates opportunity. As an artist community it's important that we are proactive and not reactive. The repulsion for AI content is currently growing, not reducing, and if that continues my prediction is that we will actually return to preferring gate keepers buffering our exposure to new music. A filter that certifies what we are going to get is human and worth our time and investment. I believe this will happen in tandem with the Spotify algorithm and both will work in unison. Call me an optimist, but that's actually a best case scenario. Algorithms pushing passive engagement and curators pushing dedicated fandom. Spotify since its launch has been music fans preferred streaming platform. Will Spotify's listener base stay as active with the volume of AI music in their feed? If not, for the first time ever this will create a hole in market and the opportunity for an actual competitor for Spotify. Maybe it will be an existing streamer or maybe someone new will find a way to capture that market. Either way, artists need to be on the lookout for this transition and respond accordingly.I have to reiterate, both a curated ecosystem and an algorithmic one require excellent work. And here's why, currently, the biggest tell that something is human, is when it is worse quality than AI. As generative AI's quality improves, artists will have to consider using AI in their workflow? Not for spam sake, but for affordability and volume sake. Each artist will have to choose for themselves and follow their moral compass.Practically speaking, I see a use for generative AI in the demoing phase of the creative development process. If not ethically opposed to these generative models, writing a song, generating a track, and bouncing stems is the most efficient way to get a demo to test on social media. If you are opposed to the use of generative AI, there are ample tools being developed using smart production systems that can work nearly as quickly, but they have a steeper learning curve. The goal here is to achieve that middle tier quality for your demos with efficiency while leaving space for your masters to reach the point of excellence, this way you're competing in the short form platforms with volume and consistency and competing on the streaming platforms with high engagement and high quality.Obviously many artists are going to simply release the middle tier AI tracks that they make, or continue to make home recordings with automated mixes and just like AI spam, some of it will break through, but that will be less and less frequent and not worth banking your first few years as an artist on.All Hands On DeckThere is more to the community than just the creative output. As saturation grows, reach will get harder and harder and breaking an artist is going to require all hands on deck. Most artist development companies just make content promoting their services or educating to make themselves the experts, and they never actually show you the artists they are working with. This needs to change. I want this essay series to be a wake up call to all the other artist development service providers to stop hiding behind the excuse that "every song has a niche" yet those companies aren't willing to share that "niche" song themselves. These companies need to start actually sharing and pushing the artists they are working with. That is the only way to prove you actually believe the words you are preaching. To put your brand and your name on the line with the work that you do.For the life of me I cannot understand why the expectation is for the artist to manage ten accounts, posting every day to push out a song that has two other songwriters, a producer, mixer, mastering engineer, manager, publisher, label, publicist, marketing team, and booking agent, who only share the song once when it drops. All these people should be regularly making content that shares the music they are a part of as frequently as the artist. This is the expectation for the team members at EAGER. Myself included.Right at the end of the CD era, independent labels were at their height. When you walked into a Target or Walmart, labels like Epitaph and Tooth & Nail would have endcaps dedicated to their roster. The equivalent of 500 first-day listeners was built in because the label had its own fan base. If every single person on the artist's team was sharing the music in a way that music fans could find it, they compound the odds and create their own luck.The forty-niners who do the work, stake real claims, make exceptional things, and share them honestly are going to outlast every cackler, every AI spam account, every influencer cosplaying as an artist. Not because the algorithm will always reward them right away. Not because the industry will recognize them, it will be late as usual. But because the music will be meaningful art, and meaningful art finds its people when a whole community is out there sharing it.Make Stuff . Share Stuff . Stay Eager.Nathan Dohse // EAGER // [email protected]