In today’s letter we talk about:
- The best social media platform for musicians
- Doing hard things
- Doing new things
- Taking a leap of faith in your creative career
- The wrong kind of practise
- The wrong expectations
- How you’re valuable to an audience
- Changing your life in 6 months
- Being more interesting.
Let’s get straight into it 🙂
#1: What’s the best social media platform for musicians?
We’re no longer in the ‘TikTok is automatically best for musicians’ era—so where should you focus?
Ultimate I think the answer is: The best platform is the one you’ll stick with and get really good at.
These platforms are tools, and how much you get from them depends on how well you can use them.
If I (not a guitarist) had the best guitar in the world and John Petrucci had the worst, who’s going to make better music?
I still think TikTok can offer a lot for musicians, even those who are just starting on it now.
Based on results I see from artists who make great content—broadly speaking—TikTok is still the platform that’s most often rewarding great content.
But I could also point to plenty of examples where that’s not the case.
So again: Pick one or two platforms and commit to getting good at them. Don’t overthink the platform—focus on developing your skills.
#2: The effect of doing hard things as a creative.
One of the biggest mistakes I see creatives make on the path to building a career around what they love is turning away from a challenge when it gets too difficult.
I get it (and have done it plenty), but it’s in these times that your greatest opportunities for growth lie.
Typically, I’ll see this in action with musicians on social media, where the bar is constantly being raised.
For example, the standard for content continues to go up, and so it requires us to keep pushing our creative limits.
Musicians understandably get frustrated with this.
But they end up struggling regardless of whether they decide to embrace the challenge or bail on it.
When you run away from a challenge, you learn nothing, and your struggle persists.
You’re still not getting your music heard; you still don’t have the fan base.
But if you decide to take on the challenge—although you’ll still struggle—you’re training yourself to solve hard problems.
And this has a massive impact on your ability to grow and achieve great things.
If you train yourself embrace the struggle and solve hard problems, a lot of “impossible” things start to become possible:
“Oh, I figured it out! I didn’t realise I could do that… maybe I can do some of the other things I initially thought I couldn’t… maybe I can do anything if I just commit to making it work…”
Next time you’re faced with a serious challenge, don’t run—take it on.
You’ll see you can not only solve that problem, but that you can solve almost anything, and that you have infinitely more control over your quality of life.
#3. The effect of doing new things as a creative.
Just as doing hard things makes you more capable and expands your opportunities for growth, doing new things can lead to all kinds of compounding benefits for creatives.
Constantly doing & learning new things (instead of doing the same thing over and over and hoping things will change) leads to:
- More creativity
- More connections
- More opportunities
- A more expansive and positive outlook on life
- And a lot more.
Are you constantly learning and doing new things to help you grow?
Or are you stuck in a loop taking the same actions and thinking the same way?
If you feel like you’re stuck (whether with social media, releasing music, building yoru career, motivation—whatever) do new things.
Fill your mind and soul with new information and experiences.
This will give you more juice to move forward.
#4: The leap of faith.
If you’re pursuing a creative career, or anything outside ‘the norm’, you’re going to have to take a leap of faith at some point.
It might not look like what you expect, but there will be a time you’ll need to move forward without being able to fully see what’s in front of you.
You can’t always rely on knowing exactly what to do or how to do it.
Sometimes it’s about embracing the chaos of not knowing and just figuring it out.
That doesn’t mean you should blindly quit your job to pursue music.
But it does you mean you shouldn’t wait to have it all figured out, to be able to see every single step of the process before you act.
99 times out of 100, overplanning leads to inaction or creating a false sense of security.
It’s delusional of us to think we can map out every single step of a creative journey perfectly.
Do your homework—you should know something about what you’re getting into when you go down the path of pursuing something like music or creativity.
But don’t wait to have all the answers, because you never will.
#5: The wrong kind of practise.
I’ve been reading Peak by Anders Ericsson & Robert Pool and it’s really called me out on how I go about learning things.
If you genuinely want to improve at something (your craft, social media, mindset, anything), you have to be more intentional about how you practise.
Most musicians I talk to about social media are ‘practising’ the wrong way.
They’re stuck making the same content, taking the same actions, and obsessing over the same problems—and wondering why they aren’t growing.
The truth is that it’s much more comfortable to keep doing the same thing, even if it’s not getting us the results we want.
But if we truly want next-level results, we have to consistently work outside our comfort zone.
In the context of social media, a big part of this is constantly pushing our limits of creativity with content, intentionally working on improving our weak spots with it.
It’s uncomfortable and frustrating—but it’s the only to make any real improvement.
Ask yourself: Am I consistently pushing the boundaries of my creativity or am I just going through the motions?
#6: Your goals & expectations.
I recently saw (and loved) this post by Brad Stulberg.
In a nutshell: Our expectations of something shape how we feel about it.
If you go into building your creative career with the idea it should be easy, you’re in for a bad time.
It will feel horrible because your expectations and reality don’t align.
The truth is something like building a genuinely engaged and loyal fan base online is hard, and by expecting it to be easy, you’re setting yourself up to hate it.
Whereas if you go in with the assumption “this is going to be a challenge”, you’re much more likely to enjoy it, even though it’s just as hard.
According to Brad, there’s a lot of research to back this up. Interesting, right?
#7: On what’s valuable to your audience at different stages.
If you’re relatively new to building an audience on social media, the way an audience gets value from you may be different from how they get value from you in future.
When no one knows who you are, they’re less likely to care about you or your music, even if it’s good.
That means you might not be able to simply post content and have people go crazy for it.
A pattern I’ve noticed is that musicians on social media who work to create more personal connections in the beginning of their online journey become more valuable to people more quickly.
Personal connection on social media can dramatically increase your value to someone, which can lead to them:
- Starting to take notice of or interest in your music (and realise they love it)
- Giving you the time of day more often
- Supporting your posts, helping them get pushed out to more people
- And more.
Sometimes how valuable people find something (like your music) depends heavily on context.
I know that sucks to hear, but it’s true.
And that can mean that people don’t really pay attention to your music and realise it’s great until you become more of a focus for them.
I’ve discovered music on social media that I barely paid attention to until I saw/heard it 20 times, or until I had some kind of personal connection with the artist… then I realised I loved it.
And I mean genuinely loved it.
It’s a strange thing, but context matters.
And as a musician trying to build a fan base on social media, one of the best ways you can put your music in the right context and make it valuable to an audience is by creating personal connections.
#8: What if you decided to change your life in 6 months?
Something I try to communicate to musicians often when they’re making no (or slow) progress: You could change your life in 6 months if you decide to put your head down.
It’s almost unbelievable what can happen when you decide to dedicate a chunk of time to transforming yourself.
For example, what if you spent the rest of this year laser focused on:
- Improving your craft
- Or levelling up your social media game
- Or getting more shows
- Or learning about sync licensing
- Or anything that would dramatically help you move forward?
Most of us are all over the place with how we spend our time and where we direct our attention.
What if you tightened that up significantly?
How would your life change if you mastered social media, or got to God mode status with your instrument, or did 50 shows over the next 6 months?
These things are much more achievable when you decide firmly to commit to attacking them
#9: Being more interesting.
I constantly find myself hitting a point on social media where I’m like “what’s next? How can I level up? How can I have more interesting stuff to share?”
The only answer I can come up with that makes any sense is this: If you want to have more interesting stuff to share, you have to become more interesting.
This could look like:
- Improving at your craft or another skill
- Having more experiences & creating more stories
- Learning more about a certain topic
- Learning more about yourself
- Or anything that gives you more material to work with
The reality is that many of us want to be able to share really interesting stuff… but we don’t do that much interesting stuff, so we have nothing to share.
The people I love to follow on social media are worth following because they’re interesting.
- They’ve done things I haven’t or know things I don’t.
- They’ve explored their inner or outer worlds more than I have.
- They’re exceptionally good at something.
It could be (and this is not a bad thing) that you’re not getting the results you want because the person you are isn’t supposed to get those results.
It could be those results are reserved for a more next-level version of you.
I hope these have given you some food for thought and inspiration for action!
As always, I want to remind you that you’re more capable than you think—with a bit of focus, intention, and effort, you can do a lot 🙂
All the love,
Alex
