The irony of the music marketing world: listen to too much advice about how to increase your visibility and as a result you become invisible.
What do I mean by this?
There’s a cap on how far you can go with marketing advice from someone else.
It’s 2023—the rules are basically out the window.
All the classic marketing approaches have been done to death, and thanks to TikTok we’ve quickly become desensitised to a lot of modern marketing strategies.
As the noise on social media gets louder, musicians are required to find better ways to market themselves if they want to avoid being buried.
We’re at a point where most generalised advice—even the up-to-date stuff—does less and less.
Why? Because everyone else is jumping on the same advice.
Musicians who rely solely on this end up in the same pool as everyone else and therefore do basically nothing for their visibility.
Nowadays, everyone can see through a musician who has followed generic marketing advice and not added anything to it.
We need more. We want that something special on top, something extra and creative that comes directly from the artist (and I’m using artist in a broad sense).
Of course, there are fundamental approaches to marketing that work, and we should use them as a base.
You might get some low-level attention and see your streams go up a little if you use just them.
But if you want to go beyond the standard; if you want to be more creative and stand out; if you want to break away from the 99% constantly flirting with the idea of quitting because of their mediocre results—you have to be able to take your marketing into your own hands (and head).
And this brings me to the big idea in this letter:
The most powerful marketing tool in 2023 (+ beyond) is your mind.
Your mind is the place you can go to generate and develop ideas and processes that make you different from everyone else.
In your mind, there’s no one else. It’s just you.
No one else has access to the same stuff as you.
While everyone else is stuck relying on other people’s limited info, you can access an endless source of creativity, inspiration, and differentiation in your marketing.
Most musicians don’t understand marketing (understandably so), and they rely only on other people for advice assuming they themselves have nothing valuable to contribute.
They never empower themselves to generate great ideas on their own because they don’t know it’s even an option.
But they don’t realise what massive power they have inside them.
It’s your mind—not someone else’s— that, when harnessed, will take you to the outer edges and get you more visibility.
It’s your mind that will take you that step further beyond the generic approaches you get from other people.
There’s a high chance you’re not operating anywhere near the level that you’re capable of. Most of us aren’t.
But you can change that. I’m going to show you how.
The big step outside.
I’m willing to bet you’ve had plenty of great ideas (maybe for content, or for marketing in general) but you didn’t feel confident enough to pursue them.
Your mind conjured up some next-level stuff, but you just couldn’t see it becoming a real thing.
Why does this happen?
I think we stop ourselves because of a lack of external validation.
There’s no one to encourage you, to say: “Hey, yeah this could be something! Keep going, develop it!”
You have no backup. No one is doing what you want to do, so you have no way of determining if it’s a good thing to do or not.
And if you were to pursue your original ideas, when your initial attempts fail—which you know is just part of the deal—you have nowhere to turn.
You can’t look to someone else for what to do next because there is no someone else.
It sucks… but it’s also beautiful—no one else is doing it.
So someone who’s prepared to take the tough road; to risk things being not so great for a while; to pursue original ideas with no external encouragement or validation…
…they have the potential to get on a whole new level.
You stand to gain a lot if you decide to break out of that ‘invisibility circle’ and head to the outer edges.
Your mind—your beautiful, powerful mind—is the tool to get you there.
It’s the secret power that other people don’t have access to.
Decide to start trusting yourself more and tap into its power. Open up your world and therefore your world of possibility.
You want to stand out? You’ll be able to figure it out. Want to grow faster? Create better content? Get more streams? You can do it.
So, if you’re willing to dive into hell for a while for a potentially huge payoff, keep reading—because I’m about to show you how to harness the awesome power of your mind to get you to the next level with your marketing.
Harnessing your mind.
So how do you access this untapped potential of your mind to take your marketing to the next level? What does it look like? How do you start?
I’m going to take you through three different stages of using your mind to become the ultimate music marketing tool.
Let’s dive in.
Stage 1: Mind Prep
Before you can take advantage of the power of your mind, you need to prep it—get it to a place where it’s ready to perform.
Do not underestimate the importance of this part.
It was once I started respecting this part of the process that I moved into a new world of possibility and expansiveness with social media (and life).
Most people ignore this kind of thing and forever get stuck in mediocrity.
You’re not most people though, right?
Sleep.
The first thing you need is good sleep—and just hear me out here.
I’m telling you, this will do more for you than you can possibly imagine.
If your sleep goes, your whole day goes. You know the saying ‘your day starts the night before’? Super true.
I’ve become so protective of my sleep that I’ve started monitoring it to improve it:
Before I started doing this, I was getting way less sleep than I needed.
This led to constant burnout, low performance on social media, and generally just feeling bad about myself.
Since improving it (and combining it with stages 2 & 3), my social media performance has increased significantly.
Getting enough sleep to function properly has allowed for a clearer mind that lets me come up with better ideas.
It helps me be more productive and generally see the world through a lens of more possibility.
I’m not going to give you detailed sleep tips—I’m still figuring it out myself. But I can tell you, it’s worth working on.
Positivity.
Did you know that when you’re in a good mood you’re more creative?
There’s now plenty of data to support this; getting yourself in a positive headspace increases your ability to solve creative problems.
This is a win, right? Who knew a good mood could be so beneficial? 🙂
When we’re negative, we’re more closed off to new stuff. When we’re positive, we open up our world of possibility.
This allows you to connect more dots in your mind and gives you more information to use to ‘create’.
So if you’re not already doing some kind of regular gratitude practise (or something intentional that shifts your mood)—I highly recommend you start.
Consume quality.
We’re always taking in information from all around us. It fills our mind, and we use what we take in to form ideas about things.
Based on what we know about the brain, it makes sense that the quality of the information you consume heavily impacts the quality of your output.
If you take in 99% trash and then wonder why you can’t come up with any good ideas, it’s because your mind is working with what you give it.
Whereas if you make a conscious shift towards consuming higher quality information, your amazing subconscious mind (which is where all of this info goes) has a lot better stuff to work with.
This is a very good reason to focus on consuming high quality music content; you’re setting yourself up for success.
The higher quality input, the higher quality output.
I also recommend you consume high quality stuff from outside the music world.
It expands your world and allows you to connect more dots that most others who stay stuck in their small world.
I’m heavy into personal development. I’m a classic case of bad childhood > bad psychological and lifestyle habits > wake up one day and realise I’ve got to change > become obsessed with self-improvement.
And so I consume a lot of stuff that helps me better understand the world, myself, and what I can do to improve myself.
I bring what I learn into my content, and it’s helped separate me from other people in my area of profession.
Bottom line: The more high quality and creative stuff you take in (content, videos, books, experiences, etc) the more you’re filling your mind with high quality bits of information that will help you come up with better, deeper, more creative ideas.
Don’t ignore this.
Set a new standard.
Levelling yourself (and your ideas) up can be as a simple as making the decision to do it. Seriously.
I’m sure you’re no stranger to the ‘thoughts are things’ concept. My personal experience suggests this is as real as it comes.
I’ll keep this simple: If you make a decision that you’re no longer going to accept a low standard for yourself, and you consistently reinforce this new decision by reminding yourself every day—your mind will make it happen for you.
This doesn’t mean being a perfectionist—don’t confuse high standards for perfectionism.
And of course, you have to actually do the things that make you level up.
But simply consciously deciding to do it; choosing excellence every day will basically force you to become excellent.
Whether you’re on the science side, the manifestation side, both or none—there’s more than enough evidence available now to show that you have infinitely more control over your success than was previously thought.
Take advantage of it.
Ok, let’s recap. Here’s how to prep your mind for taking you to the next level with your marketing and creativity:
- Get great sleep
- Get yourself in a positive headspace (practise gratitude)
- Consume lots of high quality information and ideas
- Set a new standard for yourself each day in your mind
Now you’re ready to start generating some amazing ideas that make you stand out and exceed the standard. Here’s how to do it.
Stage 2: Idea Generation
Most musicians are unfortunately caught up in the stress of always having to have something to post, and so they never give themselves the space to actually think of great stuff to make.
I know this is hard—you only have so much time in the day and you’re constantly told you have to use that time to be on social media.
But I highly encourage you to take some of your time and dedicate it solely to idea generation.
Over the long term, it will change your life.
Here are just some things you can do when you need to come up with good ideas:
Walking
This is the most slept on method for generating high quality ideas.
If you’ve been consuming a lot of high-quality and creative content in your ‘mind prep’ time, going for a walk will awaken something massive inside you.
It’s on your walks that everything you’ve been consuming will start coming together in your mind to help you form highly unique and quality ideas.
Before I go on my walk, I set an intention in my mind for what I want to generate ideas about.
Usually, it’s content ideas for social media, or a good idea for an email, or something for the big branding and audience growth course I’m working on, or something that will help the musicians I’m consulting with.
I’m not exaggerating when I say the success rate is almost 100%.
Almost every single time I go on a walk and set this intention, I come back with some awesome idea. I wish I’d started doing this a long time ago.
Walking awakens your mind.
It helps you connect dots you wouldn’t connect if you were distracted by all the usual stuff going on in your life.
I’ve found I need at least 30 minutes to get ideas to really come alive, but you should experiment to find what works for you.
Use a ‘you filter’
The most sure-fire way to differentiate yourself, your ideas, and your marketing is to take your unique experiences, perspectives, personality, strengths, and info you consume, bring it all together and create through that filter.
Instead of looking to what others do and blindly copying them, you apply the ‘you filter’ over everything and make it uniquely yours.
The great thing about doing this is that no one can replicate it (successfully anyway)—it’s yours and yours alone.
I noticed the other day another music marketing person stole one of my old posts almost word for word.
It didn’t perform well for them because it was created through my personality, my unique perspective, my voice.
Again—don’t blindly copy.
This ‘you filter’ can be applied to existing ideas, then you put your spin on it (we’ll talk about this very shortly in more detail) or you can just apply the filter to life and come up with your own ideas completely from scratch.
Here are some questions to ask yourself to help you generate unique and authentic ideas for content:
- What personal experiences have I had that affect my perspective on certain topics or aspects of life?
- What stories do I have that are ‘just so me’?
- What are the weird or subtle things about my personality / my music / the way I do things that I could showcase to help me stand out?
- Who are my favourite creators (not just musicians) and what is it about their stuff that resonates with me so much? How do these tell me who I am?
It’s so, so easy to get stuck just recreating content that already exists, but don’t limit yourself.
You are unique. Your mind is unique.
Let yourself get in touch with that and put yourself in a whole new space.
Look for gaps, opposites, & the out of place
This is fun. I like to do this exercise sometimes to get my creative juices flowing.
This is all about looking for ‘spaces’ that haven’t been filled yet. Ask yourself these:
- What things have I noticed that are missing from music marketing content? Another way to ask this is “What do I never see in music marketing but wish I did?”
- What if I did the opposite of what everyone else is doing? And if I did, could that be desirable to an audience?
- (This is my favourite) How could I take my music and put it in an ‘out of place’ situation?
Ok, what could these looks like practically?
Here’s some stuff off the top of my head to get you thinking (remember, I can’t come up with unique ideas for you—that’s up to you):
— “What do I never see in music marketing but wish I did?”
Example: I always see great performance videos, but they’re always filmed from ‘x’ angle. I’d love to see something filmed from ‘x’ angle instead. I should try it!
— “What if I did the opposite of what everyone else is doing? Could that be desirable?”
Example: Everyone is always using hooks to try and talk their music up—“POV: You’ve just found your new favourite artist”. Could I reverse this?—“POV: You hate this song and you’re about to scroll, but you realise you hate yourself so this is a perfect fit.” It’s a little dark, but you get the idea.
— “How I could I put my music in a situation / setting where it doesn’t belong?”
Example: Performing a death metal song in a nursing home. I would love to see this.
Don’t mistake this for an easy exercise—it’s hard and you need to challenge yourself.
But it’s worth going down these paths because you’re venturing outside of how the 99% thinks.
Plus, it’s fun!
Give yourself a starting point
This is another one I love. Give yourself words and see if you can use them to create interesting ideas to promote yourself.
The point of this is to give you a starting point, which is great for creativity (it’s much harder to start from nothing).
It’s also great because it gives you a starting point that you normally wouldn’t start at.
You’re essentially generating random words and taking it from there.
Example words/things: trash can, salt lamp, bottle (this is what’s in view as I write this).
What could we do with these? Here are some content ideas that comes to mind as I’m writing this:
- Trash can: You walk over to a trash can with a closed lid because you notice a weird light emanating from it. You open the lid and your song starts playing. I bet this has come into my mind because of the “POV: You hate this song” post idea from above.
- Salt lamp: A video where you ask a salt lamp if it likes the songs you’re playing for it. You can cycle through a few crappy songs in a different genre (a genre your target audience doesn’t like) and the salt lamp does nothing. Then you play your song and it turns on / lights up.
- Bottle: A post where you notice a bottle in the sand / on the beach with a message in it. You pull it out and it reads “turn around”. You turn around and it’s you performing your new song on the beach.
These are pretty weird and incomplete ideas, but that’s the point.
Get out of your normal way of thinking and into the outer edges stuff.
I can see how—if they were developed a bit—these ideas could turn into something good.
And this is just stuff off the top of my head at 7:30 in the morning. You could do much better if you actually went for a walk and set the intention to come up with something.
Deconstruct other creative posts and rebuild them to suit you
This is another way to give yourself a starting point, but with more structure.
If you take a post that you think is awesome (from your “mind prep” sessions), you can then tear it apart and replace the different elements with things that suit your music.
I love using Witchz as an example because he makes such great content. Let’s turn it into something for you.
- First, obviously replace it with your song. What part of your song would jump out to an audience lyrically and sonically? What would be most likely to elicit a strong emotional response?
- Look at the situation: He’s lying in snow performing. Should you be lying, standing, sitting? And should your setting be snow, fire, grass, indoors, rain, desert, mountains—what suits your song?
- Look at the colours: It’s got a kind of overall cold colour feel and the guitar stands out. What would suit your song—cold colours, warmer, black and white, oversaturated?
- He’s filmed in birds eye view. What should your perspective be—the same, you off in the distance, close and intimate, head on, side on, upside down, looking up from the ground?
Doing exercises like this can really help open up your mind, and because the source content is so good, your ideas are more likely to be elevated.
It’s not that you’ll necessarily get good answers from the exercise itself (although you definitely can)—it’s more that it frees up your mind to start exploring new possibilities and that’s where you’ll strike gold.
There are plenty of way you can generate creative and original ideas using your mind.
The key is put your mind in situations where it’s allowed to explore things it normally wouldn’t.
These are just some methods—you might be able to think of a lot more interesting stuff to do.
Eventually you’ll find approaches that work for you and when you need to generate creative ideas you can dip into them.
Part 3: Developing and finishing ideas
The initial ideas you capture won’t always be amazing.
They’ll have great potential, but they’ll often need developing.
In this section we’ll look at a few ways you can develop these ideas so they hit hard and help you stand out on social media.
But before we go any further: Make sure you’re always able to easily capture your rough ideas.
If you don’t, you will forget them.
I always have my Notes app on my phone open when I go for a walk—and I’ve usually got a ton of stuff down by the time I get home.
I can then take those raw ideas and develop them.
There are a bunch of ways you can capture ideas. I’m not going to go into them here because I’m sure you can figure that out for yourself.
As long as you can quickly and easily write down or voice record ideas as soon as you have them.
Sit with your ideas
This is so simple it almost hurts, but when it comes to content, 99% of people don’t sit with their ideas.
And I totally get why: The messaging around social media content is “Get it done quick and get it out there!”
And while I think this is a great way to go once you’ve got a solid idea (or if you’re at the very beginning of your social media journey), some ideas could be infinitely better executed if you just put a little extra thought into them.
Please don’t get this mixed up with being perfectionistic. It’s not the same thing.
This is about realising the true potential and form of an idea—not obsessing over how perfectly polished it is.
What I’m getting at here is this: Don’t always take your raw / first idea and call it done.
Spend some time with it. Literally dedicate time to just sitting with it or go for another walk to develop it further.
This can take an idea from good to totally next level.
Think about when you’re putting a song together. Do you get an idea, then just hit record and you’re done?
No, you develop it, most of the time anyway.
It goes through a series of changes. You sculpt it. You organise the chaos into something that hits hard and concise.
Do this with your content ideas.
Allow yourself to go deep into how the idea could be improved, understanding your messaging, the subtleties that add extra depth, etc.
Once you feel good about the idea, execute with no hesitation.
Get it done quick and get it out there.
Use structures / formats to ‘package’ your ideas for social media
This is kind of like what we talked about in the ‘deconstructing others’ posts’ bit.
You can use content structures / formats that already work to help you develop your ideas into something solid.
Say you take a post that you love and use it as a reference—think of this like a reference track but for content.
Pay attention to the length of the post, the contour / shape, all the little features such as lyrics, written hooks in the beginning, the way the message is being communicated, and anything else you can notice.
You can use this info to shape your own content.
This is something I highly recommend if you don’t have much experience with content creation.
Eventually you can break away from this because you’ve developed your own structures / formats that you know work.
Another thing you can do is create a checklist or criteria to make sure you hit a certain standard with most of your posts.
This could look something like this:
- Is this post either entertaining, inspiring, helpful, or emotionally compelling in some way?
- Does the audio and video quality meet the standard?
- Is this ‘on brand’?
- Do I feel at least 70% good about this?
This is just an example—you can make up your own criteria.
Again, you don’t want to get buried in all this and not actually create or get too locked into something that it destroys your creativity.
But if you apply the stuff in this newsletter this shouldn’t be a problem because the ideas will flow like crazy.
If you do find yourself getting caught up in overthinking, pull back a little and reorient yourself.
Over time you’ll become more self-aware and know how to put yourself in the best position to succeed.
If this is too much right now, do less of it. If you’re not getting the results you want and you can take on a challenge, do more of it. You’ll figure it out 🙂
Ok, let’s call it there! I hope you’ve found this enlightening and that it’s given you a lot to think about.
To recap—you can stand out and exceed the standard (both on social media and in yourself) by harnessing the power of your mind. You do this by:
- Prepping your mind—
- Getting great sleep
- Being positive
- Consuming quality info and inspiration
- Setting a new standard for your mind
- Generating quality ideas—
- Walking
- Using a ‘you’ filter
- Looking for gaps, opposites and the ‘out of place’
- Giving yourself ‘starting points’
- Deconstructing creative posts and rebuilding them
- Developing & finishing ideas—
- Sitting with your ideas
- Going deep
- Using structures / formats to ‘package’ your posts for social media
- Using a checklist / criteria
This is not something you’ll be able to magically sort out overnight, but I promise you it’s worth the pursuit.
If you’d like to get some help with your social media presence, you can check out your options here.
All the love and stay awakened!
Alex
