How To Successfully Share Your Art On The Internet
And why it will drive you crazy
Imagine if David Bowie blogged about his morning routine.
Like, imagine if David Bowie put out a few albums and then said, ‘nah, I got to provide more value to my audience,’ and then started making videos where he’s sitting in front of a picture-perfect studio with a guitar, and enigmatically says to camera, ‘what if Bob Dylan’s ‘Rolling Stone’ was actually prog rock!?’
Sigh.
Over the years I’ve dabbled in blogging, Youtube, Instagram influencing (for stationery…), and have always found that the things which are the most successful are the things which are adjacent to my art. It’s the ‘How To’ videos or opinion essays, the auxiliary stuff. It’s rarely the actual art I make.
Sidebar: does this just mean that the art I’ve been making isn’t good enough for people to get excited about it? Honestly, maybe. Is that bad for an artist to say about their own work? That isn’t the point of this essay, let’s shelve that for later.
Auxiliary stuff. It’s the fashion designer blogging about the A/W collections in Paris. It’s the painter making a Youtube video about how to mix colours properly. It’s the writer producing a ten-point list on how to make your characters more believable. It’s the songwriter analysing the lyrics of a popular song.
All of this stuff is valuable! It’s consumable! And especially with the ‘How To’ posts, readers/viewers get to feel a sliver of accomplishment and productivity. We have knowledge we can now implement! Isn’t that nice! Now, instead of implementing that knowledge, let’s watch another video…
From a consumer perspective, this auxiliary stuff is a blessing and a curse. There is so much free info on the internet. You can learn to do anything. The amount of resources is insane. But at the same time, you can get trapped in the ‘How To’s. You can read list after list, watch video after video and podcast after podcast, without actually putting any of the info you’ve gained into practice.
From an artist’s perspective, the auxiliary stuff is… yep, still a blessing and a curse. It helps us reach more people. But it can overtake the creative drive to make art.
As a musician, there are a lot of music marketing ‘professionals’ on the internet (particularly TikTok) who tell us, repeatedly, that musicians have to provide value in order to get noticed.
Oh, cool! My music is valuable. Right?
WRONG.
The key messaging from these people is that your music isn’t actually what’s providing the value. The value, apparently, comes from the entertainment factor, the educational factor, or the inspirational factor.
Entertainment: a funky lil dance, a backflip, something totally wild or visually arresting that gets the viewer enchanted. (I think about the man with green hair who stands in Times Square and starts his video with, ‘I flew 1000km to New York City to do this…’) And of course we’re talking about viewers here. Video is king.
Educational: like I mentioned before, you could teach people how to produce a song, how to play a popular guitar riff, or how to market your music (and thus the cycle continues).
Inspirational: you share a story which inspires and elevates people. Maybe it’s a ‘nobody believed in me until I believed in myself,’ or an ‘after busking for 10 years, I finally got signed,’ or ‘I broke up with the love of my life and wrote this amazing song.’
Now, I’m writing about all of this and railing against it, in a way. But of course, as I’ve been promoting my new single, I’ve been making content like this. I DO THIS! I AM NOT BETTER THAN ANYONE! AND THE PROBLEM IS THAT THIS STUFF ACTUALLY WORKS. SO I KEEP DOING IT. AND I KIND OF ENJOY IT??? BUT AT THE SAME TIME I HATE IT???
I went to the Natural History Museum and filmed myself flouncing around and miming to my new single, ‘Earthquake Room’ (STREAM EARTHQUAKE ROOM COUGH COUGH SPLUTTER). That was a great move and gave my Instagram reels an edge. Do I hate typing the phrase ‘that gave my Instagram reels an edge’? Yes, I do. Yet, I can’t argue that it didn’t work for me.
I write newsletters about how I quit Spotify or how I use notebooks more than social media (although that ain’t true right now), or how managed to come up with a visual concept for my geology album. All these things bring in new readers and generate interest. I can’t fault ‘em (pun not intended but I just noticed it so I guess I DO intend it).
These things validate me as a content creator and marketer of my art. But do they validate me as an artist?
The problem is, as much as we can rant and rave about art and the state of the internet, people want listicles. People want curated content and educationals and silly entertaining 20-second videos. And sure, people also want longform content, but they also want the short stuff, the easy stuff, the auxiliary stuff. As a musician, I want to rail against it, but I also get it. And so I play the game.
But what happens when you play the game, you get the validation, and then you want to continue down that path of success? What if the validation you get from all of this output outweighs the validation you get from sharing your actual art?
What if, when you share your art… it gets quiet?
I don’t have a handy-dandy answer to all of this, but I think it’s important to ask the question. As an independent musician, the internet is a constant push-pull of inspiration, marketing, connection and frustration. Artifice and reality play with each other daily. I am trying to be the most valuable artist. And I don’t always know what that means. But I know that I want people to find the most value in my art, not around it. I know that that’s easier said than done.
This essay was inspired in part by an essay which is ‘popping off’ on Substack at the moment. It’s very focused on the ecosystem of publishing on Substack, but could easily be applied to the internet on the whole. I don’t agree entirely with it but I do with some parts. It asks questions about short-form versus long-form content, the nature of their value, and the cheapening of internet spaces. Make up your own mind about it.
I hope that in these newsletters, in my Instagram posts, in my general online presence, I can share my music and have it take pride of place. And the auxiliary stuff (like this essay, for example) can bring in new onlookers. But the main thing is the art. It’s always been about the art.
What do you think?
🎤 It’s Comments Time! I Wanna Hear From YOU
Do you make art? Do you market it by making auxiliary work?
What’s your favourite kind of longform content? What’s your favourite shortform content?
Does any of this even matter!??!?
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Til next time! Be good,
Olivia 🌈✨🏔🎶
I guess my question in all this is: do the people that "LIKE" the Reels, or the viewers... do they buy in? Have they bought an album or a shirt? Signed up for the newsletter?
I see a lot of bands and artist on labels with management and touring and press and... can't sell 500 albums week of release.
I feel like we're all feeding the machine of social media, making these videos and clips but... who are they for? And - not to get all KEVIN KELLY here - but do the TRUE FANS even know we have a new album out? Or an upcoming tour?
PS. absolutely love what you do, please keep it up, I hope you sell 10,000 copies of everything!!!
Absolutely love your take.
I do make art. I do make auxiliary stuff to try and promote the art. Honestly neither has particularly taken off.
There is definitely an attention span issue and it is largely due to the fact that 90% of the people are barely keeping their heads above water. People are overworked, overstressed, in a complete panic over what the future brings. The last thing they want is more mental effort in their downtime.
It drives me to despair sometimes to realize that the things that draw millions of views are invariably things like made up AITA stories and slime squishing/ soap slicing/ cream pouring ASMR type stuff. Just a little brain scratch. Nothing too involved. Keep it flowing from one thing to the next. Tiny dopamine hits.
So it's a pretty serious chicken-egg question (just kidding, chicken-egg question was successfully resolved in favor of the egg. But you know what I mean). Do we chastise creators for making what people want or do we chastise people for wanting what creators make? Do we send everyone to art appreciation seminars where we teach them how to recognize the sophisticated listicles from the unworthy listicles?
I don't know, man. Maybe we look for some more interesting angles. And eventually realize that even if we figure it all out perfectly, there probably isn't that much we can do to change it.