 So this channel isn't working anymore. Straight up, I think I'm making some of my best videos and doing compelling work, but the views just aren't here. But what the hell do you do when you're doing the best work you think you're capable of doing and it's not working? I believe in myself and think I'm the best at what I do on YouTube, but, uh, well, the market of views says otherwise. And I know a lot of you have gone through this too with your music, so I want to talk about the right way to think when things aren't going your way. So in this video, I'm going to explain why you shouldn't concern yourself with your song's streaming numbers or other metrics, as much as planning on doing the work to do right by the music you make. Hi, I'm Jesse Cannon, a music marketing nerd who's teaching musicians how to grow their fan base from zero to 10,000 fans, and this is muse formation. So one of the main things I get asked in consultation calls or in the comments of these videos is what metrics an artist should be looking for when they put out a song to know whether they're doing well. Now, obviously, we all want that coveted 25% or above popularity score, so we can get into the Spotify algorithm, but in all reality, I tell everyone that while they should look at metrics and look at their analytics, they should not concern themselves with them. And I know that sounds a little too much like something a politician would say, and perhaps I've been working in politics a little too long, and you'd probably not be wrong for saying that to me since any day is too long in politics. And you might say I shouldn't be talking like that, but let me explain why that language is important. There's no way to make a listener like a song they don't like. Sure, if they like your content or music video, they may give it more of an opportunity and listen to it more and be more susceptible to liking your music, but there's very little you can do if people aren't feeling your song. Since in turn, that means the algorithm will ignore you, and people won't tell others to listen to your music, and those are the two most powerful marketing tools you have. So without them, well, you're running a race with no legs. And you're probably not going to get very far. And yes, it's depressing when we work really hard creating something and no one likes it. And even when we give our art our all, it can sometimes fall on ears that wish they were deaf when they hear our music. But I'm straying from the path on what I meant by you shouldn't concern yourself with metric. Here's the thing, and this is how anyone I've seen blow up from music do it. You need to first create the music you want to hear that feels like a strong emotion to you. This is literally what my last book is all about. And then after you create something you really believe is amazing, you need to honor that music by working as hard as you can to promote it. Since we can't control if people will like our music, all we can do is everything we can to try to get people to listen and hope for the best until we have a new song to promote and give it another try. Now here's the thing. The reason I don't tell you to just ignore the data is there's plenty you can learn from looking at data. You can see if you're driving more traffic from say Instagram or TikTok and see which one to concentrate on. You can learn that a playlist you paid for isn't doing half as much as the one you got for free. There's tons to learn from analytics so it's important to read them. But here's the thing I mean by concern. Much of the way politicians say they're concerned about things like people getting murdered or high gas prices and then they don't do anything, they're clearly not concerned even though they're, you know, probably looking at the statistics a little. And they usually have to do some action, but that's exactly what I want you to do here. I don't want you to stress or stay up at night over any of your analytics, but instead I want you to learn from it and then do what the job actually is of being a musician, which is to make great songs and then honor them by promoting them as much as possible. Just like a politician, don't lose sleep. This is just part of what you do and you shouldn't get emotional about it. And I know that's hard because it's your dreams. And like I said, my dream is to make this channel blow up and it's not working. And here's the thing, if you're experimenting with the new sound or still finding your sound, a lot of the time the reason your song isn't getting as good a reception is it hasn't found the right audience yet. And that's why doing your community work, which if you don't know what I mean, you better click the link in the description about that and learn the most important way to promote your music. That community work is how you find the right audience and so much of the time when I hear people making great music and it hasn't found that audience yet, it's because they're not in the right community and they don't know where to find that community, which is why that work so important. And here's a story about just that. One of my consulting clients was super upset their song wasn't doing well. They changed their sound a bit and fans weren't feeling it at all since the algorithm was serving it to their old fans. They really wandered out of their old genre, so they scheduled a call and they were really distraught. But here's the thing, when things are going bad, that's the time you really gotta work hard. It's funny because if things are going well, sometimes the inability of a good song will make things easier. But when it's not working, you really gotta push harder and this group did and they were gonna give up but instead did some playlist pitching and sure enough, they got on a good playlist that more suited their new genre and the song is their most successful song because they found a new community and kept pushing to honor their music. But since these are our dreams, we have to remember we are at the end of the day doing this for ourselves and you have to just keep pushing because you believe in your music and yourself and ignore it if it's going bad because if you stop and get discouraged, it's just gonna get worse. As I said, my numbers are getting worse and I keep pushing harder as I tweak small things. I study more and make incremental changes but like I said in my recent video on rejection, I mentioned the recent biopic on comedian George Carlin and whenever things were going good or bad, he took the success or failure to go deeper and be the best version of himself and while I've been doing that, there's always space for improvement. In fact, upon reflection, I was one, not working as hard as I can to promote this channel and two, not making the best content I could or let's scratch that. I was making the best content I could but I need to go deeper and get more inspired. So I went out and I explored how to get more inspired and I did what I tell you all to do which is look at your authentic self, your strengths and what's within you and what I found was not what I necessarily see as my final form but the form I should have been in all along on this channel. Like George Carlin, I needed to stop just slightly improving and make a big measure since slightly improving was not doing what I needed it to do so I watched a lot of videos to better understand the YouTube algorithm since you should understand the game you're playing in then I thought about my strengths and weaknesses. One of those weaknesses is I've always felt like my social media game for the channel has been weak but I'm a busy dude so it's hard to devote time to it but then I realized how I can make it work with the videos. I also realized no one was really complaining about my content but the fact is I present these videos in about as boring a format as possible. So I looked at other genres of YouTube careers with hundreds of thousands of views and the fact is just sitting in this chair isn't working and yes, no one's complaining about it but that doesn't mean that your audience always has the vision for how much better you can be. Sometimes you got instead of just thinking about positioning yourself with your own authentic traits to stick out is think about how those traits may give you a way to do things that are way better than the rest of the competition. Since after all, you can see you're really good at something why not double down on it and go in and the coolest thing right now is after doing this I feel really alive and inspired and there's this funny thing when I tell a lot of you to get inspired you look at me like I just told you to lift a tractor up a mountain with a chain or something that you're just not capable of doing. I'm literally telling you to sit down and take some time watching videos instead of doing some of the other mundane things you do in your life. You should listen to the music, find new people who inspire you and consciously think about when you appreciate someone's art how you could bring it into your own art. Really not the worst thing you could do with your time and here's the thing. The artists I know who make the best art are regularly intentionally taking time to get inspired. They listen and then react and then consider their art. As they get inspired they think of how they can bring those things into their art and that's what continually makes them level up in big ways. Even some of the biggest dumbasses in music I know do this as a regular part of their practice and it's part of the gig. So enough about me though this channel is about musicians and you want to know how this actually applies to you of course. So many of you have learned from these entrepreneur world boys to use data and those stupid click funnels for everything but here's the thing this is art and you're not selling truffle infused mayonnaise or a fashion brand so the rules are not the same. This is your dream and it's in art and unlike a t-shirt and if the customer complains that you printed it on the wrong blanks you can't easily rectify it. It's a song and it's already up. You do need to learn from feedback what you could do better and from reflection on your art. You also need to keep pushing your music out since each song sets the next song up for future success. Why I don't want you to be concerned with getting 50,000 streams or something else what you should be concerned with is how you make your life schedule the time you need to do to do right by your music and schedule time to promote it. Instead of thinking oh I have to get to 50,000 plays maybe no one likes that song but what you should instead be doing is not thinking about how you're going to then be depressed then feel like you're discouraged you should instead be thinking about how you schedule the time to keep promoting your music how you keep getting more inspired and doing what you do better because honestly so much of the time so many people launch projects and they say you know this has to hit 50k and you know what that first song doesn't but maybe if you kept going in the fourth or fifth song would have gotten there let's remember consistent sustained promotion a lot of what that is is that it takes a few songs for you to keep building up and that's why I keep saying each song sets up the next for future success which is why you should not concern yourself with saying this song needs to hit 100,000 you never know with art what's going to hit and what's going to click with an audience what you can do within yourself is schedule the time to do right by your music and promote it as much as you can each day okay so back to me one last time I'm going to show you all by example exactly what I mean by this by going deeper when you watch the next video so to quote America's third most cringe magamill the best is yet to come okay on the screen now is a video you should really watch on how to deal with projection since I know that holds so many of you back and if you enjoyed this video you should really understand that since it'll help you promote your music click on that otherwise it may hold you back