 So last week marks one year since I started this channel. So I think that was a good time to announce that it's going to keep going. But that wasn't a sure thing. While I love doing this channel, I'm super busy. And while some people can say, I have three jobs, bro, I realistically have like eight jobs that most people would consider close to full time. Don't ask how I do it since that will be for another video, some other time. But the short of it is it's been a huge toll on me and it isn't sustainable for me. And while doing this channel makes me the least amount of money of anything I do. It takes an average of 15 hours a week, which is hard to justify when my other seven jobs pay the bills pretty damn well. And people are constantly bugging me about how I'm behind on things and want more of my time and I'm not giving them as much of it as they would like. I have to be careful and consider about where I actually allocate my time. But the fact is I really love doing this channel and want to keep it going. But since we just crossed a year of me doing it, I figured it's a good time to look back at some lessons learned and go into why those lessons lend me to keep going. And I will draw each of them back to how you promote your music. Hi, I'm Jesse Cannon, a music marketing nerd who's teaching musicians how to go from zero to 10,000 fans on YouTube. And this is Muse Formation. I will be honest, I think it's important to set goals. If they aren't working, really think about why they aren't working and try a new direction. If they're not, I set a goal about being happy with this channel last year. And even if I was miserable, I committed that I'd keep going until it hit a year so I could really judge it and see if it was worth my time. Well, that I'm here, I see a lot of growth happening at an amazing rate and I'm super happy doing it, even when I've worked 60 to 70 hours doing my other jobs during the week. And I only get one night off and one day off a week. So let's talk about what I learned. And the first thing would be what I learned about growing this channel. Lesson one is you have to actually give your endeavors enough time to actually work before you judge them and decide whether to quit them. It was important when I started this channel that I not give up if it didn't work immediately, which I learned from nearly every YouTuber's advice, but particularly my friend Finn McKenzie at the Punk Rock NBA, who if you're not subscribed to, you should click above and do so right now. The fact is, nearly no one who doesn't already have a huge following does well on YouTube in their first weeks, nevermind even their first year. It's super rare to get a ton of subs and views in the first year. And while many of us believe in our own exceptionalism, it's just not realistic. I started this channel with 175 subscribers and by the first month I had 375. So many people when I tell them they need to release singles every eight weeks. And when they hear my release plan, they think after two or three singles, they should be posting huge numbers, which is also not usually the case for most people or realistic. And by the way, if you missed my video on my release strategy, its link now are in the description. But really most of the benefits of any promotion come from being consistent over a long period of time. For me, I knew to grow this channel. I needed to post at least one or two times a week. I knew in about around nine months would be about the time that I could judge if it was going to be working and a year would probably be more accurate. So that's what I did is I wanted to make sure within a year this was being successful. I think it's good to set unrealistically high goals and as someone who's been lucky enough to work with a lot of huge artists, that's the thing I often see them do. Since let's be real here, people often fall short of their goals. So it's really important and aim as high as actually reasonably possible. Now aiming to be bigger than Billie Eilish 90 days when you have four monthly listeners is a little ridiculous, but making an actionable plan that is actually realistic helps you work hard so that you actually hit a high goal. So I set a very high goal above what I saw the average YouTube channel do in the first year since I believe in myself. So what was my markers for success? Well, I'll be honest, I had some numbers in mind, like 10,000 subs, which I didn't hit. In fact, I'm about exactly halfway there. But trust me when I say never did I think about quitting over this part of it. This is because I had to remember the advice. I give all the other musicians I coach and advise, which is you don't know what your success is going to look like. In particular for musicians, they often say I want to tour with this band and then COVID hits and then they have songs with a half a million streams, but they didn't tour with that band, but they still feel successful. Trust me, most of the successful musicians I know have a goal that is often just not realistic. I had a lot of friends make the goal to be on MTV, but then that stopped being a thing when they stopped playing music videos and they sure felt successful when they were selling hundreds of thousands of units, which brings me to the next lesson. Be open to what success looks like. While I had some numbers in mind, what I didn't expect was how much I'd enjoy doing this channel and learning to edit video, as well as how much it helped my book spread and get me clients I really enjoy talking to a consulting calls and make new friends. The fact is, while I've done a lot of podcasts and outreach in the past, spreading what I did on YouTube really opened me up to a whole new world that has gotten into what I have to say I'm super rewarded by both financially and in life. So about five to six months into this, it was a success without me even having to look at numbers. Do I care that I'm just about halfway to 10,000 subscribers? Not at all, because it feels like success when I'm happy and well compensated for it through the other things I do around the channel, like book sales, consulting and meeting really great people. And while you want to have gains, you should always be learning and adapting. What really matters is your happiness through it. But I do want to get to the next lesson, which is you also have to know when to pivot. Allow yourself some space to change course while not dropping out. I try to make two videos every single week throughout this, and I succeeded all but about six weeks. And considering my primary day job since COVID hit, shifted to working in politics around the election, things got really weird and intense. And to say I had a wave of exhaustion and overworked has been going on for months with this election still being contested over a month after it, I had to come with grips with reality of making one video where I put a lot of effort in, and another where I put a good amount in is just not going to be feasible till I have more time to devote to getting ahead on content. Now, usually I'd solve this by having a ton of content in the bank, which meant for the first nine months of this channel, I'd around five weeks of videos recorded in advance, which meant about 10 videos that I could shuffle around and decide what to air depending on what was going on each week. And I would often air one that I recorded that week or one I recorded eight weeks ago. But sure enough, the election drained me of all my banked content as for weeks on I'd clock 100 hour weeks and find my normal 15 hours to devote this channel became a little impossible. So the lesson for musicians is I try to make my content more effective. I instead focused on making a single video that was really good, instead of two, and sure enough, it actually made my numbers go up. Instead of being hurtful, it helped. If you're trying to execute consistent content, it can often be helpful to focus on increasing the quality instead of the quantity or vice versa. And while you still got to do the work of spreading good ton content, you can figure out how to keep it and more make it more effective. And what I'm saying here is oftentimes you need to switch gears and maybe you need to be releasing a little bit more music and putting out some B sides and EPs, or you need to be making sure that the content you put out is more quality, since people aren't identifying with the less songs you put less effort into. I had to keep up momentum with this channel. So I had to pivot to the smartest strategy instead of giving up, which brings me to lesson four, which stems from that too, which is a lesson I know well, but it's weird how you can always give people good advice, but then forget it for yourself, which is the first 1000 fans takes longer than the next 1000. And one of the reasons I focus on the 10,000 fans metrics so much on this channel is I built tons of musicians careers mailing lists for startups and businesses up before. And it really is true that the first customers are always the hardest and only gets easier if you make sure you don't drop the ball and get burnt out. If you think of it as every time that you gain followers, some of them are probably going to tell other people about you and the bigger the army you have that's evangelizing about you, the more work they do for you and the easier it gets. In the first 10 months of this channel, I had to fight for every single view and spread my videos and message boards and do all sorts of work to get them around. Now they get posted there by fans and I could focus that time on making better videos. It gets better and remember the more you push through the hard times, they do get easier if you keep up the consistent sustained promotion. Lesson five is super important, but also so hard for people to hear, which is you need to just get started because you're going to suck at first, but you got to start putting yourself out there and learning lessons. I mean, seriously, I've been engineering records with no unintentional distortion on them for decades. I can go two to 300 songs of tracking of not overcompressing a song, but somehow with my own voice and using lav mics for the first time on my loud ass voice, I could fuck that up for a whole bunch of videos at first. I get comments on YouTube on my videos that say I'm obviously not a real audio engineer since the mic distorts a bit of my first views since my loud ass voice distorts that lav at even the lowest volumes. And somehow this person says that all the millions of records that have sold on records I've engineered and thousands of credits I have are all invalidated. Thanks, YouTube. But I'm telling this because you are going to be bad at things and you're going to need to get better and part of the feedback you get from people helps you get better. The key is to devote some time to weighing every bit of criticism you get within yourself and seeing if it helps you get to your own goals. A few weeks from now, I'm going to have to switch where I tape these videos for the third time in 14 months as I move to a nice new YouTube studio like all the YouTubers do when their glow up happens. I know that space will have its own new set of problems and some videos will sound weird just like what happened when I moved to this space and I had to figure out the lighting and the sound again. And on the other front, I'm on version four of my thumbnails and more than twice I've redone in the entire look for all of them on my channel. You should always be learning and improving. And yes, your content cannot be perfect at first and you can even delete it. In fact, I deleted all the early videos off this channel and I taped probably seven versions of my first video before the first one aired. But really get out there, start forming bonds and most of your favorite musicians have terrible songs of videos out in the world from before they got good. You learn more putting things out into the world than keeping them in with yourself. Learn and adapt and most of all keep going since it only is going to get easier. Thanks so much for all the support you all have shown me the last year. It really has been fun for me. And while I could come off as a jaded asshole to some, everyone who knows me knows I'm super grateful, softy who cries over everything and your kind words and helping spread this channel to other people really means a lot to me. Thanks so much for watching. I hope we get to have a great 2021 together.