 One of the things musicians always ask me is if it's possible to become a popular musician without having a social media presence or showing their face to the audience or touring. Now I know for many of you attention seeking, aspiring narcissists and extroverts, this sounds insane but for a variety of reasons some people don't want to do certain parts of the game past making music. So whether you're the attention seeking musician or the one who would really like to keep Twitter and Instagram out of your life or the ones that think music videos are Satan answers can be found in the MTV video games this video is for you since in this video I'm gonna teach you how to see not participating in one of the pillars of music promotion affects your ability to build a fan base I'm Jesse Cannon a music marketing nerd who's teaching musicians how to grow their fan base from zero to ten thousand fans and this is Muse Formation I often talk to musicians who've had some success but now look back every day like that guy in Napoleon Dynamite talking about his high school football team coach would have put me in fourth quarter we've been state champions no doubt as they focus on what could have been and why break down what would they actually regret they come to realize they were always focused on the exceptions instead of the rules and what I mean by this is I'm sure you probably have a musician friend that will compare themselves to another musician and try to find the exception that allows them to be lazy instead of doing what 99% of people do to promote their music a favorite of mine is all my friends who want to be a famous singer but hate having to put on a fresh fit do a photo shoot and lay down some thirst drops on the gram we'll say Jesse Adele never used social media told recently and she's like the biggest artist in the world when the fuck do I have to show everyone this booty I'm packing to get streams on Spotify now ignoring that society is gross this way and that there's much smarter youtubers on this subject than me who can interrogate this it's unfortunately a fact that when you got the songs and the strategy these pictures help boost streams but back to Adele these people love to point out that she's one of the biggest artists of her era and she didn't use social media on top but this focus is that she's the exception the one person that didn't do this and the only people who focus on this are brainwired infested contrarian musician and instead of focusing on the rule that everyone else built their fucking career in the last decade by being active in some way on social media they point this one out they somehow ignore that Adele had everything else going for her so well be it the crossover appeal to so many demographics which you gave her more susceptible marketplace than anyone since Amy Winehouse along with outrageous abilities that she was able to get by without one of the main tools that helped build a fan base so instead of focusing on this exception the right way to see is the Dell is actually an outlier not an exception and that she's so exceptional she could have been even more huge had she used all the tools at her disposal but as we will reveal at the end of this video Adele is actually kind of focusing on the rule here we just haven't learned how to perceive the rule yet so what we're discussing all the time in this channel is how to use strategy that can increase your chances of actually getting your music heard by as many people as possible to do that we focus on how to try to make that happen instead of hoping for the best and that luck smiles upon you or that you catch a leprechaun or something just as unlikely as the stories of a big manager happening to find your barely promoted track on SoundCloud I also accept that you all have lives and budgets and those lives may be incompatible with touring or making tons of social media posts or paying for music videos every 60 days the fact is there's a few different facets of your music promotion and when you don't use one of them you're slowing down your potential but there's a way to compensate and if you aren't apt to pour your money into music videos or spend time taking pictures for the gram all day there is hope so to illustrate this point I need to introduce a new or reoccurring learning tool since too many people complain that I keep using that virgin and Chad meme which is kind of a virgin critique if you ask me so instead it's time to go back to health class but trust me I'm gonna leave the birds and the bees to whatever other YouTube freaks feel like explain that to you so as you can see here we have a body and I've marked off some of the anatomy and I want you to imagine this person is a cross-country skier and we're gonna discuss their anatomy on what they need to do to win now clearly this body of mine has not been doing so much cross-country skiing since the pandemic it but I think this is the right learning device as you can see on the heart I've written good songs as this is the heart of the saw and if your heart ain't working none of the rest will either hence why I also have good strategy on the brain since that needs to be in place too and without that none of the rest will work as no one will hear your music since somebody needs to be able to handle this part and trust me that strategy can also be networking team building or whatever else so now we get to the arms and one is social media and the other arm is outreach which I like to think of as appealing to algorithms or doing PR and marketing since yeah you may be able to cross-country ski without one arm but to do well you're gonna have to compensate with the other limbs and then we have the legs which are great content and playing live as these two do more to make progress than all else but the head and the heart are needed but as we know for all of 2020 and much of 2021 we've been in a world where every single artist has had to do this race with one leg tied up since no one is doing live shows and as you may have noticed I don't have Facebook ads here and unlike most of the music per emotion gurus on here if you want to learn why I don't include them in my strategy and how to promote your music without buying Facebook ads I suggest you click on the video in the playlist on the screen now or the description below I can already hear some of you cracking your knuckles to get in the comments and tell me about your favorite artists who built a career by employing mystery and not promoting on social media or touring or being mysterious but before we go there I do want to talk about what people perceive as mystery and not promoting their music with these limbs what we have to see is an invisible limit and that is doing eventful things is part of the strategy and outrage and creates an invisible limb when ours do things like create art so they don't have to take pics in fits and instead veil themselves while still promoting their music and create a conversation around them there's an important detail there they're still promoting and they're starting a conversation not participating does not start a conversation a lot of people see part of this mystery being the artist absence from constant updates imposed as being a thing this is not a technique that works and as we're gonna discuss in a minute that's not how all the artists you see building their fan base and with very few exceptions do quite the opposite but once they've heard an audience and the right to not have to exploit their existence every single minute they are alive they do pull away and do effective promotion that allows them to stand in the shadows which is perceived as mystery and very common once they have a huge audience as I'm constantly telling you the thing to focus on is what artists you loved it on their way to the top instead of what they do at the top since the promotions that work for us at the top is nearly never what works to break an artist so I hit up my friends in my form to ask you all about the artist you perceived who made it without engaging in traditional promotion or using social media and employing mystery and sure enough I think most of the artist people regularly point to who they think are examples of this are all misnomers so now it's time for a lightning round of takedowns since as my friend Finn McKenzie from the punk rock M.E.A. has said about me all my content is based around everything you think is wrong and here's why I'm right and well it's go time the first one I got hit with and with good reason is sleep token since people loved to point out that I made a video about them and they employ all this mystery and very little presence online but to go back to this cross country skiing anatomy theory sleep token at probably the most masterful album rollout that I could point to in the last few years which called so much attention to them with repeated video drops and a series of deconstructed songs they did along with masterful energy since they couldn't use behind the scenes elements and show their faces and reveal their identity they leaned harder on another limb and that limb was an amazing strategy and whether it was the amazing covers they did and alternate versions for their series called the room below under their artwork and full stack singles and if you don't know what I'm talking about there's a video on the screen now are in the description that breaks down their entire strategy and how brilliant it was one of the recent ones that's come to my inbox from this is Apex Twin. Now I have no fucking clue why we're discussing a dude who built his career in the goddamn 80s by assuming since he's now a based hyper pop god but let's not get it twisted as I am a mega Apex Twin fan and date someone who wears so much of his gear you'd think it was a fashion brand but Apex Twin is a misnomer he built his fan base playing influential early shows constantly look there's one on the screen right now where his early collaborator talked about how he worked for his early shows but really what shot him to notoriety is he was on a label that had a ton of influence and back then labels were much like what playlists are now and that they had tons of power to tell people what they should be listening to as they were the curators of a genre of their day and he was on the best one with the most influence of that time but also let's remember what really built him up is he made some of the most exceptional content we've ever seen still to this day I mean I consider window liquor probably still one of the top five best music videos ever made and his videos are still some of the most memorable of his generation and yes while he's become reclusive and very mysterious that wasn't the case on his assent to his peak oh boy I love to hear brand new is this band that is mysterious since yes that may have been the case after they had numerous videos on MTV that were extremely well directed so they aired them all day and all night after playing the goddamn warp tour and touring nonstop until they were at the top of the pile but this on the way up was the opposite of mysterious and somehow their entire fan base has whitewashed that they weren't a pop punk band doing all the things high profile pop punk bands did in their day that was until they heard a modest mass record and pivoted and let's be honest it's probably a best to be a bit mysterious when you were doing what that singer was doing next I hear Jesse you love Sophie man she didn't do an interview forever and no music videos on the way up Sophie is the most innovative producer of a generation and so much so that Madonna tapped her to produce a comeback single before Sophie had ever released a video on her own this gave her the ability to not have to promote in traditional ways at first since she had so much notoriety and so many people beating down her doors to cover her that she was able to create mystery around it because she had demand you do not have demand I mean last I checked your third and fourth songs you released were not two of the most influential songs on pop of the last decade and let's be honest she only ever really blew up and people started know who she was when she did a video where she was fucking topless as a trans artist it started actually showing herself to people and that she's the most exceptionally talented visionary musician in my opinion I know of and I seriously hate that she's been taken from us and it makes me horribly sad every day ooh Radiohead this one's fucking funny the band made a fucking movie called meeting people as easy about how much press they did and how much they hated it and complained about it in every goddamn interview for years you know what's funny Radiohead is actually an example of a band who is doing all the things I say to do today before it was in vogue they talk to people constantly they release so many fucking videos from every album toward extensively and dominated everyone's attention they then got much more elusive with time but don't get it twisted this is a fucking band whose first single became a hit and then dominated attention for years to come using constant interviews and content not exactly a model that's going to be easy for you to emulate for jizzy what about burial I mean my girlfriend has worked with burial and she jokes about how in today's music climate even for all of burial's massive influence on music and relevance trying to get him features without fresh press photos since he refused to take them is actually an uphill battle for even him to get featured on certain sites and let's be honest untrue is one of the greatest records ever made but he's really not exactly a model of continuous success and doesn't make it easy on himself jizzy jewel they were super mysterious man ah yes another 30 year old example but it's also important to talk about this when no one was leaning into music videos that were really exceptional and looked the way tools did they leaned in and took months on end to make animations that augmented their nine minute prog rock songs it did some of the most outlandish interviews of their time as their singer is one of the most provocative interviews they knew their swat analysis and their strengths they leaned on one limb to concentrate on what others took away and went way harder than anyone else on art at the time was well aside from that group green jello who made that video about the three little pigs who are on the same label as them but they didn't have much staying power because they were kind of corny okay cashmere cat is another study in limb theory magnus is shy to a crazy degree but you know where he's not shy look at who he works with ariana grande salina gomez benny blanco so he's effective in collaborating with the biggest artists possible and they promote the songs for him he tours but he doesn't do interviews and a ton of social media but instead when he does videos he does it big it's the same for porter robinson in that they're not going to be heavy on the social media but when they put out a creative piece of content they're going to lean on that limb to make up for what they're taking away from the other limb but you may say dog he didn't do that first and i've heard you say that his e p wedding bills is the greatest e p of all time cool make music that's so amazing and unbelievable that rick rubin's account which has made like four tweets says your music is amazing as well as kanye west as his peak proclaims you as the most insane artist out there and then you can get away with not doing anything do music that's not exceptional and go right ahead okay dog i got you now the weekend no one knew who he was at first fun fact the weekend had four publicists at once during the trilogy era as well he's the epitome of consistent sustained promotion while no one was seeing what he looked like and yes his identity was gone and he wasn't making posts all the time he also basically put out 30 songs and nearly three hours of music in around 500 days with a massive press push around each of those releases and i will give him that it became a talking point that no one knew who he was but his team gambled that the music was so good and he had so much of it that making every powerful publicist assist in the business back then pushes music to blogs when blogs mattered a lot that was some pretty fucking smart strategy and the brain was pretty big on that strategy now we all know today he's an exceptional talent and the person who in the earliest in their career to ever be featured as the main act in the super bowl as well he had the most streamed song of 2020 so i guess if you have that level of juice you can take the same gamble as him the fact is he understood the game and leaned into the strategy by doing what worked for the time and it led to him blowing up but he really leaned on some limbs to make up for the one he was missing and lastly i told you i'd tell you about Adele funny enough Adele was on excel records which is known for many more electronic based groups than groups that sound like her including radiohead since she didn't have social media on their side they leaned other ways the label put out acapellas to dance clips so people would hear them on the floor all the time and then they'd be familiar with them when they heard them on the radio later they then made great videos and leaned on partnerships and live performances since Adele had the juice to carry those live performances to an exceptional degree yet again since one limb was missing they had to go stronger on another limb now i'm sure you're done with me yelling at you and have received the message that if you're going to ignore one of these limbs you need to strengthen the other limbs more than the rest and if you haven't well then there's probably no hope for your stubborn break now i don't want to imply i think every artist should overexpose themselves and you have to do social media to this ridiculous degree this video is a exercise in quite the opposite i think 90 percent of the artists i like could deal with editing themselves a little bit and being a little less extremely online but i also think 99 of the people who tell me they don't want to engage in one of the limbs is not doing it because they are striving for perfection in their artistry they're just trying to justify laziness or apathy towards something that they really don't want to do and need this video as a dose of reality and here's reality i challenge you to look at the artists you enjoy the most and odds are you will see that in all the mediums they are handed they try to find a way to do something exceptional to them social media touring everything else is just a challenge to find how it works and there's many ways to do it many artists use social media as a purely promotional and newsletter tool and then they vote their time to doing truly exceptional things in another medium if you're going to chop up one of these limbs you better use the other one to their fullest extent to compensate so i know this is a controversial one so feel free to only in the comments as i love a good debate and if this got you thinking please like subscribe and get notified so we can keep having this fun together if you like this discussion coming up on the screen is a playlist on how to promote yourself on social media as well as another on how to go from zero to ten thousand fans and another on how to blow up on Spotify in 2021 cook away and keep learning thanks for watching