Welcome back to The Club List, a newsletter about making a business out of what you love.

June in New York is a beautiful place. I’m writing you from A2IM Indie Week, a yearly gathering of a giant amount of the US independent music industry. Through these days, I’ve already said hi to far too many old friends and heard far too much gossip. If the music business considers access to be its currency, gossip is its fuel in the car, for better or for worse!

I write this newsletter for creatives of all disciplines. Today, a jaw-dropping statistic from a music company is worth everyone’s attention…especially in a society where we’re all far too wired to chase numbers as a form of approval.

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I often talk with my clients about how engagement is just as important to boost as a following, and arguably more. How could it be more important? Well…because most of the numbers you see on a daily basis aren’t real.

Numbers vs. Reality

Here’s a wild stat cited during a panel I saw at New York Music Month’s annual conference by Andrew Batey, the co-CEO of Beatdapp. Beatdapp’s entire business is modeled around combatting fraud in music streaming, which hurts everyone from the streaming providers to the distributors to the musicians themselves. Prepare yourself:

According to Batey: in April, 40 music distributors saw 50% of their releases’ streams come from fraud. Half. 

Half.

That’s not just bots listening to playlists. That’s coordinated money laundering, people uploading obscure old releases they didn’t own and pocketing the cash, and exactly as much as much pay-to-pump as you’d think if you’ve seen playlist submission spam emails and scammy “give us $500 for 200,000 streams” social media ads.

That ties in with a stat worth keeping in mind for everyone: per this Statista report last month, about half of all web traffic, yes all of it, comes from bots. If you’ve ever taken an ad out on X after Elon Musk took over Twitter, you know the proportion of bots there is unusually massive even for a social network, which all have degrees of bots. And some of what you have left, too, is real but low-quality engagement. If you’ve ever paid to boost a post on Facebook and went too broad with the targeting, you know those ads can turn into magnets for grumpy old men commenting “spam” and posting junk memes. (I’ve even seen this on boosted job posts before…some men just want to watch the world burn, it seems.)

You may look at all this and think, “Great. How am I supposed to get attention for what I’m doing?”

Well, I prefer to look at it another way. And it’s simple.

I think that if your fanbase online is only half as big as it appears, there’s also no reason to trust it as your constraints. There’s no reason to look at numbers alone and think they’re reality. Instead, think of it this way:

Whatever numbers you are getting anywhere, half of that isn’t real. So, your real target reach at any given time is at least double the number of real people left over in your numbers. Maybe they’re people without social media, or people who haven’t found you yet. And it’s on you to cut through the bots and find them.

How do you do that?

Well, if I’m going to spend money promoting something, I always start by giving it to humans. I’d give it to a digital marketer who can optimize my pages to get better engagement from the followers I already have, and to better hook new people coming in by building up a sales funnel. If I’m a musician, I’d consider spending it on a radio campaign for my upcoming album, where radio programmers will be real people and the people hearing what they play will be real, too. (Yes, people still listen to that - it’s great for building up places to tour!) I’d spend it on merch with my work or name on it, which can be made into both promo and pure profit. Maybe I’d set up a Patreon and work to build recurring revenue. No shortage of options.

But the one thing I wouldn’t do, in marketing, is spend the most money on digital ads or fake numbers. Because the second you do that and make it your main focus, you’re giving most of your money to machines who don’t care about you, or worse, will actively exploit you. And spending your money on buyable items (new records, shirts, etc) is attractive to the money of real people you already have.

I’ve heard horror stories of tiny bands throwing $30K+ at Meta ads and then wondering why their album didn’t go anywhere. Don’t be that person. Have a diversified strategy. Start with humans first, then allow for places where bots and humans coexist.

Engagement with real people beats raw numbers every single time. Do you want 1,000 people who would give you $5, or 100 people who would give you $100? One of these options leads to a sustainable career much more quickly. Choose, and chase, wisely.

One Thing You Can Use Today

I’m making this suggestion, and nobody at their company is paying me to say it. If you don’t already have Canva - and especially if you’re doing your own social media - stop what you’re doing and download it right now. It’s free! The pro version is only about the price of Netflix, and you may not even need it. I’ve been using it for a little over a year, and it’s been a total game-changer. And it’s shockingly easy to use on a cell phone.

Here’s what you can do in Canva with very little design experience, all relevant to pretty much anyone:

• You can create poster-quality flyers from scratch and from templates. Bonus: the phone app is so good that you can build a flyer in 10-20 minutes on your phone if you know what you’re doing. Artist managers, you might really like this.

• You can automatically create graphics that are sized for Instagram Stories, Reels, feed posts, Facebook landscape covers, and other types of social media content. Just mastering this in Canva can give back up to an hour of your day per post.

• You can create very nice-looking invoices quickly. I do this for my consulting work!

• And then a lesser-known but incredible feature: You can make websites in Canva, and you can even upload them to a custom domain if you have Pro. Although this is a really simple web solution and doesn’t let you use Google Analytics or go deep on SEO, it’s an incredibly affordable and efficient way to launch a website. This can replace your Linktree with a full website at a custom domain, and the website stays up even if your Pro subscription ends. If you’re categorically against data collection, this is a chance to emphasize that your page doesn’t keep visitor data and push visitors to join your mailing list instead.

When I initially launched my consulting business, I did so by building a single-page website in Canva in one night and uploading it to meintheclub.com. I later upgraded to multi-page (there are good YouTube explainers for how to do this), and I only recently migrated to Wordpress. For getting started, it was perfect. And for fixing your link-in-bio doldrums, it’s the best value out there.

List of Clubs

These are the kinds of clubs I’d like to be in around NYC! Wherever you might find music, art, or a compelling experience under one roof, that’s a club to me. I only list clubs I’d enjoy going to. If I list a client, you’ll know.

Friday, June 14 - SVMMON @ Talon
Free all night, and always one of the best goth nights in the city. I’ve made lifelong friends from this party. When it hits, it really hits.

Saturday, June 15 - The Aussie BBQ @ Central Park Summerstage (free)
I’ve worked with Australian bands and managers for most of my career, and this annual show is always one of the best places to see what it’s like to catch a festival bill in their home country, featuring a couple bands each time that will have a much deeper US impact. If you can only see one artist, get there for Sycco.

Sunday, June 16 - Coloring Lessons Juneteenth Block Party @ The Lot Radio
No RSVP, just show up. Records on sale, food on site, and sound by Karlala which is responsible for the unreal audio setup at Public Service. (If you went to that last Sunday, you may have seen me in the club.) Starts at 10am, goes until dark!

Thanks for reading! And now, an image of me in the club…

The Club List is a newsletter from MeInTheClub.com. All issues are available at TheClubList.net. To inquire about marketing services for your work, contact [email protected] and include "Services” in the subject line.