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

We’re just a day away from the Spotify takedown survey closing, and wow does that story ever get more fascinating by the day. If you know someone who has music on the platform, send them the survey! Takes 5 minutes to do, and deeply helpful to my reporting. I’m closing it down at the end of tomorrow, and I’ll be sharing my findings here next week.

Survey HERE. Closes tomorrow.

Today, we get into branding philosophy, and then I’ll show you how to build a funnel in minutes. Let’s dive in.

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Branding From Within

Indulge me in a flashback for a moment.

It’s Warped Tour, in the early 2010s, out in Long Island. I’m a radio promoter at this point in my career. A lot of the bands I’m working with are metal, hardcore, or something adjacent to that. Several of them are playing, and I keep getting handed cans of Monster Tour Water, which is in a Monster-branded can but is otherwise just regular water. 

(Picture Liquid Death [not a thing yet], scoop the rizz out, and make sure the water is so flat it might have been petrified first. That’s Monster Tour Water. Think Poland Spring with extra steps. At least it’s better for recycling than plastic.)

I get invited onto a tour bus by the manager of a band I’m not (yet) working with. They come offstage, caked in sweat. As they’re preparing to change out of their uniforms, the manager stops them.

“Wait a second. Turn around. Let me see the back.”

The guitarist turns around. There’s a logo on the back of his outfit. All of them have matching logos on. The band’s performance was physical enough that the crowd had multiple chances to see these.

“This can be better,” the manager says. “We need the logos to be bigger.”

Instantly, I realize that he’s doing this thinking of someone seeing the band from 30+ rows of people away and wondering who it is, on a festival bill with 50+ other names. Like a prepackaged boy band, but heavy.

And to no real surprise, their album - released during Warped Tour - made a huge first-week debut on Billboard. 

That’s when I realized just what branding can really do. One very commercial way to go about it, though the band was surely pretty happy with the results. 

This is a valid way to do it for certain goals. But in general, my approach would wind up being pretty different.

//

Flash forward a few years later. I’ve co-founded Marauder and end up working with a heavy band. The music is not as widely accessible, not by a long shot, and they’re more of an underground project with potential to get a cult following. But I love their music, and they ask for my help with branding so their stage show can look extra-impressive. 

Putting uniforms on them doesn’t feel right. They just know they need something. But what?

I offer to take them shopping in Manhattan, and we’ll go visit some stage clothes-friendly stuff that they can see and weigh out for themselves. They agree.

We hit a bunch of places that Saturday afternoon. Upscale boutiques, thrift stores that I knew were top-tier, vintage stores with kind and unkind prices, and a place called Gothic Renaissance so they could see gear like what a modern black metal band would wear and decide for themselves. We went seemingly everywhere south of 14th Street. Some awesome looks, some weird ones, lots of shared laughs and talks about music.

But the place that stuck with them didn’t have clothes at all, and was just somewhere I loved that I thought they might get some inspiration from. It only exists online now, but at the time, Obscura Antiquities had a physical location. So we went.

They got a little lost in the section with decaying old photographs. One of them bought a photo. Nobody bought anything else from the stores that day.

We got dinner, and when I asked for their thoughts, they told me they realized they liked themselves how they were. None of the clothes they looked at spoke to them. And I agreed. I’d spent the whole day with them, could sense how they looked at the world, and felt they appeared compelling for being themselves and also being huge fans of the bands they loved. They also had more charisma in person than they saw in themselves, which is always cool to sense in developing performers.

They were real, they had personalities, they cared about playing great shows, and they could shred. And that’s what people would see.

I suggested they all wore dark jeans going forward (one of them favored lighter pairs - you’d be surprised at how that sticks out in certain situations), and then otherwise, double down on themselves and what they wanted. That was that.

So, what good did that day do, aside from building their self-esteem? Well…

A few months later, they sent me their album art. The cover was based on a decaying photograph of what looked like a class of third-graders. It matched the music inside, and its themes. No other bands in their scene were putting out record covers like that. It was brilliant. They got plenty of metal press coverage, and they stayed with the photo theme for a subsequent record, which built on what they were doing and got even more attention. They had found an aesthetic that was familiar but undeniably theirs, and they stuck with it.

Great branding, to me, isn’t about cutting and pasting until you have something to graft onto your subject. It’s about the internal vision of a creative project lining up with how it’s externally conveyed to the world, and then making sure that the external part is memorable. If you have something strong to say, so should your branding. And you don’t have to iron out the unique parts of whatever you’re doing to get there. You just need it to all be in alignment.

(All of this came back to me because, to my complete shock, Monster Tour Water is available to buy now at my local grocery. So, if you really want to know what normal-ass water in a can tastes like, I can’t stop you. But you’re not missing much, if you don’t.)

One Thing You Can Use Today

Marketers talk a lot about building funnels. This is a term that roughly means, “A model for getting broad attention that will ultimately convert some people to being your customers.” I don’t think this phrase is intuitive, and I don’t even think it illustrates how modern marketing operates on the whole, but that’s a conversation for another day.

With that in mind, your Instagram page can be a funnel, if it’s not already.

Here’s how.

• Bio: A single line about what you’re doing.

• Right under the bio: A call-to-action that urges engagement with the link in your bio. This should say something direct. “Tickets here,” “Get a design quote here,” “Register to vote,” etc.

• Link in bio: You can have more than one technically, but the main one should be the one you want people clicking. It’s rare to see clicks on the others.

• Story highlights: Have at least two, but no more than four. These can be testimonials, press coverage, an about section that describes your work more thoroughly, portfolio samples, a “listen here” direct link to a specific record you made, a preview of what your website looks like - you name it. Also keep in mind that if you include a story with a link in your highlights, Instagram will preserve that link.

• For your grid: you get 3 pinned posts. Pin anything that you feel makes the best impression about your work. Live videos, a really strong commissioned piece, you name it.

Funnels as a concept may be as old as carnival barkers, but now that you know the format, you can make it yours and have some fun with it. It may not seem like a huge deal, but this format consistently boosts engagement for just about every type of online business that wasn’t already doing it. And if you have one but feel like you could make it better, well, that’s what I’m here for.

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, July 12 - Sounds of Detroit: Celebrating 50 Years of J Dilla @ Herbert Von King Park (free)
The Pharcyde is headlining a free show in honor of one of hip-hop’s greatest producers. You can’t possibly need more incentive.

Saturday, July 13 - Book Club Radio Meeting #19
The way into this series is interesting by itself. Location is never public, and neither are ticket sales. You have to message @bcrlibrarian on Instagram and tell them you want to be there. Sometimes it’s sold out and you go on a waiting list, other times you get a ticket link. But, by all accounts, it’s always worth it.

Sunday, July 14 - Mister Sunday @ Nowadays
All I’m saying is, there’s a high chance we have a rainy Saturday and there isn’t any in the forecast on Sunday. Which means this party has a way higher chance to be great than usual, and the chances are always high.

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.