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- The Club List, Issue #18: Keep It To Make It
The Club List, Issue #18: Keep It To Make It
Kodi McKinney
September 27, 2024
Welcome back to The Club List, a newsletter about making a business out of what you love.
If you’re interested in independent music writing and based in NYC, you should make a point to be at the ANTICS magazine launch party on Sunday. Scroll to the List of Clubs for the RSVP link!
From now through December 31, if you’re a label, distributor, or booking agent, I’m offering a ROSTER DEAL on the Discovery Package I do for artists and creators. You can read more about it here, but here’s the gist:
If you opt in two artists you’re working with, I can also include a third artist at no extra cost to you.
If you want to opt your own work in, I’ll include two of your artists at no extra charge.
And if you’re an artist seeing this and going “but what about me?,” you get 20% off just by mentioning this.
If you’ve been waiting, now is the right time. Let’s get after it and grow together.
Today’s issue gets into some thoughts I had on realizing I’ve got a platinum-certified record with my name on it now, and how despite this, success is often subjective. But then, if “making it” is in the eye of the beholder, what do you have to do first?
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Keep It To Make It
I had a conversation the other day with someone who has never stopped moving around genres as a musician. She started as a metal singer, flipped to making electronic music, and generally tries not to repeat herself across projects.
“I do the other work that I do to bankroll following the urge to write and perform,” she told me. “I need to be able to do this to enjoy being alive.”
She spoke about what she did with a kind of reverence. Not the usual outsized conviction you might expect from someone is focused on Making It, with dollar signs in their eyes.
Instead, her mind was set on keeping red off of her balance sheets and still moving forward as herself, living in the way she loves to live. She had projects that gave her stable income, and then she had her passion projects, too. In other words, she was focused on Keeping It.
This goes hand in hand with a question I often ask clients I’m speaking to for the first time.
If it’s a corporate situation with stakeholders, I ask: “What do you feel are the key performance indicators you need to see?”
I ask the same question to artists, without the corporate-speak.
“How do you measure success?”
There is no wrong answer. Some artists want to play Madison Square Garden one day. Some want to be the next Taylor Swift. Some want to do a headlining tour, or just play shows outside of their hometown. Some want to affect one person’s life with a song they wrote, as a kind of romanticism towards community. Some want to be able to be a full-time artist, with no need for a second job.
It’s important to know what your ambitions are. And also, it’s important to know what you want next, or what you’d want if you don’t hit those goals.
Several years ago, I walked into a room at SXSW and saw an artist playing for a group of about 100 people. I already knew his producer, and I was floored after seeing him live. When we started working together, his goal was to play as many shows a year as possible, so the campaign I built around him with my team was focused heavily on getting as many in-studio opportunities for him as we could. He was already touring and wanted to do it over and over, so we kept him busy. This worked, and all of his numbers skyrocketed, not even stopping after our time concluded.
I felt from the first time I saw him that he had a really high ceiling as a career artist.
This week, I found out that a single we’d all worked on with him back then was just certified platinum in the US. For me personally, it was a huge achievement to be part of building someone from the ground floor to 1,000,000 copies. For him, I am sure there are goals past that; he still tours.
I have my own goals past that, too. Many of them have nothing to do with how many records someone sold.
You don’t stop when you hit a goal. You figure out what’s important to you next, and that’s what you do.
For most artists, just being able to break even doing music is the step 1 goal. Which, in many cases, is actually what I’m helping artists do. If you’re in the black, you can invest more into your work, or into living, or both.
The Discovery Package I do? That’s about making sure artists have clear pathways for cleanly promoting shows they play, marketing directly to fans, and getting more consistent revenue from people who either already want to give them money or people who don’t yet know that they will want to give them money.
But Keeping It is also about building income streams through merch and other methods, getting your business admin right, nailing down touring strategy (especially the DIY kind), and about steering artists towards smart choices when they do want to invest in themselves. Because for every artist that can eventually make a small living (or more!) doing music, there will be three who lose money doing it. I don’t want artists to lose money in the long run, at all - I believe in building a bigger middle class of artists.
And so, the first goal I have for everyone involves breaking even.
And then the next goal involves surpassing that.
Before you Make It, you have to Keep It.
One Thing You Can Use Today
We talked above about the universal question of how you measure success.
Here is how I personally measure success, in any given moment.
If I have the ability to enter flow state with anything I am doing, then to me, I am succeeding.
We could spend a full letter talking about flow state and how to enter it, and at some point, we might. There is a ton of New Age-y stuff floating around about the concept as a whole, but in short, it exists somewhere between discipline with a process, and surrender to the process. Greater repetition of anything you do makes it more possible to trigger flow state.
For me, success is about whether I can become so engrossed in the process of what I’m doing that the rest of the world ceases to be half as interesting. I am constantly intrigued by the world around me. Existing in the ever-passing now is not always a given. So the process itself must be fascinating to me, with a combination of “anything could happen in this context” variables and “but this is what will happen” framework.
The first time I experienced flow state was while playing a guitar solo I had written and rehearsed, in my high school’s jazz band. Time seemed to slow down, in a way. The hands moved quickly, but the world did not. Every time, it was like this. At first, it felt like a superpower.
But in one performance, I thought the band had sped up for some reason during my solo break, and it completely threw me off balance. No, I had actually played the solo at twice the speed I usually would, and my mind had played a trick on me because it was a big show and I was nervous. My nerves kicked in and knocked me out of flow state partially. My internal framework had changed.
Frameworks are internal and external. Create an external framework that’s interesting to your brain and does what is necessary, rehearse the process it demands, and then execute it. Then, do it again. This applies in a whole lot of businesses and concepts, and it eventually allows you to do what most people can’t.
And then remember that your internal framework is just as important. Some think that nerves are useful to have. But with flow state, you have to have such confidence in the process that your nerves shut up and get out of the way. If you don’t, rehearse first before changing the framework.
Track of the Week
Clutter - “Holy Brother”
One of the more interesting guitar-driven indie records I’ve heard in a while comes from Stockholm, a place I’d personally associate with metal and punk legends (not to mention Sweden’s lengthy history with pop). But Clutter is something a little different from that. They’re really going for it vocally on “Holy Brother" while playing what feels more like sped-up garage rock, and I’m fully OK with that. Their debut 7” comes out on Pnkslm next month, and you’ll see them at Viva Sounds if you’re on the fall showcase scene in Europe. If I’m this here for a first single, it’ll be fascinating to see what else they can do.
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, September 27 - Ninjasonik + The Death Set @ Baby’s All Right
The first time I saw Ninjasonik in 2009, they were at Cake Shop and it was one of the wildest, most confrontational shows I’ve ever been a part of. For all of the ink that gets spilled about the wilder side of bloghouse-era New York, these guys don’t get enough credit for their role in it. Now they’re playing again, and this is your chance. Go only if you’re prepared to get a little wild.
Saturday, September 28 - Criterion Mobile Closet @ Alice Tully Hall (Lincoln Center)
The New York Film Festival is this weekend and next weekend, and you could do far, far worse with your Saturday than stopping by and walking into the on-wheels version of the Criterion Collection. You’ll only get a few minutes in it and there will probably be a line, but if you’re even a little interested in movies, who wouldn’t want to see this?
Sunday, September 29 - ANTICS debut issue release @ Kaleidoscope Studios
Free with RSVP! The first issue of a music magazine that’s owned and operated by veteran music writers, with a seriously impressive list of editors and contributors. DJs will be going all night. In an era where print is gradually mounting a comeback for established brands, seeing something this audacious and independent is truly exciting.
Thanks for reading! And now, an image of me in the club…
