- The Club List
- Posts
- The Club List, Issue #21: Care About The Right Things
The Club List, Issue #21: Care About The Right Things
Kodi McKinney
October 18, 2024
Welcome back to The Club List, a newsletter about making a business out of what you love.
If you’ll be at New York Comic-Con today, there’s a high chance I’ll see you there! Your chances go way up if you stop at my old friend Matthew Lineham’s booth, 3383. It’ll be the right kinds of chaos in there. (And if you’re not familiar with Matt’s work, get familiar. That shirt from The Cure’s last world tour that you see everywhere? You know who did it already.)
Fans of shoegaze, big dreamy guitars, and great indie-rock should also know that Kestrels’ new song “Lilys” is out now! It’s been a blast working with them so far, and you’re in for a treat when Better Wonder comes out in February. I don’t say this about clients lightly, but I’ve heard the new record, and it’s an early gauntlet-throw for shortlists everywhere in 2025. Just a tremendous step up for them.
Today, I get into why caring too much about numbers without proper context will be the death of you, creatively and professionally. Let’s dive in.
The Club List is powered by beehiiv, the best newsletter platform I’ve ever used. Want to try it out? This link will give you a 30-day trial and discounts past that. I may make a small commission from this.
Care About The Right Things
There are reasons I write at length about paying less attention, from a creative perspective, to raw numbers.
I won’t name the band and I’m paraphrasing their post, but I saw an artist excitedly posting about how they had a song hit 100K on Spotify recently and were really excited about it. I won’t take away from that by itself, mind you - most artists never have a song get this many streams. It means you’re starting (starting!) to do pretty well on Spotify.
But they then pointed out other things about their streaming numbers:
They celebrated the fact that they were in the five figures on monthly listeners at one point recently
They made the expectation-managing point that they don’t currently have that many monthly listeners, because, you know, that number isn’t always constant
They somehow also managed to say “we don’t really care about numbers, but” with a straight face in the caption
Most of the positive comments congratulating them were from other bands in their scene. You know, the people who have been trained to care about this stuff. Not fans.
And the one clear and obvious fan who did comment said (paraphrased to protect anonymity here): “I play your vinyl all the time, so they’re not counting me!”
Nailed it.
Musicians, I’m going to throw cold water on every stat you’ve been trained to celebrate:
Spotify claims to have 550 million users worldwide as of 2023. About a third of the population of the US uses Spotify, as well as about a fifth of Europe. This means two thirds of the entire US population is not a Spotify user. Sit with that for a moment!
Instagram is used by about 2 billion users worldwide, monthly. About half of the population of the US uses it. That means half of the US does not use Instagram. Interestingly, TikTok is lower than this worldwide, but used actively by slightly more people in the US than Instagram.
Bandcamp is great for direct sales, but tricky by social network standards (which it only sorta-kinda is). Why? It’s used by a fraction of these audiences. A search using ahrefs.com shows that Bandcamp’s organic monthly traffic averages 4 million visitors a month, but keep in mind that nearly half of all Internet traffic globally is bots, so the real number is likely lower. More importantly, traffic here is quite decentralized: my search shows the Bandcamp user with the most traffic of anyone in the US is TV Girl, and that accounts for just under 9,000 of all visitors. (I’m making an educated guess that the link ranked above them, whose account has since been deleted, was hosting porn instead of music.)
What am I saying here? I’m saying that if your strategy as a musician involves only going through Spotify and Instagram (and maybe Bandcamp), you literally cannot reach a clear majority of the US population. You have to diversify your approach.
Stop and think about how many musicians you know who use only these three channels.
Now, let’s come back to that Big Statistic that got us down this road in the first place: 100,000 Spotify streams on a song. This is only exciting on paper, and yet professional musicians have become strongly wired to chase streams.
For reasons both draconian and inexplicable to all but a tiny handful of very serious nerds, the US music industry collectively decided some years ago that 1,500 on-demand audio and/or video streams is equivalent to one album sale. (That number changes in other countries, which we won’t get into here - Ed.) This means that 100,000 streams on Spotify equals selling just under 67 copies of your album. If you think the next stop is a gold record, think again…you’re 740,000,000 streams away from gold at 100K. Not so exciting now, is it?
Oh, and let’s not forget: 100,000 streams on Spotify means about $340 in royalties, depending on how many listeners were free users. That’s barely a couple days’ wages for one person, let alone a whole band.
To be clear, I’m not trying to be a doomer about all of this. Yes, it’s a giant mess. I still retain the importance of optimistic realism, my guiding principle in life, business, and art. You must know the parameters of your cage in order to shake its bars.
But the thing that ultimately troubles me most about citing Big Stats like this is the expectation-managing about monthly listeners, because it speaks to a far deeper issue with comparing yourself to other artists on these platforms: manufactured shame. Instagram started hiding total likes because of this kind of thing, but you yourself still see them and know you aren’t getting the traction there you did a couple years ago. Spotify used to list “<1,000” if a song had under 1,000 streams; now, you just can’t see how many plays the artist has on a song until they crack 1,000 on it. Meanwhile, you can still inexplicably see streams on Spotify once they pass that magic “we’ll pay you royalties now” number. These networks want you to feel like you didn’t do enough, so you will give them more that they can then profit from.
And unfortunately, I’m also aware that the industry, in its current form, props this thinking up. This will look more attractive to bookers, even though most of them will tell you they’ve had plenty of situations where streaming stats didn’t correlate to ticket sales. It also looks more attractive to bands in their scene, who might be more eager to play shows or tours with them. That second part is only partly psychological, and partly a knowledge gap, which mix into a tricky cocktail.
That’s the core of the problem. This decentralized only in theory, digital-dependent era of “you have to be an artist, but also a self-governing entrepreneur who cares that you’re doing numbers” is messing artists’ minds up. You can’t understand these numbers without triangulating them into a whole picture of data across multiple channels, and social networks and streaming platforms are breaking our contact with reality about that. None of this is core to the creative experience, and most people do not have the context to blend hard data and creativity together in a way that keeps the reward center of the brain focused on the goodness of making. It is taking a brutal toll.
How do you survive it?
You have to care about the right things, as a musician. Making great music, having a strong strategy that you stick to when releasing it, playing excellent shows (if you care about shows!), and being as true to yourself as you can are some of those right things. Doing what makes you happy - you, specifically - is another of those right things.
Numbers alone will never make you happy. Your goals should be as decoupled from your stats as you can manage. Stats are different from fan engagement. Stats are different from money, and they cannot pay your bills by themselves. Let me show you.
Every time someone buys a single merch item or vinyl from you, you make money equivalent to thousands of streams on Spotify. Every time someone buys a cassette from you, you make money equivalent to about 1,000 Spotify streams, and that’s after costs and with you pricing it at $5-6 on your merch table so it’s more of an impulse buy. Every time you get a fan’s email, you can reach them without having to pay some multibillion dollar network for an ad.
Your fans care about what you make, and that you’re focused on making the best art you can.
And I’ll leave you on one other point, that is far too often missed.
Fans don’t want to be part of a faceless crowd to you. Community? Yes. Less important than, say, listener 100,000? No.
You can build without huge numbers. It’s about how you communicate with every person who feels what you’re doing.
One Thing You Can Use Today
The Book of Five Rings is one of the most useful books I have ever read. It’s credited to the samurai Miyamoto Musashi and dated to 1645, so it’s in the public domain.
Here you go. You should strongly consider picking up a physical copy anyway. I’m not a Zen devotee or a Sun Tzu guy, but I refer to this all the time.
While there is way more to unpack from this than I can easily do here, know that there are a few translations of this from the source text, and all are meant to be presented as a collection of parables. The version I linked is identical to the version I own. True to its name, it is broken into five “books” or “scrolls” depending on your version.
But if you skip all the way to the end, you get the fifth book, my personal favorite. It’s called the Book of the Void (or, the Scroll of Emptiness), and it is a single page in length (p.107 in the linked version).
Read it. Think on what it discusses about discerning the difference between what is outside of human perception, versus what is simply not understood (“bewilderment”).
Then, consider a single sentence from the first translation I found of it years ago, which I have not seen in any other edition but find deeply illustrative:
“The Void, too, has limits.”
Track of the Week
Skeet - “Brief Call”
Sometimes, the best new music has waited years to be heard. Coventry, UK’s Skeet broke up in 1981 before ever releasing a song, but “Brief Call” is strikingly simple and impossibly fresh post-punk. It’s part of the new album Simple Reality, created when the Australian label Efficient Space dusted off small-press runs of Skeet’s known tapes and found enough in the vault to release a full LP’s worth of secret gems. It’s the only “reissue” I included in Club’s Choice, Vol. 2 - with very, very good reason.
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, October 18-Sunday, October 20 - New York Comic-Con
Beware, it started yesterday and tickets are sold out. But if you’re in NYC already, maybe you can find a pass anyway. Or maybe you know someone who knows someone. You’d be surprised just how many people are doing something at this professionally.
Friday October 18-Sunday, October 20 - The Other Art Fair
It ain’t Frieze. It ain’t Art Basel. It ain’t allowed, legally, to tell you that. It’s The Other Art Fair, and this is the Brooklyn edition. Always good, always worth the walk-in, and a more affordable alternative to NYCC if you don’t want to deal with the punishing corporate-ness of it all.
Saturday, October 19 - GEL w/ MSPAINT @ Bowery Ballroom
Usually, band names shouldn’t be in caps all the time. With these two, it’s acceptable and also correct. Bonus: the first opener (not on the ticket link!) is The Mall. That band is responsible for one of the best merch items ever, a white T-shirt that just says SYNTH PUNK in giant black letters.
Thanks for reading! And now, an image of me in the club…
