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

There’s a great read in Hearing Things today from Larry Fitzmaurice, which reports on a theme you’ve seen me talk about quite a bit: music’s shrinking middle class. His piece is about indie rock’s mainstream moment giving way to modern realities, and it’s a worthwhile read from the standpoint of musicians coming up in that now. Read it as a companion to what we’ve been discussing here, and keep in mind that while his sources are all within a specific genre, it’s all reflective of the purpose behind the work I’m doing for every creative business.

This week’s newsletter comes from a place of recognizing good you’ve put into the world for others and for yourself, and the ways it can shift reality over time. When you feel stuck doing anything, remember this.

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Why Compounding Matters

I was getting myself situated with a new client’s payroll platform the other day, when I ran into a technical issue. As most people would, I reached out to customer service and was pleased to get a human response, in a world where there’s too often a chatbot between us and civilization.

The agent took care of my problem quickly. I made a point to thank her personally and tell her I appreciated her kindness and clarity in communication, partly in hopes she’d have a bright spot in her day (been there, you need those!) and partly in hopes her supervisors would see it. 

A couple days later, I got an email that encouraged me to provide feedback directly. It was a busy day, but I still came back to it when I had a moment and left a 5-star review, with comments similar to what I’d told her myself. In the strange min-maxing world of modern tech company life, I know these things matter.

Now, none of what I’m telling you is to point out how good of a person I am. At all. I’ve absolutely let that chat close without a note back saying thank-you before, and I’ve definitely left the “tell us how they did” email alone because I was doing too much or didn’t see the point or any other number of reasons.

But over the years, I’ve learned to see the power of compounding actions over time in everything, over and over again.

The concept is big in business circles and in investing; if you’re up on your startup psychology, James Clear’s Atomic Habits famously centers around the incredible power of this idea (and is a must-read, if you do anything where the deck can feel stacked against you). In short, getting a little better all the time will eventually make you a lot better.

However, it’s a key part of how artists develop, too. Even when you can’t see it working, it’s there.

And one example I’ll never forget involved one of my all-time favorite metal bands.

When I was first getting into underground metal in college, I became obsessed with the Swedish melodic death metal act Arch Enemy. (Yes, they’re quite well-known if you’re from that world, but all of it was new to me then. Let’s not split hairs. And full disclosure: I worked on their War Eternal album in 2014, which was naturally a highlight of my time as a metal radio promoter.)

Arch Enemy’s original vocalist was Johan Liiva, a gangly Swedish man with the expected long hair and authoritative bark you might imagine. But it wasn’t until the band dismissed him and replaced him with Angela Gossow, a German woman with even longer hair and a more authoritative bark, that Arch Enemy became stars in the metal mainstream.

Both singers were brilliant on their own terms. Both sounded unique. I loved both of them, and both performed on albums I view as classics. In fact, my favorite song from the band’s catalog has Gossow on vocals. She had undeniable star power and became an iconic presence in the mid-2000s, overcoming rampant sexist trolls who could barely handle that a woman was not just doing death metal vocals but absolutely ruling at them. I personally know a few non-dude metal singers that she paved the way for, and that’s not even counting Alissa White-Gluz, her (also very talented) eventual replacement when she retired from recording and performing.

But I kept following Liiva’s career too, including his band after that, Hearse. I was taken with his vocal approach, which could sound gruff or frantic or existentially urgent, sometimes all at once. Gossow was a fiery taskmaster, made to take over arenas, one of the best call-and-response leaders metal has ever seen; Liiva was a channeler of a more personal darkness, something stranger, more emotionally raw. His work, as much as hers, permanently altered the course of my life.

One night in 2012, I got to tell him to his face.

A mutual friend was doing some work with him, knew I was a fan, and brought him to Idle Hands Bar (RIP) in the East Village so I could meet him. He introduced me as a fan from inside the music industry.

I thought about how frustrating it can be for an artist when the work they do is defined only by the people they did it with. Band fans are often unintentionally great at that.

So I made it clear I loved not just those Arch Enemy records he did, but also his stuff with Hearse. I kept it as concise as I could; it was my first year as a radio promoter, and I’d stopped being shocked by run-ins with artists I was nuts about. But I made sure he knew that he’d been directly responsible for me working in music, and not just because he was the original vocalist for Arch Enemy.

He thanked me, quietly, and got surprisingly emotional. And that passed, and we just chatted lightly with my friend after that.

About three years later, Johan Liiva did a guest performance with the current Arch Enemy lineup for the first time. Then, the original lineup reunited under the name Black Earth (the title of their first album) to celebrate the 20th anniversary of their debut. They also recorded some new material and performed it for a special show in Japan, which was filmed for a live DVD and released as an album too, though not on streaming services. 

Do I think I personally helped that happen in some way? It’s impossible to know, and my understanding is that he was still friendly with the band before the reunion. But I know that telling him how much I loved Arch Enemy’s stuff from that era, while also making it clear I was a fan of his as well, had to have some kind of positive effect. For me, I just cared about making sure I took the rare opportunity to tell a hero of mine that he was one, to his face.

I’m sure that if I told him that, I couldn’t have been the only one. The cult following his work had was no joke. If 20 people tell you that as an artist, what happens? Or 200?

This is the beautiful thing about compounding - everything counts in large amounts, and yes that’s a Depeche Mode reference - and also the incredibly difficult thing about it. You often can’t see the proof of it working, until it works. 

It’s a huge leap of faith.

Entrepreneurs are taught to do this, by the James Clears of the world. Professional athletes do it, too. And certain industries know the rules; the first year of a festival almost always loses money, but the second year has a better shot. But if you’re an artist, you have to make yourself internalize that getting 1% better every day is an actual difference maker. I find that persistence and consistency, time and again in my career, have mattered more than raw talent for just about every artist that was able to do it professionally. 

So, I try to do what I can to level that playing field a bit, and I’m not just talking about the strategy work I do. I try to say thank you more, try to do the kind thing more. 

We’re in a funny time in human history where it’s easy to dwell on what we don’t have yet. It’s easier than it was to get distracted. We have so many options for our attention, without a lot of clear direction.

But I try to remember that angry feedback tends to be louder, and positive feedback tends to be quieter. Ten five-star reviews of a customer service rep can be spoiled by one really brutal one-star review. One fan who hates a person’s singing can be louder, at first, than ten fans who play their record on repeat.

Compounding from a creative perspective, to me, is about two things.

For one, it’s about how persistence can bend reality to match your ambition. What I’m doing right now for clients is light-years ahead of what I was doing a month after leaving my old agency. It’s because I’ve spent the whole time building on what I knew how to do, and I already knew quite a bit. If you already know that what you’re doing should fundamentally work, compounding to build an idea over time is a calculated risk. It has to be underpinned with conviction, but it’s intensely useful.

And then, it’s about supporting the other people in your world. Giving good back to good. Past karma, past the golden rule, and taking an active role in even a small way.

We have lots of distracted souls around these days. Just showing you notice someone can count way more than you’d ever think.

One Thing You Can Use Today

I sometimes have artists ask me how to handle it if a single they have out begins taking off over another single, especially before an album is released. This is a common question when “waterfalling” songs leading into an album launch.

My answer? Stick to your guns and let them run.

Unless you’re doing a big commercial campaign, you often are limited in your ability to dictate which song gets embraced fastest by the general public. But if you take resources away from something that’s working, you may inadvertently cut off a response that’s happening organically.

And paradoxically, a moderate response for one song can cause a domino effect that pushes a subsequent song way up in streaming algorithms.

The platinum EP I worked on had three pre-release singles. Guess which song I thought was going to be the hit? The second single. Guess which song it was? The third. Both did well, but we figured the third single would be the last little nudge before the record came out, and the second single would be the one that built on the first single’s momentum but could stand on its own. It was a cool way to be proven wrong, not gonna lie.

The rhythm of how you’re hitting, and keeping the plan you have in place, is always the most important thing first and foremost. And once things stop moving, you can try new approaches. But give your work room to breathe; it won’t look like it’s helping you to do this, but it is. An interesting example of compounding in real time, one that will probably serve any rollout you do.

Track of the Week

Eyas - “casa7”

The new EP from Baltimore’s Eyas, Quiet-loud, spends more time on the quieter and prettier side than the fuzzy loudness the phrase might make you think of if you were raised on a steady grunge diet. But for me, it’s the moments where rhythm suddenly takes center stage that find architect Jenna Balderson truly shining. “casa7” is one of those moments, and when a deeper read reveals Bartees Strange’s credit for synthesizer and production, it both makes total sense and also doesn’t distract from the impression that Eyas has something to say as an artist that’s fully hers.

Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

List of Clubs

It’s Thanksgiving Week here in the States. My strongest advice if you’re in NYC is to find a drink with a friend on Wednesday night. It’s a special, lighthearted, anything-goes kind of pre-holiday that has its own value.

We’ll come back to this as usual next week!

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

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