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

Thank you to everyone at 343 Labs for having me out to mentor their production students last week! I am constantly amazed by the level of talent to be found among the prospective DJs, production engineers, singers, and instrumentalists who are willing to dedicate the time and energy necessary to learn music production in a group environment. It’s one thing to find talented people around New York, because they’re everywhere; it’s another thing entirely to meet them in a setting that’s tailored to building their careers and learning from each other. Truly a privilege to talk with them about marketing themselves as they keep growing.

Today, I’m going to get into why printing off a batch of flyers about what you’re building and leaving them at your local coffee shop (presuming they’re cool with that) is an increasingly important part of a complete marketing plan. Let’s get into it.

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Start Local

I’ve been thinking a lot about what I imagine the theme of 2025 to be, from a marketing perspective and a creative one.

Yes, in the short term, we all saw the whirlwind of current events where TikTok became a political bargaining chip, followed shortly by the three most influential tech owners in the US - two of which own most of its largest social networks - seated conspicuously in front of cabinet picks for a presidential inauguration. 

But that’s just the theme of where social media is this second. Marketing is a lot more than that.

And as our national condition drifts further into consolidated power, I see all of this pointing to a shift in favor of localism. 

Think about it. X already has a reputation for pushing advertisers and its prior users away, with increasingly little to incentivize new users with - especially from a content moderation perspective. Meta’s widely-publicized changes are going to significantly worsen the usability of every platform they have, including Instagram, which many millennials like myself have been holding onto for dear life. That’s not even getting into the TikTok-copying short video expansions that every network either has rolled out or is working to roll out, including LinkedIn (hilariously).

That’s just the condition of the networks themselves. What about their users?

There is an entire swath of human beings, especially in the US, who are actively unplugging from what they don’t have to be plugged into as quickly as they possibly can. Present politics, as concerning as they are, function as a catalyst for an issue that’s already there. That issue is what we’re talking about: we are currently faced with a handful of tech oligarchs who are just out of touch with regular people enough that they’ve each decided to build something an increasing number of present users do not want.

And whether you’re mysteriously pro-oligarchy or not, when you see and hear people saying they don’t want to use the big social networks anymore, you need to listen.

I talked about the Slop Singularity last issue. This is its more obvious, more trivial cousin. It is simple: some of the people you want to reach with your work are about to stop using the networks you deliver it to them on. This is a very clear thing that is already occurring.

I’m far from the only music and creative business marketer who has talked at length in public about the need to build your own network connecting fans directly to you. Yes, you need a mailing list. Yes, you need to focus on building it. Yes, you also need to have ways for people to access your work in the physical world, whether that’s low-overhead merch or the classic “print 100 of these flyers about your business off and leave a stack at the coffee shop” approach. These things take time to scale, but you need to be doing them.

The market segments of people who are most open to new bands and artwork and comics and books and films are uneasy with the social corners of the Internet, and they want out. I can tell you this, because I work with and follow many of them across different age ranges, industries, and locations. It’s not just cool-kid Brooklynites or whatever choosing this.

And this isn’t just something artists are going to experience. Every creative-minded business is about to go through it.

But as I seem to have to keep reminding myself in this newsletter lately, I am not - by nature - a pessimist, or even a cynic. I’m an optimistic realist. 

And so, I am wired to look at what another person might see as a swirling black hole of uncertainty and say, “Damn. That’s a big hole. But is there an opportunity to be had by going through it, or around it?”

That part is also simple.

In the Covid era and even before it, we were all looking at the decentralization of modern music scenes. SoundCloud rap, vaporwave, hyperpop, and djent are all genres that came from people having wildly specialized near-to-free access to music and creative tools, then interacting with each other about it. Tellingly, I also just mentioned four micro-genres of hip-hop, electronic, pop, and metal in one breath (and if 100 gecs has anything to say about it, hyperpop can sometimes be all of those genres at once). 

But I also started out in the college radio world, where the humble local station in a mid-sized college town can help set the tone for what its community is looking for.

And the fact is, if certain types of people begin spending much less time on social networks, they need to find places to be and friends to make elsewhere. Other methods of discovery - more traditional ones - have room to gain in that. Your community bulletin boards are about to get a lot busier.

Does that mean we’re going to see a return of city-specific scenes as the driving force in music? I’m not quite sure things will swing that far the other direction, but I know of plenty of US cities where local scenes are strong right now. Tucson’s scene seems to have been waiting for the right band to break for a while, for example. (Does an uptick in localism help or hurt the Dimes Square scene as something that can impact national culture and not just NYC culture? I’ll leave other journalists to spill ink on that.)

And does this also mean that international artists visiting the US have more of an impact they can leave, as the attention economy shifts to being more in-the-moment for the critical first shows here they may play? I have a hard time thinking this shift hurts those bands, who already have enough of the deck stacked against them with visa costs and Spotify’s geo-locking algorithm.

But in any case, if you have humans you’re trying to reach with what you’re making - a painting, a music tech idea, anything - your tactics are going to need to emphasize the physical world more than they would have 6 months ago. And they should be emphasizing your local community, too.

Localism has always mattered. In 2025, I expect it to matter a whole lot more.

Start local.

One Thing You Can Use Today

Do something you’re bad at. 

First, do it because it’s different.

Then, do it because it’s interesting to do a thing you’re not good at twice. For a certain kind of high performer, this is enough reason to stop. Ignore that voice.

If you learn something about yourself or enjoy it, keep doing it.

Why do I say this?

A close friend of mine loves music to an extreme, “you could totally work in the industry if you wanted to” degree. They told me something I found almost shocking: they have never learned to play an instrument, and it’s because they grew up with the belief that you shouldn’t ever do anything you aren’t good at right away.

I’m not clear on if this was from perfectionist parents, or a learned fear of criticism, or something else. But they’re not the first person to have said something similar to me.

Business advice is filled with “Michael Jordan didn’t make his high school team right away” analogies about this, all of which you have probably heard and all of which I will spare you a rehash of. Instead, I will point out something simple:

The next time you try something that interests you and discover you are bad at it, remember that many other people started out bad at it too. 

And if you heed this, you will continue where they stop. That will eventually lead to being good, with time. But first? It will lead to the people who tried and stopped being worse at what you’re doing than you.

(You do not necessarily need 10,000 hours or whatever else pop psychology is suggesting. Just do the thing that interests you.)

You will always get farther at doing anything than someone who stopped trying.

And the reverse of this also applies: just because you’re instantly good at lots of things you try doesn’t mean you’ll be instantly good at everything. This isn’t a check on your intelligence, or anything of the sort.

It sounds so wildly simple, but you’d be surprised at how many people are hung up on the need to be instantly good. The tension between what you can do, and what you can’t do yet, is in fact often where the magic happens.

Track of the Week

MOMI - “Spring In Reverse”

Vocals that aren’t buried in the mix, but obscured anyway. A hook that appears to be built on something between reversed synth and backwards guitar. Drums that are doing just enough. That’s the peculiar, indie-pop/shoegaze pastiche addictive drug called “Spring In Reverse,” from Sydney’s remarkable duo MOMI. It’s rare that a song featuring Hatchie would not be the song I want to tell you about, but that’s how good their MOMI001 EP is. It’s unclear if they’ll do a record past this, and if this is all we get, I plan to treasure it.

Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

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.

Thursday, Jan 23 - CHUFFED @ Earthly Delights
If you haven’t been to Earthly Delights yet, it’s the perfect setting for an indoors 140 bpm-obsessed electronic party. The world’s a mess right now. Come dance about it.

Saturday, Jan 25 - Downtown Gallery Map (free)
Yes, this is the part where I direct-link a gallery map and tell you to have fun, but it’s not just any map. This map covers free galleries throughout the Lower East Side, Soho, and Tribeca, with a couple of Financial District outliers squeezed in. There used to be apps for this sort of thing, and while those are gone to my knowledge, the remote-work boom has lead to an explosion of galleries in the southern half of Manhattan as new things need to be done with all that space. Go check it out; if you’re local, you’ll be amazed at how much is here compared to a few years ago. SoHo and the LES have never lacked, but…something is happening.

Sunday, Jan 26 - ANTICS Issue 2 Release @ Drink.More.Water
Client event! Just south of every great dumpling spot in Chinatown, you’ll have the chance to catch DJs and pick up issues from the writer-owned magazine in a basement filled with music fans. You could do far, far worse with your Sunday.

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.