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

If you’re in NYC and enjoy indie rock or care about the spaces it’s played in, you should roll up to Our Wicked Lady’s two-day fundraiser show this weekend! More in the List of Clubs about that.

It’s easy to get hung up on the constant pressure to stay savvy about promotional tools, when they’re always ultimately a means by which to convey what you’re doing. Today, we’re getting into why that matters in an era where you’re often struggling to have a person on your marketing team that isn’t you, let alone to have a few team members in place.

And as I get into that…if you’re going to SXSW in March, this is your reminder that I’ll be there from Saturday 3/8 through to the end of it. Tag me with places to be. I’m going to do the same with you.

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.

Where Art Meets Science

A little while ago, I was having a conversation with a relative about her aversion to technology.

We’ve all been there. Maybe you’ve had to walk a family member through troubleshooting their smartphone, or you had to set up two-factor notification on a parent’s email. 

The thing that confused me in this situation, though, was that this relative was not particularly old. Technically she could order off the senior’s menu, but she’s a long time away from thinking of senior living, let’s put it that way. And we were solving a pretty easy “my email storage is full” sort of problem.

I brought it up a couple days later, and she told me, “The thing is, I don’t want to learn how to use this stuff myself. The old ways are better.”

You might wonder, “Oh my god, who would think this way?” But if you’ve been dealing with hardcore vinyl purists and “I prefer analog, it makes things sound ‘warmer’” music types over the years as much as I have, the argument is familiar. It even sounds a lot like people who still hire publicists to “get a premiere,” a fully obsolete strategy at this point. Lots of intelligent people learn what works for them, and then they get rigid in their approach.

And what I said to her in response is something I’d say to a client:

“The thing is, you can prefer your methods, but you still need to know how to communicate with other people. That doesn’t mean you have to lose your sense of self. If you were a band I work with telling me you preferred typewriters over everything, I’d suggest typing your next show flyer on one and putting it up on a simple piece of paper next to other show posters somewhere, just to see who reacts. You’d be meeting people where they’re at, but in your own way. That’s special by itself. And that’s just one way to do it.”

She got a kick out of that when she thought about it. Which I think does speak to an underlying truth - our methods for how we put ourselves out in the world become part of who we are, and changing them can be threatening to the self at first. But we’re human. We learn. You have to constantly examine what serves you, versus what serves your concept of you. Change is part of growth.

I was reading the very solid B2B marketing newsletter Exit Five this week, which is itself a smart combo of “work with us” and “we’ll give you lots of helpful knowledge while we’re saying that.” There’s a brief discussion within it that touches on future marketing teams being split into “art” and “science.” In context, that’s the idea of more cleanly breaking marketing teams into two halves: longer-term strategy and direction (art) and shorter-term revenue creation (science). In an era of smaller marketing teams (or a “more agile” team on a good day), this is important.

And it’s worth then considering how this plays out for someone like me.

When I work as a fractional leader for a growing company, they need strategy but also movement. Investors tend to need to see growth metrics sooner rather than later, and urgency is important to demonstrate. (You never want an investor to say, “Are you actually trying to hit these KPIs or what?”) By my nature, I’m heavily steeped in the art of marketing, but I know how to execute the science of it and teach others to do it. So if the company is scrappy enough, I may need to do some of what we’d otherwise want to hire a technical specialist for, especially at first.

Is it an ideal use of my time to firm up a strategy and then deliver it? Not always. It gets tougher to think big-picture then. For the right clients though, the rules change. We’re in an era where a startup might be dead before we can train up a specialist under me, and margins in music are tight across the board. Scaling to where “art” and “science” can be separated is important - this requires clear boundaries from both myself and who I work with! - but it’s just not how things are going in a lot of sectors. The era of the big, unwieldy 100+ person agency is well on its way out, and it’s the same for internal marketing teams.

And if you’re an artist, I’m sure all of this sounds very cute. If you’re marketing your work, you start out by trying to be the entire team. As profit gets tougher to find, you often have to be the entire team, which is the tough secret of modern music making that a lot of the industry wants to try and not think about too much. Yes you may want to be able to put a pro on retainer, but breaking even is the new Step 1.

I get a ton of joy out of helping creative people navigate these things from a perspective that’s couched in the art and science of marketing, while also not wasting much time in doing it. Now that experienced artist managers often can’t afford to work with someone on building better revenue streams and strategies until they’re consistently filling 800-cap rooms, there is an increasing need for expert help to light a path forward. And that demand is being sustained across the marketing world I work in. This is true whether you’re a bootstrapped company owner trying to get Series A funding, a nonprofit weighing out its options in the current political climate, or a musician dealing with conflicting advice and bad actors every time they search for help on Reddit.

Where does that leave the less tech-inclined sole proprietor? Well, there’s value in knowing just enough for your art to be dangerous.

A year or so ago, one of my best friends got me added to his grandmother’s weekly mailing list. She’s in her 90s and is a retired English teacher. Her mailing list isn’t on Beehiiv like this one, or any other feature-heavy provider. It’s just an email she sends from her personal account to a constantly-updated small batch of friends, family, and their friends. And each time, there is a Word doc attached.

That Word doc contains a poem she wants to share with us all, and these poems are never an afterthought. They’re often from heavy hitters like Rainer Maria Rilke, tend to be timely with current events, and always demand a second read. They may be sweet and short, but they’re never basic. It’s as far from “live laugh love” as it gets.

Her mailing list isn’t blind-copied, so sometimes when she really nails it, I’ll get a reply-all from someone she loves who needed to say how much it resonated with them. 

She has just enough savvy to give this to everyone in a way that’s easy for them to digest. It’s just modern enough of an approach, but it’s real and special. And even though I haven’t met her in person, it says so much to me about the person she is - just as much as it says something to me about the potential we all have, in however we communicate our curiosities.

One Thing You Can Use Today

This one is for the “working stiffs.”

If you’re a small business owner, you can benefit from it. If you’re an artist who works a “regular” job, you’ll benefit too.

Every day, when you make whatever to-do list you have, you should also make a “what do I want to make?” list.

That list may be something you can only tackle weekly. Or, hell, monthly. This is more than okay.

Look at this list, when you make it, and then add a second portion:

“How would I do it?”

This is your research portion. Maybe you want to know how to record yourself. Perhaps you have a kind of vocal training you’ve always wanted to get a handle on. Maybe you want to make visual art, and you need brushes or pens or tools of some kind.

It’s not just limited to what we typically understand as art, either. Being an entrepreneur, especially if your initial resources are limited, requires a combination of creative thought and optimism. And all of this can only really be sorted out through research.

One summer when I was in college, I spent a month holed up in my room just trying out mic placement for guitar sounds. Did I come up with something perfect? Not at all. But I researched how it was done on records I loved, and the knowledge has stuck with me. Today, if you give me two Shure SM57s and a mixing console, I can still phase-match an on-axis and off-axis microphone together for two tracks of one very big guitar sound, and I spent a whole bunch of time in recording forums to get the knack for it. It’s not a trick I get to do at parties often, but it’s quite a trick.

In my experience, if you get hung up on not knowing how to do something, you very well may not do it. But if you look at how to do it and then try and tackle the process first, some of what you’re aiming for will naturally begin falling into place.

Go back to this list. Try to get to where your “how” research is identified.

Now give it all a try.

Track of the Week

PC World - “Doublevision”

Reader recommendations are welcome here too, and this perfect slice of quirky synth-punk really hit the nail on the head. Like a lot of my favorite artists in darkwave and EBM (along with other synth-heavy subgenres), there’s something un-serious and also totally-serious about London’s PC World, and their Infinite Dream Weapon EP is a new favorite because of it. “Doublevision” is the perfect example, with a sense of danceable mischief that’s akin to standing under neon while watching a training video for a forklift that’s been fitted with chrome weapons. Don’t worry, I Googled the name for you already.

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.

Saturday, Feb 1-Sunday, Feb 2 - Save Our Wicked Lady Fundraiser Show
A rare instance of listing one club, and one club only, because this one matters a whole lot. The Thing (who I think are great and extravagantly underrated locally) headlines Saturday night, and Miranda and the Beat returns from New Orleans to headline on Sunday night. An absolute pile of several of the best indie rock acts in NYC right now are playing with them, and each night is $20 (before fees, which are chill).

We’re losing Paragon in a couple months already, and as North Brooklyn keeps changing, it matters to support one of the few true hubs for consistently adventurous band programming that also has a great system and layout. It’s worth pointing out that OWL is willing to partner with a buyer to keep going, and I applaud their transparency in doing what they can to keep it alive on the best possible terms.

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.