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- The Club List, Issue #42: The Learning Loop
The Club List, Issue #42: The Learning Loop
Kodi McKinney
May 30, 2025
Welcome back to The Club List, a newsletter about making a business out of what you love.
Today marks the 1-year anniversary of this newsletter! That’s a fun thing to notice. Thank you for being here. I hope this continues to demystify some of what goes into building a creative business and the music industry itself, whether you’re professionalizing your own work or doing new things for fun. It’s always cool to do new things for their own sake.
In 10 short days, it’ll be Indie Week in NYC. I’ll look forward to seeing so many of you there!
Perhaps you have found yourself never quite satisfied with what you know. And perhaps, other businesses have a way of using that against you. If so, I see you, and today’s issue is about that.
Ads From Businesses You Can Trust:
The Learning Loop
I’ve got a confession to make.
You know all those “lead magnets” you see people hawking through online ads? You know the deal: “Enter your name, email, and maybe your phone number, and we’ll send you a free breakdown of the 7 things you need to know about organization structure to help make your first $10 million.” Or: “Send your info, and you’ll get a free guide for how to break your music on Spotify.” Or: “Comment ‘YES’ to get my go-to-market template in your DMs.”
I download all of them.
ALL of them.
I’m not even kidding. Some people ask ChatGPT to confirm stuff they already know, but maybe need better context memory for. My version of this is downloading lead magnets. They don’t usually get read on the spot, but they all get stashed away for later and all eventually skimmed, when I want to analyze how trends are being shown to others and take note of where there’s good advice.
Yeah, I know, marketers are often some of the easiest people to market to. I knew this going in.
But I carefully allocate specific time to reviewing these, and not elsewhere. (If you’re a producer or electronic musician and see Instagram ads regularly, you’ve totally had to do the same thing with free plug-ins.)
Why?
Because there’s a dark format in play with many of these that I think you always have to be watchful for, and it’s a time-honored behavioral hack in capitalism: convince people something is wrong, and then show them you have a solution.
“If you’re not conducting B2B outreach with this strategy in place, you’re leaving money on the table.”
“When you don’t sign up for this accounting platform, you risk losing thousands of dollars in expenses annually.”
And so it goes, on and on.
The darkness in seeing this advertising tactic everywhere is not just in the invented problem, some of which are carefully scripted to highlight things only an expert would know, and some of which are intellectually dubious but stated very loudly.
No, the real issue with this - capitalism as solutions to problems you didn’t know you had, whether these are real problems or not - lies in the cognitive dissonance it creates.
If you listen too closely to all of this noise without realizing it as a marketing tactic - and trust me, it’s a marketing tactic - you’ll start hyper-focusing on all the problems you don’t know about yet. You’ll even see them in aspects of skilled work you do that you don’t yet understand. Sooner or later, you’re subconsciously saying to yourself, “Well, I just need to always question myself until I know every answer.”
But eventually, you have to sit with yourself and accept what you don’t know, and then lean into what you do.
I have the advantage of having done what I do for 15 years. The curse of doing expert-level work with a conscience is, you’re always spending time aware of what you don’t know. My personal solution to this is that I leave set amounts of time a month for work-related learning, which is both less arrogant than shutting out new roads of research and also kinder to myself than saying, “I have to be exploring new methods right now or all of what I know will become outmoded.”
But I also find that this is true when you’re creating anything. If you have a great startup idea, you have to focus on demonstrating that it works for clients and investors both, and also that it can scale, while putting a team together around it. If you’re a musician trying a new path of creation, you also are well-served by continuing to make music in ways you’re already good at; that way, you have both the confidence booster of creating in ways you know and also allowing yourself to have Novice Brain.
It’s sort of like learning a new language. You don’t stop speaking your native tongue altogether as you learn. It’s compartmentalized.
And yet, if I named the number and instances of musicians I’ve worked and played with who get stuck on what they can’t do and forget about what makes them want to make music, I’d be here for hours. I also think of startups I’ve seen get permanently stuck on their SWOT analysis, so micro-focused on threats and weaknesses that they can’t acknowledge strengths and opportunities.
At some point, you have to accept that you won’t know everything. What you have to focus on first and foremost is doing what you do really, really well.
And from there, don’t lose your curiosity, but put a little box around it and compartmentalize it when it gets away from you.
Because in the modern attention economy, some days, your curiosity tells you things about yourself that aren’t as true as you fear. And you’ve got cooler stuff to offer the world than chasing your tail. The imperfections will be the human things that encourage connection where you need it most.
One Thing You Can Use Today
It’s easy to look at numbers that someone else in your field might be putting up and think, “Ugh, but why not me?”
Maybe it’s record sales, or streams. Maybe you’ve got a company that’s growing revenue slowly, but not at that magic $1M or $10M (or higher) annual recurring revenue (ARR) level that your competitor is. Or perhaps they’ve got an interesting new collaborator, or they’re playing a show at the coolest room in town and you haven’t gotten that note back from the booker yet. I get that it’s not always easy to look at this stuff and think about how you support the community you’re in, even though that’s ultimately the best place to come back to.
You are only going to set yourself up for failure if you let incomes or followings make you personally feel insecure. This doesn’t mean that anyone is somehow better than what you’re offering. If numbers alone indicated quality, then I would enjoy Drake’s music.
The fact of the matter is, in any creative work, people tend to go with a) who they know and b) who makes them feel something (which tends to be people they feel they know). The power of compounding is real, and the social component of who you meet has a way of driving everything. Three friends who like what you do can tell two friends each, and so it continues down the chain. The more engaged they are, the more friends they will likely tell.
Word of mouth matters.
So aside from any advertising or personal outreach you might be doing - or that a publicist or radio promoter might be doing for you, if you have a record coming out - make a point to be personally engaged with others. Go to creative-minded events where no one expects anything of you in the moment, and just be real with people. If you have a startup, go to events with other startups, and be interested in them genuinely.
In bigger cities, you can find a trove of this sort of thing on Meetup or Eventbrite; in smaller cities, the hubs tend to be more obvious.
Once you are making a point to let connection speak first, the work you do can then speak. Until real connections are made, you’ll usually be extra noise in a world where many are talented and everyone is fighting for attention. Once you have connections, you can then look very granularly at what “successful” other creatives are doing that works, and then think about which specific systems or tactics you’d add to your approach.
But know right away that there is no substitute for connection, and everything you do in marketing your own work is about finding it and amplifying it. Even David Bowie cultivated real friendships.
Track of the Week
Errorr - “Innocent”
Somewhere between Albini-era Pixies, Catherine Wheel, and their frequent tourmates the Brian Jonestown Massacre, you’ll find Berlin’s jangly-yet-very-noisy Errorr. Their Self Destruct LP delivers on the loud anthemic strangeness this all promises, with its fair share of hooky tunes and guitar feedback, but it’s hard to avoid the feeling that Errorr really wants to be sure you remember these songs later with creative structures and notable catchiness. I tend to appreciate that kind of approach a lot, and it’s most abundant on the opening track “Innocent.” You probably will too.
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, May 30 - Shred Flintstone @ Alphaville
They’re not technically the headliner, but if you know Shred Flintstone, you know this will rip. One of the most outright fun rock bands in NYC, and you don’t get to see them nearly as much these days!
Saturday, May 31 - Diavol Strâin, Delusive Relics, Shanghai Beach @ TV Eye
This is the first Synthicide show of summer. These are always unnaturally good, even if you’re just visiting for a little darkness. Delusive Relics is the exact sort of slinky minimalism I’m trying to slip into on a Saturday evening.
Sunday, June 1 - The beach
It’s back. New York is…well, not good at the beach, but we’ve got beaches! Riis Park is where you’ll likely see me, but I have plenty of good memories from Fort Tilden and Rockaway both. June will be busy. Start it gently.
Thanks for reading! And now, an image of me in the club…
