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

The Club List wound up taking Q4 off, which I didn’t personally get to do (and I doubt you did either)! Let’s see…what’s new around here? Well, the answer to that is plenty.

I’ve joined Brainchild as its CMO to help introduce cutting-edge, easy-to-use marketing tools that empower creatives and their companies at all levels. As a new addition to Nvidia’s Inception Program, Brainchild is a rare business that started as an artist-owned marketing firm and evolved into software development. I think their flagship program Logos will be a game-changer for how creative businesses of all sizes market themselves, and I can’t wait to show you a preview. Want to see it? Ask me!

The goal of Me In The Club has always been to work with creators and founders on real landings for big ideas, but my fractional practice leaves plenty of room for supporting great records. Currently, I’m project-managing two artists and building their US teams: the talented and road-tested rocker James Bruner, and the envelope-pushing indie multi-instrumentalist Lou Oma. I’m also overseeing US growth for the (also artist-owned!) Arabian punk/psych/noise indie label Anomally Records, which officially launched at the end of last year and is now scheduling its first releases.

And I’m proud to continue supporting A2IM at length as their Special Projects Lead, which I’ve been thrilled to stick with in their tireless work for the US indie music industry. What brings this all together, and how do I have room to work with more folks? The answer is simple: I care deeply about leveling the playing field for independent creators and founders, and all of my effort revolves around that. It’s all in one alignment, for me.

There’s a new trend influencing my decision-making around all of this, and it’s probably influencing yours too. It stems from a fracture in trust felt by artists and people, and we’re going to all have to bridge it. Let’s talk about it.

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.

The Organic Era (or, A Crisis of Confidence)

There is a commercial Google released a couple months ago that is arguably the only good TV spot about AI to date. It aired in the middle of big football games during the holidays. Maybe you’ve seen it.

In it, a child has lost their stuffed animal - a lamb named Mr. Fuzzy - and the parents feel really bad about it. So, they use Gemini to find one like it, and they get the idea to devise a story about where Mr. Fuzzy could have gone. An adventure. Skydiving. The Running of the Bulls in Pamplona, perhaps? 

And then, they have Gemini’s creation tools generate photos and video from the big vacation. It’s cute! The lamb has seen so much and looks so happy. This lamb has lore now. And so, he sends a video message from the moon saying he’ll be home in “7-10 business days.” The replacement toy has been shipped, but imagination wins the day. The music throughout is playful, the kid can play again, and everyone is happy.

I grew up in the kind of home where I knew my parents loved me, and it’s easy to picture them doing this. It’s touching to just about everyone. It’s a moment where the first wave of AI isn’t presented as replacing humans the way its worst corporate advocates would tell you, but adding to their daily lives and inner worlds instead. I told you it was good.

There’s just one problem.

Instead of the parents telling this story while also acknowledging this lamb is different, they had a nice bonding moment with each other and then, uh…sorta-kinda lied to their kid. Not in an undetectable way - I mean, the lamb has a voice suddenly - but how many young kids would understand that this is referencing a shipping timeline? These aren’t exactly Amazon Prime subscribers.

A child can still hold two truths at once. A stuffed animal isn’t biologically alive, but the way kids relate to one helps them learn about themselves and the world’s mysteries while play-acting friendships. I was acutely aware that thousands of copies of any given Beanie Baby existed as a kid, but it was fun to pretend they were all related if I was looking at a pile of one character in the line at a gift shop. Siblings are different even when they’re identical twins, right? There’s room to imagine a world in which multiple universes of the same lamb exist, or in which every Mr. Fuzzy is the same little guy made more real by memories shared with the one that’s yours. It’s both an intelligent and emotional exercise, and it comes with the knowledge that your parents are different. They can say things to you on their own, and they can hug you.

This kid can almost certainly handle the truth while still enjoying the fantasy, and recognizing it as coming from a place of love. The parents, for some reason, don’t quite connect the dots for her. (And the parents even had years to learn about the Ship of Theseus.)

You can watch it here if you haven’t seen it. It’s sweet on paper, but it assumes something subtle about adults that I find to be a little cynical at heart. And yet I keep finding adults acting cynically with AI in its present mass-market form, in ways that are already impacting how artists want to move and how people in general want to move.

I see adults replacing their voices whole-cloth with generic LLM usage, which has made it so that people with “good ideas” that I get introduced to by friends on LinkedIn turn out to transparently be drafting every post (or comment!) in ChatGPT. Why would you do this, as someone trying to be a “thought leader”? Do you genuinely think people are moving so fast that they won’t notice? Is short-term engagement worth sacrificing your writing voice or credibility? I don’t personally want to train LLMs to write for me, and while you can train one to write in your voice if you really want to, grown executives are doing this stuff with fully stock material. There’s nothing social about running a conversational platform like this.

The parlor trick at the heart of first wave AI tech - “Hey! It talks!” - is not being understood by the mass market as a tool so much as a laziness pass. It’s a sign the marketing outpaced the still-evolving functionality. Some get it, and they recognize the amazing power LLM tech has to format and recombine language for everything from SEO keywords to marketing timeline drafts and coding assistance with the right guardrails. But when you’re willing to throw your personal perspective under the bus to save a few minutes of writing, what does that say about your motivations? 

It’s even spread to some newsletters, which I have mercilessly unsubscribed from; I just don’t see value in those when not drafted by a person. (Any imposter syndrome you’ve ever had should be long gone, if you’re keeping score at home.) 

Then there is the flip side of this cynicism, which is cynicism towards all applications of this tech. With the way a lot of it evolved by training on intellectual property without permission (people’s writing, people’s art, you name it) and also as a scapegoat for Big Tech layoffs in the rocky economy of the past couple years, this is fair. Trust is earned, and AI-related tech has to earn it. But you don’t want to get left behind as tech evolves, either. Skepticism is healthy as a default position; cynicism rarely is.

It’s incredibly important to understand that between this and increasingly tough news events - some being magnified by AI slop and deepfakes, some plenty nightmarish on their own - plenty of artists and users are checking out of the Internet except when they have to. TikTok, CBS News, and the Washington Post have all been gutted by heavy-handed billionaire control over the last couple of months. Most of Minneapolis spent January in the street. We tried out a nationwide general strike last Friday for the first time in generations. No one should be surprised that a whole lot of people want to touch grass. Doomscrolling is one thing; this is something much more than that, a trending towards rejection of the online world as we knew it. The AI Era is here, and the Organic Era is also here. It is not one or the other; we live in both.

Even going back to the end of last year, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard artists say they’re prioritizing organic growth, or real world connection, or wanting to only promote themselves away from Spotify or Meta or any other Big Tech entity of their choice. These things sometimes struggle to coalesce into DIY movements - community as an ethos is one thing, community organizing is harder! - but it is a reaction to a crisis of confidence in the current methods of modern living, and that’s the kind of environment that gave us punk rock 50 years ago.

New Yorkers especially remember what it meant to be doing everything alone with our phones in 2020. The new ways of doing things in the mid-2010s have become the old ways, and people want out.

I am not necessarily offering immediate solutions to this by any means. In fact, for civilization’s sake, I would argue that embracing the Organic Era IS the solution.

I would argue that much like the Internet we got after the get-rich-quick schemes of the dotcom bubble burst, the only way we will ever fully use new tech to benefit human experience is to first deeply respect human experience. We collectively have a need to move forward from telling people, “This thing I sell is what you want,” and instead showing them why it improves their lives without hidden catches. It’s the same with musicians.

Musicians have largely been in such a hand-to-mouth position for so long that the joys of doing certain kinds of shows and releases just because has been incredibly easy to lose, in favor of doing only what makes a little money and suits the timeline in place. I know this sounds a little funny on paper since I do so much with artists to set their rollouts, but I would love to create an environment that empowers artists to do more things purely for love of the game. Consider how frequently visual art is made for its own sake; music for its own sake has always mattered, too. A little controlled chaos is important, and it’s good for your long-term story, too.

The people I work with at companies get this impulse, often having been musicians themselves. Creators and founders often have a ton in common; inventors like making things, and the best of both of these sorts of people are all idealists.

There is a bridge to build with how you reach audiences now, and it’s outlined by the run toward what is felt as real. It’s also outlined by the impulse to make sure things get better instead of worse.

At my core, I’m a futurist. I prefer music that sounds like it’s being made a year from now, but I love considering how music from decades ago influenced it. I’m the guy who played Cyberpunk 2077 all the way through over the holiday season in 2020 - when that game was still so new and unstable that it crashed during the ending and I had to beat it again - and thought “Hell yes, I love dystopian futures but I should also consider what looks familiar here.” I’m also someone who read Snow Crash and thought its concept of the Metaverse was far, far away from whatever Mark Zuckerberg was telling people it was - escapism from societal near-collapse, not a parallel Earth to monetize when you’ve already conquered the original - while also noticing it had fascinating things to say about how we don’t assign enough power to language.

I’m sometimes a bigger skeptic with records and inventions because I know and love their source material. And at the same time as all of this, I believe in the potential of creative work because I believe in the potential of people. 

Imagine a world in which all of tech, not just its best-intended members, also believed in people. Consider how hard that feels to reach in the present day. Instantly, you’ll recognize it’s easier to be a real person reaching real people where they are, especially right now. 

You’ll still get them through ads, but I think it’s more powerful - as I always have - to reach a human by being human in coffee shops, in conversations, at industry events, and in the ways your work speaks to them. Relationships have always mattered, but I think they’re absolutely the entire game in 2026. Think of how bluntly AI-driven cold outreach has become, and how much that’s magnified the power of already knowing the person you’re talking to. And I don’t think it’s any coincidence that college radio made it to the Times before the end of 2025, right in the middle of all our streaming discourse - who could have guessed that human music taste would stay important in an era of recommendation engines?

Don’t be afraid to go outside. The people you need are very likely there. Let’s never assume they’ll come to you on their own, and always know they’re looking for something real.

I plan to spend a lot of time reaching people organically this year. Hopefully, you’ll come with me.

One Thing You Can Use Today

Take notes on every business conversation.

No, seriously. Every one!

Even if it means you go home and type stuff out or write it before you crash.

If you talked with someone about collaborating with you, regardless of the time? That’s in your notes.

And let’s be honest. The further away from pre-2020 office culture we get, the worse people are at timing these conversations and the better you have to be.

Case in point: if you are in a band, you have almost certainly had someone try to approach you to talk business (usually other musicians) at 1am and after, long into the afters from whatever show you played. I know this because I’ve been in a band and had that experience - guys come up to you on various substances at 3am sometimes, trying to talk shop! And you know what? They won’t remember any of it - and I do mean ANY of it - the next day.

So, you have to write it down. If it’s somebody who’s wasting your time, you’ll find out quickly. But I generally find (especially away from city centers) that people have great ideas and aren’t used to realizing they can act on them, or know how to do that. Maybe they wind up being someone you genuinely can work with, or they know someone who has it more together. You just never know.

This helps in a lot of ways. It’s great for business admin, great for work projects, and absolutely stellar for creative purposes. I learned it from being a journalist first, and from being a dreamer talking to other dreamers second. 

Lots of people scoff at dreamers (yes, even in my line of work), but let me tell you from experience:

When you can ground your dreams on a printed page and then repeat other people’s dreams back to them - and especially if you have an idea to help! - everyone usually comes out ahead from it.

And in general, you’d be surprised at how bad most people are at taking notes anyway. So you can refine a tough skill, while you’re at it.

Track of the Week

Texoprint - “Getting Ahead”

I absolutely love noise rock with a post-punk edge, which you probably know if you’ve been here for a second. But let’s face it, there are countless bands that say they make this kind of music but struggle with writing an earworm. Texoprint is NOT that band, and this track from September’s great Modern Living finds the Rotterdam trio locking in with each other to a playfully cutting, yet hypnotic degree that masters like Mclusky (on the noisy side) and Shame (on the laddish side) would certainly appreciate.

Bandcamp 

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.