A Musician’s Battle with Social Media

Got hardly anything done this weekend because it’s festival season and I crashed after Bon Odori. I knew this would happen so I did my best to complete some good recordings before the weekend and succeeded. We have two tracks to work with my friend who is mixing and helping with some production aspects.

Still a long way to go even with those two songs but at least we can use 4-6 hands at once now. Today I wanted to record some backup vocals and then by Friday record one more and clean up these for some poliashing. Not a final version yet but a rough final version if you will, we will finally know where everything goes and exactly how we want it to sound.

Since I was too tired to play yesterday I tried to promote my existing body of work again, using what I’ve learned over the past few years about social media and algorithms. and editing.

But as my technique improves, and as my work is more solid, the standards continue to climb. People‘s attention spans only become shorter and more defensive against anything that isn’t an instant dopamine hit.

Of course, there’s the possibility that the songs aren’t all that good, but it’s really hard to imagine them not landing much better 10 or 15 years ago. I can see in myself a lower tolerance for anything that requires a time commitment. If I don’t know what something is about in the first 3 seconds, I’m skipping it unless I really really trust the person, and sometimes I don’t even look at who made something. So it’s makes sense that this is how other people are behaving too.

I doubled down on the vintage filters because I only used an iPhone 12 to record most of my videos and I don’t have a lot of skill or storage space to maximize the quality on any device.

I realized that no matter how hard I try, YouTube will treat my work as originating in Japan, even with a VPN because I haven’t used it consistently over the years. So I made Japanese and English titles and descriptions and put Japanese first.

I also reuploaded a few old shorts to Instagram where I do much better, especially with carousel posts. Reels don’t do great because they reach more strangers and people who know me, even a little, are way more receptive to my work.

I tried out trial reels and found that they are a really good way to see what strangers will think. As expected most didn’t respond and the trials died at about 100 views, similar to YouTube. But it was a blanket failure. I got 5 likes from strangers and a new follower! That’s something.

Let’s see if they are real supporters though. Liking a single post and liking all my work is different, and I’d trade 100 of the former for one of the latter.

It’s quite a daunting task though to keep posting these things so I am only going to do it when I have finished my recording or practicing or writing for the week.

All of this is reinforcing two things for me. First is that face to face is at least 20 times more impactful than online for me. Second is that my recorded work is likely going to do much better because live has so many imperfections that even the layman can notice them. Imperfections are fine but there are nice endearing cute ones and ones you want to clean up as much as possible. There’s raw and then there’s sloppy.

I think live would land better if people already knew the songs better which is why I’ve got to go play more!

Here are some of my latest re-edited clips. I don’t expect them to go viral but if a few people appreciate them and check out our live album that’s a big win!

https://youtube.com/shorts/mUi-IbB4oyc?si=fa9wMSqVb4nBYT7j

世界と世界のあわいで (引きがかり．．．というか) On the Border between worlds

一緒に歌うっていいね　Singing Together is Better

Singing in a dirt hole