I had this awesome call with Circa from Indepreneur a couple months ago I wanted to share to this blog in case you missed it. We talk about music marketing, of course, but in detail we talk about how you can use storytelling in Facebook ads and advertising in general to develop a fanbase.
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**NOTE THAT THE FOLLOWING IS AN AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPTION FOR REFERENCE, SO IT HAS PLENTY OF ERRORS**
Andrew (00:00):
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the modern music marketing podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Southworth. And this is an example of a piece of content that was uploaded to my YouTube channel. Prior to me starting this podcast that I thought would be perfect to put in this podcast format. It's this, this awesome. I don't know, 40 or so 35 minute chat I had with Circa from indepreneur and he also has a podcast on whatever platform you're listening to this on called creative juice by indepreneur. So you know, I highly recommend you check out intrepreneur and creative juice podcast and the full stack, creative YouTube channel as well. But Circa dropped a lot of awesome gems in this thing, but if, if you hear any references to, you know, this video or like click the link in the top corner or whatever, that's just because it was a YouTube channel video before, and I'm just copying it over here for convenience. So enjoy see you later.
Circa (00:52):
Rock and roll, man.
Andrew (00:53):
I thought a great place to start would just be for you to introduce yourself to everyone on my channel.
Circa (00:59):
Yeah. my name is Kyle, everyone calls me circa, but I try to give people the option to use either one. And I run a company called intrepreneur, which helps independent musicians market themselves more effectively learn the principles of digital marketing and like, you know, two thousands entrepreneurship, modern entrepreneurship, because I think, you know, I'm an independent musician, lifelong, and one of my like lifelong worthy goals would be to help other independent musicians sort of get a hold on all that stuff.
Andrew (01:31):
Awesome. Yeah. And just to add stuff for from my perspective for my channel the entrepreneur program is awesome. Like it's got a whole bunch of courses that like anyone on this channel could definitely benefit from Oh yeah. Yeah. I love it. So one thing that really stood out in our last call was that you told me about how important it was to construct a story around every single one of your releases and then how you use that in your marketing and like all the followup kind of social media stuff around that. So could you dive into that process, how you start that, think about it and then how you actually implement that,
Circa (02:09):
For sure. Yeah. I think that, you know, throughout the history of recorded music and bands as brands and you know, and you, you can trace it back from the fifties through the sixties and seventies and eighties, and all the way up to today is people have made guesses as to what, what story will captivate, you know, an audience what, what value people derive from their music. And I think that labels have been instrumental and, and branding companies and marketers have been instrumental in kind of painting that narrative of like, what is the band supposed to mean to its fans? Are the artists supposed to mean to the, to the world? And you know, we're a lot of that has been sort of off boarded onto our responsibility these days, it's our responsibility to figure out what is the value of our music? What is the value of the content and entertainment that we're providing and who is drawn to it?
Circa (03:06):
Because not everybody's gonna, you know, look at the misfits for instance, which is one of my favorite bands and be like this fits into my narrative of who I am as a person. And here's how so you know, it behooves me and everyone else, I think to go out there and not predetermined, not pre decide, not pre-package what that value is to the average fan and just go out there and discover it. So a big part of my first year coming back into my music career, cause I was alive musicians strictly up until pretty much last year when I finally had recorded music in my new style to release. And instead of like going out there and releasing a single and trying to sell stuff and, you know, doing a big album release, I've spent the past year and probably will spend the next nine months releasing content as much as I can, but in a single format and then dedicating, you know, exploratory budgets to marketing that music.
Circa (04:06):
And really what I'm trying to figure out is who number one, who likes my music, like what is the common type of person or common types of people or avatars of people that enjoy my music. And then more importantly, why? Because, you know, I, I write it, I'm sure most musicians out there you're writing interpretively, you're writing sort of, without such a, it's a hard definition on what the song supposed to mean to everybody. And you get to go out there and figure that out. So what I've done is I've promoted new singles and let people interpret it for themselves. I've tested many different, you know, headlines that kind of indicate what the song might be about and the ones that perform best show me, okay, this is what people would get from this song. And then furthermore, in the comments, when they talk about what it means to them and the personal messages I'm getting, I learn, okay, well, for instance, my song sacrifice, you know, it could be about a million different things.
Circa (05:04):
It could be about creative endeavor, but what people took from it is that it's about addiction and recovery and sort of a beauty in imperfection and like that's one interpretation of the song of millions. So it took really me spending my own money, going out there, talking to people, running ads to figure out, Oh, I have a niche in this addiction culture. I mean, I grew up in, you know, like my parents were addicted in various forms and went through recovery and I've had peers and family members in addiction and recovery. So that makes sense. And I can talk a lot about that, but I wouldn't know to, to sort of tell that story if it weren't for this testing, because I have a lot of stories I could tell. And so what I've kind of been harping in on is like long before you ever try to be a successful music act, you should take the time to figure out what people liked your music, why they like it and what that story is so that you can better tell a story. And all too often musicians sort of right.
Andrew (06:06):
Rush past that. Right? Yeah. I, I totally agree. I I've noticed a lot of people on my not necessarily just my channel, but like reaching out to me and like DMS and stuff and they'll, they, they might have a song out, but they want to rush right into getting into ads and they want to rush right into different ways of promoting their music. But they have no idea who actually would be the right person to listen to the music. They don't have the whole branding and content strategy behind it. And then a lot of those cases, they they're, they're wondering like, why are my ads so expensive? How come people are clicking and they're not following. And I personally, I never had any good results with ads and other marketing methods until I figured out or had a better understanding of who I was targeting and also had the content there so that when people actually went to wherever the hell I'm sending them that they, they can actually see that there's like, it's, it's for them, you know, it's designed for a specific type of person.
Andrew (07:11):
Right. So like a followup for that would be the way I would imagine that you would, you would set this up is you're not just running like one video with one headline. You're probably taking advantage of the I forgot what they call it, but you can kind of do the ad split test where you're putting multiple headlines, multiple descriptions and then maybe even do multiple creatives. And then you just see which one is the most effective or do you actually manually make every single one of them in like a separate ad?
Circa (07:44):
Yeah. There are multiple ways to do it in Facebook as an ad platform. I mean, at any ad platform, you could test messaging. Facebook has a lot of tools to make it very easy. My favorite way is to run, you know I mean, back in the day we would run individual ad sets all targeting the same audience, but they have different ads in them. And that would show us because we could run it per perpetually and we can really do. We examine the results at day five at day 10. How long do we wait? That's all up to you. Facebook has a feature now called split tests where basically they'll automatically test out these different variants. And then they'll tell you a winner. Once they've reached statistical significance, that's a little bit more hands off. You don't control when it ends or how, you know, how much budget it runs to determine a winner, but it's also a quick and dirty way to get an answer.
Circa (08:37):
And you know, that's not, it's not just this, Oh, find out what headline works best and then run it. It's like find out what headline works best and then engage in the comments, find out why it works best for this piece of media. What are people deriving from it? And then go and try to make content that speaks to that narrative. So for me, it's like, I need to go out there and tell my story about my experiences and struggles with addiction and recovery, because that's what people got from my song. And I needed to take that to its natural conclusion. I need to talk to those people and let them know, Hey, this thing you saw that you felt like was you, it is you. I'm going to sit here and reiterate how it is you by telling you my story. And, and you can watch how my story links up to your story.
Circa (09:24):
Cause there's so many commonalities in that sort of, you know, in bat variant of story you know, people in addiction and recovery, they all share a lot of experience. And so, you know, it might seem obvious, you know, if you go and watch my video and you go listen to that song, that it would end up here. But to me it wasn't, I had no idea. People could have thought this is about, you know like letting your peacock feathers spread. Cause that's really what the song is. The song it says my flame is immaculate burning bright. And so it's like, well, it could be about creative inspiration. It could be about, you know, letting yourself bloom creatively, but they chose to, to see this sort of struggle with being an imperfect human in it. And so yeah, like running those tests, it's cool and all to run a test to see which headline works best and get a cheaper result on finding these new listeners. But what's better even is to spend that time to figure out why these new listeners like that narrative and then create content around that narrative and start to develop that familiarity and understanding with your audience's story.
Andrew (10:39):
Right. That's incredibly clever. I have a, like a somewhat related story that I'll, I'll tell my audience that I've never told anyone, but I, I had a campaign that I ran for my song triggered last year which is a song about, you know, how everyone is very triggered on the internet about every social issue. And the message that I had in the song was that these, these issues are like super important and we need to take them seriously, but there's a lot of people that are so triggered and they response is so like violent and aggressive that it's kind of, it makes people treat the issues less seriously because like there's all of this like hatred online and people aren't just discussing the actual problem. So I ran ads to a pretty vague group of people. I targeted people who, the music I thought was similar and I got so many comments that were like, what is this Republican EDM or something?
Andrew (11:39):
Cause they, they interpreted the song is like me saying that everyone that sees this, that, you know, they thought the message was that I was disagreeing with all those issues. And so that it was like Republican EDM and I'm in the comments. Like, I don't think you're getting the message. Right. And I eventually just gave up, shut off the ad because like so many people were just fighting on that point. And to me, what probably would have been the best approach would have been to either embrace that and target Republicans who are into EDM or perhaps like change the ad and, and make it more obvious what my message was. Yeah. Yeah.
Circa (12:18):
I, I it's, it's it's to prompt, you can use these tactics to determine what your best foot forward is in terms of story. And if it's a story that you feel like you can tell, great, go with it. But if it's not, you can also use these methods to understand, Hey, this piece of media or this piece of marketing communication, it's not going where I want it to go. I need to refactor it. I need to figure out why it's telling this sort of undesirable story. So, you know, you can use it in different ways.
Andrew (12:50):
Yeah. And that's, that's kind of the beauty of music is that there's very rarely, at least in my music, one clear message. And I think most artists are the same where you don't necessarily tell one story with a song there's often, you know, unlimited interpretations, which I guess is kind of a blessing and a curse.
Circa (13:10):
I mean, I think a great example is to look at M and M you know, M and M was in the rapid Olympics. He was a battle rapper and a freestyler, and he could have come out like you know, like all these different freestyle oriented coalitions and made albums upon that. And, but, but his story ended up being I'm trailer park, white trash I'm on drugs. My mom's an asshole. And like, my childhood is fucked up and, and I'm, you know, I'm a dangerous like guy for society. And so like I was 13 in on the baseball team, listening to slim, shady LP on the bench and feeling like, yeah, my life's kind of going to, to tatters right now. And this, I identify with this, this makes me feel like I can be an antihero. And I've, I've always said that music, the utility of music most often is helping us embody archetypes when we're, when we feel as if we're powerless because of our circumstance, music comes along and turns that circumstance into like an enviable cool character.
Circa (14:18):
And so, you know, I can throw on toxicity and walk into my middle school and feel okay for a second and feel like I'm a dangerous guy. And like, you know, maybe, maybe my life's messed up, but like don't mess with me. And so like that be helping people embody those archetypes takes learning about what your, what the story is. And for M and M that captivated America, there were so many 13 year old pudgy white kids like myself who, you know, who were like, yeah, man, my life's of going off the rails right now. And this music makes it like, that's a cool thing. Like, I'm cool for that. And so, you know, when we hear a great song automatically the song takes, it elevates the status of the story within the song automatically. If the song is good and the musicians good and they're talented, it takes any story and it makes it something that's cool or an F or an enviable character, an attractive character. And so finding your story is the only way you'll be able to do that for people is to figure out what is the, the, the narrative that they're living and that they see in my music, let me make that ma let me make it okay to be them like, that's what you should be looking for.
Andrew (15:37):
Right. Right. So when in your case, you know, you and I aren't like, we're not huge, huge, famous musicians, like, like M and M and you know, all the big top stars. So for people like us, you know, the indie, indie musicians who were trying to build an audience what's your usual goal in terms of where, where you're often sending people. I mean, you, you took a break from releasing music and now you're getting back into it. Are you initially focusing on just kind of getting all those, all those targets in place, so you can kind of just continually develop the fan base on social media? Or are you trying to send people to an email list? Are you trying to send them to Spotify?
Circa (16:22):
I'm not, yeah. I'm not doing any of that right now. And mainly because I, if you look at it as a spectrum, when you're beginning your, your career, especially when it comes to marketing yourself effectively, your ability to, to reach back out to the audience at a later time, is that the lowest it will ever be. You have the lowest amount of resources to maintain these audiences. You have the lowest amount of content to send them that you'll ever have. You'll have the lowest amount of offers for them to sign up for, or buy that you'll ever have. So your ability to maintain an audience you gain is at its absolute lowest. The only lower is before you started marketing. And so I think you can fight that and you can really spend a lot of energy to make sure you're not, you know, that you can reach back out to the audience at any time.
Circa (17:11):
And you know, like that might be okay, I'm gonna make sure that everyone who watches my videos, it doesn't, it doesn't go a year without watching another video. So I can always retarget them in Facebook. Cause the limit, there is a year for retargeting video viewers on an ad, or you can say, I'm going to try to send everybody to Spotify and get them to follow. So at least they see new releases or you can say I'm going to get them to an email list. So I don't have to pay to follow up with them. And I always can. But your ability to do that is at this time at its lowest. And so just like I would advise someone financially, Hey, if you're broke, your ability to save money is at its lowest. So focusing on saving money is going to help you focus on making more money and then your ability to save money will grow.
Circa (17:56):
But if you focus on saving and scrounging and cutting expenses, when you're already at the bottom of the barrel, you're kind of screwed. So, and this goes is flies in the face of a lot of, you know, the intention of some of our trainings. So it's a bit contradictory, but I want to explain why it's not is that I'm really trying to find the people who I don't need to make sure I follow up with. I'm trying to find those initial, really, really diehard fans, where I speak to their story and they go follow me on Instagram and they go follow me on Spotify. And they message me because I'm going to get the most data from them that I don't have to, you know expend energy or costs to get them to follow up. They're going to follow up naturally and I can learn them.
Circa (18:43):
I can learn the most from them is really the main point. And so that's why I'm focusing on them right now is cause I needed to learn before I can collect. So yeah, my goal right now is to have as many one-to-one conversations as I possibly can. It's not scalable. It's not trackable. It's not, you know, there's not a lot of intent behind it, but I know if I run story driven, narrative driven shareable posts, I run content to these audiences. I'm going to get tons of those, what we call automatic buddies, people who just love everything you're doing. They go right for it. And my goal right now, I could spend more time and attention trying to keep everybody I'd rather spend that time and attention right now, talking directly to those people. And so I think probably in three to six months, it's going to shift from, let's give them content and let's get them to Spotify, to let's give them content and let's get them to sign up for something that's true. It will. But not until I know what can I present that they're even going to sign up for,
Andrew (19:47):
Right? Yeah. Okay. That makes a lot of sense. It's I guess it's kind of the, you're relying on the spillover effect or as you call it. And I think it's in the buddy system, of course, you guys have the the low hanging fruit buddies as you call them. And I remember watching, if you don't know what a buddy is, I think is the buddy system. If you're one of your free courses,
Circa (20:09):
It comes with any of our trainings. And I believe there are several places on our website. You can sign up for it for free. So it literally any training, like the second someone gives us dollar one, they have the buddy system for life.
Andrew (20:22):
Well, so, so anyways, the whole idea behind the buddy system for, for my audience is that you're, you're trying to turn people that don't know you into warmer and warmer leads so that you kind of develop a relationship with them. And there's, there's kind of a two way street. You're giving them content, they're digging it and deepens the relationship between them. So there's an idea of low hanging fruit, where some people are just going to kind of engage and it's more expensive to get some people because they're, they're kind of on the fence or they're not as willing to jump into stuff. So that, that makes a lot of sense. And on a lot of my ads, I focus a ton on sending traffic to Spotify. At least I have recently, and I've noticed a pretty big spillover effect where if I'm sending traffic to Spotify, it also means that a certain percentage of people are sending me DMS.
Andrew (21:17):
They're going to my music video on YouTube. They're following with me on Instagram. And it's kind of surprising that you can pretty much grow an Instagram account just on running ads to Spotify because so many people are, are those low hanging fruit or the easy to attract buddies? Like they see your ad, they click it. I liked the song, the DMU, they look up the music video. And I not even like promoting the video, it just gets people going there and saying like, I saw your ad and I loved it just coming here to say hi. And it's like, Whoa, that's awesome. Like that's the best case scenario like this, this kind of super deep engagement. For sure. So yeah, it, it works.
Circa (22:00):
Yeah. And I mean, I'm not here to say, like to give you guys a full breakdown, like, cause I'm saying a lot of like stuff that's more conceptual and less hard data. So just to give you the hard data, like I started off with five headlines for my song sacrifice and a live performance music video, not a music video, just a live performance with my buddy who produced it. And so we narrowed it down to one headline that centered around, I mean it didn't, wasn't intentional to center around addiction. The reason I wrote this song was that I chew ice a lot and dentists say that it's going to ruin my teeth. And so sometimes when I get a good chord progression going or some feeling of a song, I'll start with just imagery. And so the first imagery that I chose for this song was jagged rocks, hardened dust.
Circa (22:48):
I frozen my cheek, like all this imagery from chewing ice and also using shock when strength training. So that's where the song comes from. And so the headline was, I wrote this song about how I wanted to write a song about how chewing ice has ruined my teeth, but, and people thought ice crystal man. Oh, so yeah, it's interesting. So I narrowed down to that and then I ran that I probably ran a thousand dollars of traffic just on that video just to get the data. This was across like three or four months. So about $250 a month on this ad. And then the song wasn't out yet. It wasn't on Spotify when people were clamoring for it. In that time, I also released another single and then I started running back behind the scenes content to the same audience that was getting turned on to that music.
Circa (23:35):
And then when the song was ready on Spotify, well, first of all, I put it on another single on Spotify, tried to run them to that and validated a theory that look, if people come in on this one song, they want that song and they want that story. So that other song I released didn't do too well. Then finally this song came out on Spotify and I turn that video into that video ad into an ad director, Spotify and ran that. And, and so, okay. I also tested out audiences based on other artists to figure out which artists, audiences liked my stuff best common practice. You know, it was newer three years ago when I first started teaching it. It's not so new now kind of everyone knows how to do that. And I narrowed down to two or three bands that, that whose fan bases really like my stuff.
Circa (24:26):
Then when I released on Spotify, I submitted the song for editorial inclusion and I use Spotify as API. They're their backend data, which you can go to you can go to debt developers.spotify.com, click console, and you can search their database all you want. So I searched the artists that were their audience was responding to my ad and I found their genres and Spotify. And then I use that to submit my song. So that way Spotify has a really keen idea of who's gonna really like the song that way, when they included on release radar, they're making accurate hits. And that's what really matters in Spotify is that their algorithm, when they recommend it, that the hit is accurate. Otherwise they have to go back to the drawing board. So you really want them to be recommending it to people who are going to respond positively on the first go.
Circa (25:17):
Otherwise it's gonna take a long time for that algorithm to pick up for you. So that when I released it on Spotify, it went, it went really, really well. Like right now it's got my, my nearest single to it, which was the single before has like 8,000 plays. This one has over 30,000. So it's a big difference. And, and so there's a lot of strategy in that that doesn't have to do with finding out the story necessarily. It's not as if I'm just wasting money and trying to talk to people. I'm also implementing some strategy behind it. But that is the main goal. The main goal was not to blow up my Spotify. And so to speak to what you were saying, it's like, you can run ads to Spotify. And if you really focus on that and you make it your thing and you don't quit for a year, no matter what, at the end of the year, you'll be like, Oh shit, this is working.
Circa (26:04):
Like, I guess like, if your music is good, that's going to happen. It might cost more money than it brings in. You know, there's, there's all these other caveats to it, but for certain, that will be true. So you can do that. And I know a lot of people who do it, you don't necessarily need to find your story. First. The reason that I want to do that is because I need people off of Spotify. I don't just want them on Spotify. I want them to sign up for my email list. I want them to stay with me for life and to do that. I really need to tell them a narrative that speaks to their life experience. Wow. You're making me rethink all of my marketing. And this is from phone call.
Andrew (26:44):
Yeah. Cause I, I like a lot of my my ads are involved. Like I have a music video, pretty much every song to some degree. And I'll just like, I'll run ads and then I'll try to like spin in a certain way. But I, I feel like I feel like my next song, I'm going to be focusing on this, this story thing too. Cause it sounds like it, it works incredibly well. And the theory makes a lot of sense where, you know, you're, you're trying to develop a pool of people that are there. Their relationship goes deeper than just a click. You know, it's, it's, it's a lot more than hearing 15 seconds of a story ad being like, Oh, that's cool. We're going to Spotify and listening to it. Even if they follow you, it's, it's a very surface level.
Circa (27:27):
I mean, one of the dangers is, and like, I like, I'm not just theorizing here. This is what I do is I will find an artist on my discover weekly. I'll add them. And 90% of the time, that's it. I found an artist that I like a song that I like and I added that song to my playlist. And now that song comes up once a month and I listened to it and that is it one level higher than that is that, hold on one second. My cat's breaking out straight yet. Stranger shut up.
Andrew (28:04):
I'm I'm totally, I'm totally including that in the,
Circa (28:09):
She sometimes when, when, when her mom is gone, she'll be downstairs and she'll start doing this weird Meow. She's never done before. It's like, Whoa, you need to stop.
Andrew (28:19):
Right. Okay, cool. So yeah, I totally totally agree with what you're saying about how, like you see someone discover weekly, you might listen to the song, add to a playlist, maybe at your library, but that's probably it. And like one of my bands last year we came up with an album in September and we spent a good amount of money on Facebook ads. And that did result in like 280,000 streams in like six months because it got it performed while I got put on discover weekly and release radar and stuff. And it did get added to like a couple of thousand playlists from users. But the problem is like, it didn't give us thousands of followers. It gave us like 600 followers. So, and then those people didn't necessarily follow us on social media. They just, they kind of clicked and in some people did reach out and they were like, really love what you're doing. People shared it on the social media. But we didn't, I don't think we developed the narrative to the point where, you know, now when we release a new song, it won't be as effective as if we kind of deepen that relationship upfront.
Circa (29:25):
For sure. Yeah. And like, and like, you know, that's, that's going to be a broad majority of the cases is that people add it. And Spotify allows us to do that. Like we weren't able to do that before you had to go find out, otherwise you wouldn't be able to listen to it again. Now you can add it and never find out anything more about this artist. It's a new thing. It's a very new thing to say, Oh, I listened to that band, but I've never seen anything else from them besides this song on Spotify, that's not common at all. So it's a new challenge that artists have to deal with. And you know, that's the worst case. Oh, I kicked her back from recording the recording. Yeah. A broad majority of use cases is going to be someone finds it. They add it to their playlist.
Circa (30:11):
That's it. 9% will go. And they'll look at your artist profile on Spotify, add more songs. It's only like one or 2% who are gonna say, I like this so much. I'm going to go research that artist. I found an artist called what is it? They have a song called the distance and I found them on my discover weekly. And it's like Cody something, Cody. I forget. Let me actually, let me just give him a shout out since they goddamn deserve it. But yeah, I found them and then I went to their Instagram ironized Cody go listen to ionize Cody, the distance I went to their Instagram 600 followers. I sent them a message. I said, I love this song, no response to this day, that was like a year ago, no response from them. And they, they seem to have largely not done anything else.
Circa (31:06):
So these people were incredibly successful at their going Spotify. They found a person who loves one song so much that I went to the internet. I spent my time. I found out who and where they are and I messaged them and they didn't respond. And it's just like, it's like, that's why you have only 600 followers on Instagram. Cause you're not paying attention to the big picture. And so, yeah, it's really important to escape. You need that escape velocity from that gravitational pull of the easiness of just adding you on my Spotify playlist and then never worried about you. Again, we can put artists in this neat little box and not have to explore. And that's a danger for artists,
Andrew (31:50):
Right? Yeah. Cause then it just boils down to listening on playlist and then you're no better than those that study beats musicians on Spotify that are making so much money. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That's, that's, that is a huge missed opportunity on their end to like you, you were interested, you, you found them, you messaged them and then they didn't even bother applying. And their audience isn't big enough where that's like justified. Like if I message marshmallow, I'm not really expecting a reply, but if it fits a small artist, like you, you kind of expect it. And with my, the band that I mentioned with the album last year, we had someone like our album so much that she made an Instagram series of Instagram story videos saying that she loved what she heard so much that she signed up for premium Spotify, just so she could listen to our album.
Andrew (32:41):
And she shared this to all of her fans. So I contacted the band. Then I was like, guys, I'm going to message her and tell her that we're sending her a free CD, a free shirt and a free hat. And they're like, why would we do that? And I was like, cause that's the kind of person you want behind your music. Like, she's going to tell all of her friends and maybe it only results in a few extra people. But like, I don't know. I know if that happened to me like a smaller band, I liked I would be floored and I would tell every person I knew about it. And I, you know, I interact with her on Instagram all the time and my personal account too now just cause it's, you know, it's, it's not just like, people love your music and that's cool. It's, it's it's can actually be fun and rewarding to actually engage with the people that like your music and I've you make a lot of friends doing it too. So it's
Circa (33:30):
Yeah. It's it's and what you did there, like w in the terms of our framework, the buddy system, we call that like the, the advocacy stage where basically you're, you're selecting a fan who clearly has a higher, a higher degree of devotion to the music. And you're saying I'm gonna make a dream come true experience for them to activate them as people, as someone who brings in new fans. And like, it's like, you spend money on your ads. Why not spend money on this person? Who's going to do just the same effect as the ad and, and spread your music. So, yeah, I think that was a very smart decision and creating those types of fan relationships is even rarer these days. I think, you know, in 10 years, you're going to, we're going to be at a place where a musician musician has a job.
Circa (34:25):
If it's just, I make music and release the music. That is not, that is not a full time as that is a below the poverty line income. There's so much fragmentation. There's so many artists people could listen to. If you're just making him releasing music, you have a, a percent of, a percent of a percent chance of ever making more than 30 K year. I think you have to, you have to transcend this role of, I make I write and record tunes and then throw them out there to the world. And obviously people know that, but I don't think they really consider what that means is like, you're not just a musician. You are, you are a vessel for, for this embodied narrative.
