How often you release music today is actually one of the most important factors in how fast your fan base grows. So it's no wonder it's become a really controversial issue. Since it's become pretty clear that among those of us dorks who discuss how musicians should promote their music, we all don't agree and you've all been begging for a fight and I'm here to start it today.
People get so mad about this in my comments on like a daily basis. You'd think we were talking about politics or something even more controversial like whether pineapple belongs on pizza. But I get it because frankly internet is flooded with know it all saying half truths with no context and there's a few voices who are discussing this I think are really spreading a lot of information that is not good and not helping musicians and you all keep asking me about it so it's time to go along and give you context so you can decide what's best for you to do for your own music.
So let's first start off by saying I'm not going to be calling anyone out by name. So the people I'm talking about in this video will be known as Rick G, his sidekick and there's a cameo from a guy I like to call the useful idiot. As well I've been through this whole copyright thing before so I'm gonna have actors play them but I am quoting directly from their videos just as they said it and I know their defenders will say I'm taking them out of context but that right there is the problem.
All too often these people themselves are not giving enough context and intentionally leave out a lot of the details that keep musicians from getting confused and lead them to make really bad decisions and I want to bring that context so they don't trash their dream. And the second thing I know all their stans will say since they already say it already is "But Jesse you don't have 4 million monthly listeners. " Yeah chief, inherently since my job as a music marketing strategist I don't have any monthly listeners because I'm not a music artist with music on Spotify.
I am the person behind many big artists who've sustained careers and built them up from nothing and whether that's in my music marketing work production or mastering I have millions upon millions of monthly listeners through those artists but I would never take all the credit for that because it's all part of a team. But much like betting on a boxing match by who's gonna win by the size of their fists, pecs, or weight if you're judging our ideas by our monthly listeners you're probably too stupid to be betting since no one who knows anything would ever place a bet on this. But if you think that's a good way to judge things I can't help you but I'm sure one day someone will help you to a nice tasty glass of Kool-aid.
So let's start off with the number one thing in my comments all the time which is the absolutely concussed idea that unknown artists should be putting out a song every two weeks. Here's what Rick G says. "I've released every two weeks sometimes weekly for the last four years with a couple albums in between and my numbers have really gone up.
" Oh boy. So many years ago I had to go over a similar idea with the artist Russ and put into context his strategy he used to blow up by releasing a song every week and if you for some reason still want to hear more of that discussion after this video that's linked below. So we should start off by discussing that some genres are a bit more open to artists releasing music that doesn't take a lot of time or effort to do than other genres and there's nothing wrong with either side of that.
If you make prog metal or perfectly perfected pop songs or even let's say Midwest emo there's a level of crafting a song that people want to hear that like that genre that's often a little bit more longer and takes time to do than let's say trap or country rap. So what I mean by this is most of the top artists who are crafting say trap songs are often playing a numbers game. They look for a hot beat after sorting through a dozen of them or so and then try a flow and they may pull one out of 20 of those tracks to the side and choose to refine that one a little bit more.
They'll compile the best lyrics they had on some of those songs that are on the cutting room floor and then use those with the song that came out better after the ones they were crafting. Whereas crafting a prog metal or emo song requires months of playing around with the song till it's perfected down to strumming patterns, delay times and countless details and all that level of detail is rewarded by the listeners of the genre since they're used to that level of thought put into the songs they enjoy. And while the creative process can look similar in both trap and prog metal, the experimenting and optimization in some genres is just more rewarded.
This is the same way jam bands like King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard jam out songs on the spot and they have their fans go nuts over them over some improvised jams. And meanwhile the people they're smoking weed with in their dorms are listening to records by like Rosalie or Skrillex which they slaved over the composition of each song for sometimes years. Different genres need different levels of refining their tracks for listeners to respond to them.
The fact is the fans of different genres have some standards for how much a song needs to be slaved over and frankly two weeks is usually not it unless you're doing absolutely nothing else but that. So you're probably wondering now where am I going with this? If you release a song every two weeks in most genres even the best songwriters of these genres are rarely capable of doing 26 songs a year.
In fact they often don't release that many in four years since they live and die by their fans seeing them as people who release quality bodies of work. Whereas say in country rap well those aren't exactly the fans who are having brooding long conversations over the body of work of an artist which makes or breaks some genres. In fact if you look at some of those sites that do mugshots the fans of that genre are sometimes having conversations over the bodies of.
. . I know a lot of you are thinking "Whatever Jesse, my songs are just as good as the biggest artists out there like Taylor Swift, Bad Omens, or John Summitt.
" And with that I have to yet again introduce your dumbass to the Dunning-Kruger curve. This is a little piece of science that shows how idiots like you often think everything is easy and you think you're smarter than like scientists devoted their whole life to a subject and you think you could walk in and do everything better than experts. But what this curve shows at the top of it is the people who are much smarter.
See the details of things and how hard it is to be a real expert because of the nuance and the fact that what makes you think your pop songs are good as say "Get Your Freak On" by Missy Elliott, possibly the apex of creativity in pop, is that you actually just can't hear the details that make something great so you're overly confident at this. And we all experience this at some point in our lives just most of us get over it by the time we're a teenager. This is all to say if you think the song you put two hours into in GarageBand is as well crafted as say Justice's Phantasm and you could turn out 26 songs that good a year, my bet is you can't hear that you're making the type of music none of us ever want to hear.
Anyway this is all to say a lot of genres of music need crafting, pondering, and slaving over to be able to even release six great songs a year. Never mind 4. 5 times more than that per year.
So this "Taking Rick's Advice About Releasing Every Two Weeks" is out the window for most people who are in genres where quality of craftsmanship is valued by the fans more. But I've explained this before and then I hear Rick G's disciples quote him by saying this after they wipe the Kool-Aid off their smile. "But Jesse, I'm building catalog and I gotta have catalog if I wanna be one of the biggest artists in the world.
" In fact in an interview with the useful idiot here's what Rick G had to say. "So what's gonna be your focus to start? " "I mean focus to start releasing very consistently, release very frequently, and create content around those releases.
My main goal is just build my catalog. I want a very large catalog because I'm not looking for, even though I may come, I'm not looking for a hit every time. " So one of the biggest myths that's been spun by Rick G and his sidekick is that you need to have catalog to build off.
And they're right that you do need catalog but yet again the context they leave out again and again is that weak catalog does you no good. I mean after all if catalog was such a great asset why does Viper only have 25,000 monthly listeners and his biggest song has a millionish streams yet he put out 347 records in a single year and what we didn't know is he had a woman kidnapped in his basement that whole time. Yeah that's real I know we all have a lot of questions about this.
Anyway we now live in a world where it is easy to go to artist page and see the myth of catalog. Since every single week I thoroughly dissect artists and how they blow up on my members feed which you can join for five dollars a month to get five hours of videos and watch me teach you how artists are blowing up right now. Anyway what I see over and over again is that you cannot make people stream songs they don't like.
This is why artists who've gotten a ton of attention from one or two songs can have millions or hundreds of millions of plays on those songs and then tens of thousands on the weak parts of their catalog. Just take a while and really look at plays on Spotify and you can come to learn that catalog is nothing unless you can constantly make material as close to your good material and the real reality is that it's easy to browse the top bars in Spotify and notice they are selective with what they put out but their catalog tends to be consistently of a similar quality and the reality is most of them cannot sustain 26 songs of that level of quality a year. This is all to say too many of you are under the delusion your songs are good enough to do that and that you don't need to do what most huge artists do which is to write a lot of them then keep some an incubation state hidden in the vault and pull parts from them lyrics melodies and other ideas that you have and put them into your best material to punch that material up to make it as good as possible.
That's what most of the artists who really blow up do because without that process they're making mid material and when they put out mid material their fan base dies as we'll talk about in a little bit I mean you have all seen artists lose fans when they put out mid material right so why on earth do you think you're immune to this but to that I noticed Rick G has said something. Another great would be I don't want to overwhelm the listener with too frequent releases. You don't want your listener to grow tired of your music and maybe there's more gripes I'm not sure but to the listener grow tired one and you don't want to overwhelm the listener what I would say is I'm the perfect example of being the opposite.
As I was about to make this video we got a good lesson in how if you release too much catalog it won't matter because they won't listen unless it's great and too many of yous mommies told you are a little too special and you think just because it's you people will listen but if you make a song less than the quality your fan base is used to it won't get listened to as evidenced by Taylor Swift's metrics with the tortured poets department where we now see the artist with the most rabid fan base in the history of music as an album her fans are not listening to as much because the assessment seems to be it's not what most of them wanted from her so I ask you is this if the most rabid fan base in the history of the world won't listen to her mid material why is your mid material gonna help your catalog I'll wait actually I won't because that's not how YouTube works this is all to say that you do continually need to make a decision between how much quality versus quantity to release because it will not get streamed if it's not liked by your fans the fact is it is now easy for people to access whatever music they want to so pumping out mid tracks all the time that treat your song like it's a lottery ticket rather than a mood-altering drug that makes people feel a way they'd rather feel that you can make more powerful well if you're gonna treat it like that lottery ticket you're gonna have a losing one most of the time but here's the crazy thing the biggest lack of context that Rick G keeps leaving out I haven't even gotten into that so while I would rather have my toenails pulled from my body and have to regularly listen to the style of music that Rick and his sidekick makes I do do thorough research for these videos I will say when I listen to their music versus the other artists they're on the playlists of they make pretty good quality music comparatively to others on those playlists with them and there's a good reason they have tons of streams and to be honest if I was advising them I would probably tell them to release a lot more music than new artists it works well for a lot of artists these days once they have a huge audience to release a lot NBA Youngboy has done this to great effect but my number one problem with his advice is it betrays one of the main things I've said so many times in this channel what your favorite artists with millions of monthly listeners do to promote their music is probably not how you will get your first fans and that's the thing releasing all this material works for artists with tons of monthly listeners because their problem is keeping an audience engaged whereas you all's problem is that no one hears your music to even decide if it's good or not so here's the thing right now we've never been in an era where it's been easier for an artist to go from no fans to millions by doing so little work and that work is taking advantage of what I coined as the earworm era of music promotion and that's where you find the hook of your song and release 30 to 60 tick tocks on it and if you're not familiar there's a link in the description to watch that video after we're done so here's the thing right now that's the most common model of how artists blow up from nothing to a huge fan base what Rick argues for is a model where exceptions blow up and sure you could argue anyone who blows up is an exception but if we graph who blows up from which method most often what I talk about is the model where you push the same song for six to eight weeks is what works most often and one of the main questions I get about that is why not release faster and optimize that well great question and we'll get into it so one of the main things I see with the artists I consult with who want to release faster they often have a problem is that when releasing these tick tocks it only starts to work usually at around the 30-day mark have you ever noticed a lot of the tick tocks you're watching from musicians aren't from the day you watch them but often weeks later when an artist is unknown the algorithm is often finding where to send them and when it finally figures out a critical mass happens and frankly that often takes a few weeks but if you stop posting after two weeks you've stopped posting right when it usually starts to work and then you know what momentum dies and that song's momentum does not reach its full potential the reason you see so many of the artists blowing up are releasing every six to eight weeks is exactly that it seems to be the pace that keeps up an attention and allows time to promote a song and let the Spotify tick-tock and the Instagram algorithm get it heard by enough people that it hits critical mass and then the word of mouth and the algorithms take over some more and let the song continue to get more streams this is all to say two weeks is too fast since what I often see is that week two the promotion is starting to work and week four is when it really works and really in all reality I've seen times when at week eight it's probably too soon to pull off the gas and you should keep pushing the song and right now we keep seeing artists like Lea Banks and Dasha stop promoting the newest song they were promoting and pause that promotion because the song they were working on promoting before their newest release needed more time to promote as it started to blow up this is because oftentimes when they've been promoting that song for a few weeks it takes a few more weeks for it to catch on and then you have to shift gears and go with the song that's really taking long if you want to learn more about that I'd I second how both of those artists blew up their songs on my members only feed which you can join via the link in the description and a funny thing this is how Rick G blew up - for example let's look at his releases and if you know who he is you could go to Spotify and look through his release dates and see when he first pulled up he slowed down his release schedule it didn't release every two weeks in fact here he says he did the exact same thing that I say to do I think I did 30 to 40 videos for rice pop and this is honestly what gets me mad and why I make these videos is these guys constantly sell something that is not even totally the story of how they did it now I know he's talked about this is how he blew up before obviously it's right there but the thing is is he keeps saying this is what I'm doing right now as if this is good advice for small artists who haven't yet broken it'd be one thing if they live by the sword and died by it but it's not how he blew up and there's a reason for that when artists are first getting an audience they need to continually get attention remind people over and over again and then once they have a big audience waiting for more you can more easily get through them as you have more direct means to communicate with them but this is probably a perfect time to return to Rick G's interview with the useful idiot let him speak with his own words a lot of people are just trying get one song to go bananas when a more realistic approach is just to release more music and it'll add up it'll add up to one song going bananas if you just release more music the likelihood of you getting one to go bananas increases the more you release for example if you're releasing frequently and someone doesn't like your song they just won't listen to it they're not gonna be like I wish my favorite artists didn't release so frequently they just won't listen to that one it's not for them listen they do like it listen a ton and I'll even follow it up with a smart question that his followers often ask me in the comments which is why can't I promote more than one song at a time Jesse? sorry this is just not the case when you're an unknown artist if someone likes what you do but here's a bunch of crap coming from you constantly they stop paying attention we've seen the data a thing I've showed numerous examples of this on this channel is when you only have one hit or one song that's doing well no one will follow you at the ratios they follow people with a bunch of good material people get excited about artists who do exciting things and putting out an occasional song and a bunch of mid crap in between it's not exciting to fans it does not incite a relationship where they keep coming back to see if you finally delivered another egg after you've been basically crapping something out he's right if you blow up and put out a lot of material it's easy to get fans excited and they are more forgiving of you if you've been putting out consistently good material that occasionally mess up here and there but all this sets up the potential to fall off and is often unsustainable which is why we see artists disappear much egg has been poured over say like Brock Hampton generating a ton of excitement by having a dozen or so minds making such amazing music and releasing so much good music so fast but then they slowed down and lost excitement as they released mid material less office and that I fear is the ultimate lesson of this method is it's incredibly hard to sustain good tracks for a long period which is why artists have such short careers and frankly I'll put money against any artist doing 26 good songs that sustained fan base growth for more than a year or two where's the method I prescribe of crafting your material and pushing out the best of it well there's a reason it works and I'm sure you all have experienced this with your own listening but if you like a song someone does and then they put out a bunch of mid crap that doesn't hit you or for that matter they put out bad material well fans grow bored and stop listening to see if you're going to give them a good song which is another part of context rip G loves to ignore and I hate to really dig in here but I'm of an age where I mean a lot of successful musicians whose careers have sadly washed up like most musicians do it at around middle age and the real truth of it is when a lot of them talk about what they regret it's that they thought they had everything so dialed in that they could release material they didn't give their all to and they find out otherwise when the fans hate it and frankly releasing music this often often feels like a real formula for disaster for most musicians but ultimately the nice thing is I get to go to bed every night knowing I gave my full context and you can all stop asking me the comments when I think of this and do whatever you want for your own career since that's the beauty of context is you now have a lot more information to make your own decisions and do whatever you want isn't context so nice so fun fact I didn't even get into half the things that I see these guys talk about that I really really think needs more context so obviously if you want to see me do more of this well hit the comments and let me know because wait till you see what they say about playlists and music videos but if I already released that video it's on the screen now but if I didn't release that video quite yet on the screen right now or in the description is a video on how I recommend promoting your music, so watch that now.
