You're not an influencer

The question I get asked more than any other is whether you're allowed to do trends at all.

I've been making a version of the answer for years and never landed it cleanly.

I sat through two and a half hours of a podcast last week and came out with more notes than I have from most conferences.

The guy is Charlie Rocket.

Managed Travis Porter, then 2 Chainz. Built the first one out of his mum's basement with a hundred bucks to his name, a basic microphone and a quilt hanging off the ceiling to deaden the room. Won a Grammy. Then walked away from music at the top of it and became a Nike athlete instead.

He went on The Manager's Playbook, which is a podcast made for artist managers rather than artists. Worth a follow on its own if you've never come across it, because almost nobody is making anything for that seat.

And he did the thing people at that level almost never do. He gave away the actual recipes. Turned up with a stack of notebooks and read out of them.

Here's some of the juicy stuff.

"Artists should not be influencers"

His words, not mine.

His argument is that every time you jump on a trend from your artist page you spend the exact thing that made you worth following.

He calls it the worship gene. People are walking around waiting to find something to believe in. That's the itch.

So somebody hears your track. They like it. They hit follow.

In that second they're genuinely trying to decide whether you're the one.

Then they scroll your page and it's the same format eight times in a row.

You didn't lose them because it was cringe. You lost them because you answered their question for them.

The fix is annoyingly simple

This is where he stops being philosophical about it.

Don't stop doing trends. Stop doing them from your artist page.

Keep the artist page like a museum. Sparse, curated, the work.

Then have a mate run a fan page, and put every daft format going on there using your track. Two hundred times if you like. Nobody minds a thirsty fan page. That's what fan pages are for.

His version: the point was never to see the artist on the treadmill. The point was to get the song heard.

You're allowed to do trends. Just not from that account.

Where I'd push back

Two things, because I'm not going to hand you a tidy story.

One. Everything he describes is 2009, America, hip hop. Our corner works differently, and how much of this applies depends on whether you're the face of your own project.

Two. If you run the fan page yourself and pretend it's a stranger, you're one screenshot from looking like a chump. Get a mate to do it, or be relaxed about it obviously being your second account. Don't build a thing you'd hate to have found out.

The spine of it still holds though. Your main page is a room people walk into on purpose. Don't fill it with adverts for yourself.

Charlie Rocket on The Manager's Playbook · Watch on YouTube

There's a whole other stretch in there about running your own events, in your own city, monthly, on repeat.

A DJ listening party. Then a single release party. Then a video viewing party. Then the album one. Then round again. Same handful of local people invited every time, the promoter, the DJ, whoever runs the radio show.

He was openly inventing reasons to get people in a room, and the repetition was the entire point. His line on it is that fifty people in a room beat five hundred thousand views. It cost him a room and some pizza.

That's exactly what Building Your Base is about. Not chasing reach, but building something real where you actually live, online and off, instead of waiting for an algorithm to hand you an audience. The whole thing is $27. If any of this has you nodding, it's already paid for itself.

Building Your Base, $27

Hit reply with either of these.

One. The last thing you posted from your artist page that you wouldn't have posted if nobody was watching.

Two. Whether you've ever put something on in your own city, and how it actually went.

I read every one.

Nice one.

Jimi
Pitch.Audio

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