Most of the creative people I talk to about starting newsletters say some variation of the following:
“I’m not that interesting.”
It’s along the lines of, “why would anyone care?” Or, “I don’t really do anything exciting.”
Then I look at their websites, and social media feeds and I have a good laugh.
Social media has us convinced that if we’re not going viral every other day, or our videos don’t get 100,000 views in the first four hours, we must be boring. Washed up. Nobody cares.
Yet these people I talk to are designers with a dreamy client list. Photographers who post breath taking photos. Musicians with amazing music and visuals. Editors, writers, builders, artists of all sorts, minds brimming with ideas, stories to keep you awake til the sun comes up…
But a throw-away social media post on a Tuesday night gets a few likes, and we let allow these platforms to feed us this idea that nobody cares.
Some songs will never see the light of day because they didn’t go viral on TikTok:
“You kind of live and die by overnight virality. That has now created a situation where qualified A&Rs with great ears, who are tenured, who are good with music and passionate about it, can’t really do their job the way they used to,” say Ryan Tedder of OneRepublic over at Rolling Stone.
See that?
TikTok has more sway over qualified A&R folks.
And social media has swayed artists everywhere into believing their work isn’t good enough.
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