I released an album of punk rock/noise pop whatsit last October. You can get it right now by clicking on any of these words. Since writing this, I have gone ahead and put the album up on all your favorite exploitative music services, which you can view by clicking on this (this is not the full list; it’s all over the place, including Jay-Z’s Tidal!). I will now also embed the entire thing below so you can play it while you read this (or not; it will probably be a little distracting, ngl).

This is the second part of a towering postmortem of the album. The first part was a stream of consciousness blatherfest about its creation. Try and live through that, if you can, tough guy.

Anyway, now we’re gonna talk about… well you can see the title up there, can’t you? Yeah, good. Okay.

Heeeeere we gooooooo (again)!

SWEET RELEASE!

Woof! I did go on a bit in that first part. SORRY if it’s annoying I took over two years working on something so I felt like I had fifty hours worth of bullshit to say about it. Didn’t mean to WASTE your TIME, Mr. or Ms. Busy-Ass Home And On The Web During A Pandemic Motherfucker. But now we’re finally out of the making-of and into the discussion of Songs For Jerks‘ release and I’m glad you’re here with me. Can you believe we made it? Fine. The release period was a lot shorter and a lot less work when compared with the album’s creation, so this section shouldn’t be quite so gargantuan, I say to myself, willing it to be true *gif of Homer Simpson pulling on collar*. (It didn’t work. It’s longer.)

I released Songs For Jerks on October 22nd, 2020. I had been done with it since mid-July, but my biggest following is (or was, as I technically have more followers on Tumblr now) on YouTube so I figured my biggest PR push was going to be through videos on there. So the album didn’t come out until I had both the goofy advertisement above and the “People Are Famous” video below ready to go. I also pushed myself to release it when I did because only a day or two later I was scheduled to get septum surgery on my deviated septum that was causing me nose troubles and I figured I’d better get all my social media blast ducks in a row while I was still lucid, since I was shortly gonna be hopped up on prescription goofballs. I also reasoned that I might get some assholes insulting my music and that being on said goofballs might lessen the blow.

In the end, the doctor only prescribed me Tylenol with Codeine, which barely even registers on the Kaiser Permanente Goofball Scale! What a fucking rip! But also no one really insulted my music, so that’s nice.

Though Songs For Jerks can now be streamed for free, at release and for a good while afterwards, the price was set at THREE BIG DOLLARS. More on that later.

Great Success!

So was the album release a success? The short version is yes. The long version is I don’t know, I guess. Fine. Whatever. I don’t care if you like my music anyway. Leave me alone. I don’t need you, I don’t need anybody! And so forth and so on.

Look, it’s not a success in that what everyone wants (or thinks they want) is to put a lot of work into something, stick it online, and have it turn into an overnight viral success that forces Pitchfork to review it and admit to its significance and I dunno I guess Anthony Fantano with his terrible Weezer opinions makes a video about it and probably hates it and then Jimmy Fallon brings you on his show and shout-laughs at you while you play a song as you feel huge pieces of your soul fall away and disappear into the ether, never to be reclaimed. Well, newsflash, bucko! None of that shit happened!

My more realistic, big downer expectation was that literally nobody would pay any mind to the thing and I’d be left knowing I’d wasted over two years of my life and would now have to face the question of what the hell to do next. My even more realistic expectation was that, regardless of what happened, I’d still have made an album, which would be cool.

I guess what really happened falls somewhere in the middle of all these. The reality is that I am a relatively unknown internet person and I am (outside of a select group of friends, open mic participants, and the hosts of a local Chinese television game show) extremely unknown as a musician. So to chuck an album into the internet with that non-pedigree and have had the response I’ve had? It’s absolutely a success.

The fact of the matter is that S4J (nè Songs For Jerks) has been almost exclusively listened to and purchased by family, friends, and friends of friends. That’s hardly surprising, however. When nobody knows what you sound like, and you put a link in front of them, with all the music, professional and amateur, that’s out there, why would you bother to click on it? And if by some rare chance you actually do click on it and some angry old manboy starts screaming at you and then you see he wants $3 for the pleasure of getting to hear him scream at you whenever you like when so many other indie musicians are giving away the milk for free? On Spotify? Why would you touch this shit? Like, why, bro?

Unless you’ve established yourself enough that people already have some idea of what you sound like, I can think of little reason anyone would voluntarily check your music out. If you’ve built up enough of a fan base doing other stuff and then announce a music project, it’s still a risky and weird left turn, but you’ll probably get a fraction of fans who will give you the benefit of the doubt, though I imagine it helps if your music project at least has something in common with what you’re known for. I have a small cult following at best and the last time I made a new video for the thing I’m most known for, The Simpsums, was 2018. I released two music videos during the height of Simpsums popularity and got people (who I don’t think were being sarcastic…) saying it sounded decent and one guy even asked when there’d be an album! But that was then and those people are all dead now. Not really, although now that I’ve typed this I’ve realized it’s not actually impossible in this day and age. Whoops.

(Oh, I should also mention I’m actively antagonistic to my fan base, which I think probably helps? More on that later!)

I also think it’s hard to get people to care about music that’s on Bandcamp in the first place. Unless you’re reaching people who already seek out indie music and have a Bandcamp account, it’s sort of a big ask. You can stream from Bandcamp — they even have an app you can do it with — but I’ve always viewed it as a place you purchase and then download your music from. Most people don’t care about housing their music files on their hard drives and stream everything through Spotify, so you’re either asking them to download your music or to listen to it through a streaming service they might never even use again, as it’s mostly populated with independent artists they’ve never heard of. You don’t have to make an account to purchase music but I do believe, if you want to stream the music rather than download it, you need to make an account for Bandcamp to keep your collection of purchased music with. Otherwise, after three streams, Bandcamp either cuts you off or at least sticks an annoying pop-up in your face after each play, I’m not sure which.

44 people have bought the album, but only 24 have actually downloaded it, so 20 people either streamed it or bought it to be nice and support me but never listened to it. At any rate, especially now that I’ve made it free, maybe the amount of times the music has been played is a better overall gauge of success, or it’s at least a good measure of how many people have actually heard some of my music. It’s obviously better if they go on to purchase and/or download it but at the moment I think my main goal is just to get my noise into more ears.

By the way, I’ve struggled endlessly with choosing which track to have play first when you visit my Bandcamp page. “People Are Famous” has always 100% been the correct first track for the album in my mind. It’s not quite representative of the rest of what you’ll hear (though I’m not sure any one track gives you a great idea of any other), but it’s a loud punch in the face and that’s how I always wanted to start. But for trying to sell the album to people who are hearing it for the first time? I don’t know if it’s the best choice!

So I’ve jumped from track to track, choosing a different one to play first for new visitors and my overall findings? It doesn’t seem to matter much one goddamn way or the other! No obvious change in the number of skips, partial listens, and complete listens. Guess I’m consistently likable and unlikable!

This Dang Old Pandemic!

I often look to Mitski’s career as a good model of making it as an indie musician in the modern era because her music is in a genre I consider adjacent to my own (these days I think you could call what she does alt-rock and pop, though I am also familiar with her more morose, piano-heavy early work) and because she started out by putting her music on Bandcamp. As far as I know, she got the following she has over time by playing live constantly all over the place. Of course, she put her first album out in 2012 and it’s very possible what worked for her is already outdated, but my feeling is that it’s still the case that many people learn about a new artist and decide whether they like them based on seeing them perform live and I’m limited on that front because it’s a pandemic, innit?

I should obviously eventually pivot to being a lucrative chiptune musician but the basis of most of my music so far is guitar and vocals and it feels like a very personality-driven sort of music. It’s the kind of thing that is better sold by witnessing the person blanging away on the instrument and singing their lungs out and though I did do one hastily tossed-together album release gig on Twitch (at which point I was still technically in the recovery period of septum surgery), I haven’t truly had a chance to perform live since the release.

I have done a fair number of performances in the past, both with ramshackle bands and by myself, at a surprising variety of venues and for very different audiences (to name a few: a wedding in Greece, an open mic in Newark, NJ, and a local television show’s version of American Idol/Pop Idol in China) and I usually get a good reaction! People seem to like me. I’ll concede I’ve almost exclusively performed comedy music so far, so maybe they just think I’m funny and the more sincere shit isn’t gonna fly so good, but that remains to be seen.

Some friends at the Greek wedding (which was neither big, nor fat, and though it was held in Greece, the couple was actually Czech) told me they’d been singing “Douche Guitar” a lot after hearing me play it live but then they tried to show some other friends a video taken at the wedding and they were unamused, so evidently it didn’t translate outside of the live performance. This is all the proof I need that playing live will trick more people into grabbing the album and then they’ll realize later they don’t like it and were just tickled by my in-person antics, but it’ll already be too late, suckers!

Pulling a Beyoncé

Most of the criticisms I’ve leveled at myself in this postmortem are ones that are like “okay, I probably won’t do it like this in the future, but it’s fine I did that this time.” This, however, is one thing I wish I just plain hadn’t done.

I know not a damn thing about how to market and my album release was not based on any advice or successful release model other than, kind of, what Beyoncé did with Lemonade. If it worked for her, it should work for me, right? Lolol!

Yeah, I dunno, Beyoncé was hardly a huge inspiration really. She was just the closest model to whatever the hell I was trying to do. My reasoning was, basically, in the internet age, you can break the rules however you like and see what happens. I just decided I wanted to drop this thing like a big, lo-fi stinkbomb, so I released the album, the advertisement for it, the “People Are Famous” music video, and the “Nothing Doing” video all at once (the latter was actually released years ago but I’d updated the song so I reuploaded it). I found out later that Bandcamp suggests releasing music effectively the opposite way from how I did it. They recommend putting some music out in advance and directing people to follow your Bandcamp page so that they’ll all be notified when you release new material and already be hyped up and ready to buy it. Nobody even knew I had Bandcamp page until the day I released the album!

I gotta say it bugs me how poorly the music videos performed on YouTube. I put a lot of work into editing them and feel they came out pretty damn good and they just got absolutely pathetic engagement. Two of them barely even cracked 100 views. Really though, my channel doesn’t get a ton of views unless I post more Simpsums, or at least something Simpsons-related. It’s obnoxious because, as mentioned, it’s still one of the platforms I have the most subscribers on, but the majority of them don’t give an iota of a fuck unless they see the word “Simpsums” in the video title (and a good lot of them are, or at least were, people from 4chan; I didn’t ask for them to be my fan base, but that’s how it panned out). In fact, whenever I post a new video and it’s not Simpsums, I lose subscribers. My channel would almost certainly be more successful if I stopped posting altogether.

Still, dropping three videos all at once didn’t do me any favors. Maybe I’m imagining things, but it feels like they performed even worse than my videos usually do. Just piss-poor view counts, one or two comments, and only 8 likes apiece on the two music videos (and 14 on the advertisement). As YouTube is one of my most popular social media accounts, I was hoping to get at least a handful of subscribers from there who’d buy the album. Did that happen? Well!

Anytime someone buys the album, I get an email that tells me how much they bought it for and what their email is. Since I’m acquainted in some capacity with practically everyone who’s bought S4J, I’ve so far been able to quickly figure out who everyone is from their emails. As for sales I can attribute to people I’d call fans of my other creative endeavors? I think it’s about three? Three sales? And only one where I can recognize that it’s a channer (do we still call them that these days or is there a newer term? Nazi?) who I’m pretty sure follows me exclusively on YouTube. I can tell it’s them because they’re one of very few people on 4chan who uses a tripcode and the name matched up with their email. I don’t expect them to read this, but, if they do: thanks, pally! Hope you’re not a Nazi!

The other fans are ones who have followed me to other social media and aren’t just hovering around my YouTube channel waiting for another Simpsums to pop up. So what I’m saying is I can attribute literally one sale to YouTube. Victory!

The honest truth: even if I’d spaced out the video releases, the difference in interest probably wouldn’t have been too markedly different, but, for whatever reason, whether it be down to YouTube’s fickle algorithm that mostly favors alt-right content or my fickle subscribers who mostly watch alt-right content, dropping three videos all at once seemed to tank my engagement pretty horribly and in the future I’ll release everything piecemeal.

Oh, I suppose I must also mention that only a week or so before releasing the S4J videos, I uploaded the above video of Tucker Carlson siccing his white supremacist viewership on me for a rude tweet I made about our former president. This was not a new video. In fact, it happened before Trump was even sworn in. I put it up just because a friend had asked why I hadn’t done so already and I thought my channel had been dormant for so long, I might as well show some signs of life to remind people I was there before the album popped up shortly after.

Believe it or not, it didn’t occur to me until right when I was posting it that, oh yeah, this is going to alienate a lot of my stupid alt-right viewers! And, indeed, I lost the most subscribers all at once that I’d ever lost (I think it was something like 14, which still isn’t really a lot, but it’s not insignificant for a small channel like mine). So that may have affected how the S4J videos performed, too. But I guess I didn’t really care that much because also…

The Price of Abortion

As mentioned, the album cost $3 up until recently. Again, all these marketing moves were pulled by me, out of my ass, so the reasoning for them is shaky. If I’m remembering right, Bandcamp’s default suggested price was $5, but I had settled on $3 as an amount that a lot of people can view as being so close to nothing they might as well buy it, but still enough to feel like an actual product they chose to own rather than, say, $1, which is so cheap you might buy it on a whim and then forget you even own a new thing. Whatever, like I said, I made this stupid number up and I bet Bandcamp’s suggested $5 is basically working on the same reasoning but with actual data to back it up.

But then, lots of unknown Bandcamp artists charge nothing whatsoever and, really, that probably made the most sense for me to do too. But charging money was primarily done in a very silly attempt to gatekeep my music, and one that fell flat.

I’ve told a lot of people this, but to officially document it, these are the reasons I decided, well in advance of finishing S4J, to donate everything I made to the National Network of Abortion Funds.

In order of importance:

ONE – Like I said, I am actively antagonistic to what is apparently the core of my fan base, 4chan users. I hung out there a little bit when they started sharing my videos to talk with people and bask in the attention, but it didn’t take long for the toxicity of the culture there to get to me. And it didn’t take much longer for them to figure out I was a lefty SJW. I know I have fans who aren’t alt-right anon freaks, but the ones that are heavily sullied my feelings about continuing to make Simpsums. I don’t like making dickheads happy.

Since S4J isn’t obviously political in any way (and I previously mentioned I also worried it might strike a chord with incels), I wanted to at least make sales of it political in some fashion. I reasoned I should either donate to something that would help immigrants or donate to a cause for women. I went with women because the right hates immigrants, but they hate women first and foremost, and they super don’t like abortions. Plus, some immigrants happen to be women! Anyway, an affront to my right-wing fans was literally the main reason I did this.

TWO – I thought it was a good PR move. Hey, I’m just being honest! I’m happy to give money to abortion, but this was the second thing that occurred to me. I thought people who might not check out my album normally might give it a try for a good cause.

THREE – When I was making the album I was sitting on money from a former job and didn’t really need whatever I might get from the sales (I have less money now, but the album sales still wouldn’t have been enough to make much difference in my life). I thought, in my situation, it was good to practice the socialism you want to see in the world. I had the means, so why not?

I also figured (and I was correct) that I wouldn’t be making a significant amount of money off this thing, so why bother tying it to my livelihood at all? It’s quite freeing to not be watching the sales and thinking about what they mean for me because I’ve already pledged to get rid of all the money. Basically, there’s very little at stake for me, personally. It also (I think) takes some pressure off of friends because they don’t have to view however much they give as direct financial support for their pipe-dreaming elderly musician friend. I just want you to grab the music–maybe listen to it once. Whatever money you give to the abortion fund is gravy.

FOUR – An abortion fund would get a bit of money, duh. I mean, that’s good. Incidentally, I went with the NNAF over the obvious choice of Planned Parenthood because Planned Parenthood has pulled some big company bullshit like union busting and being anti-single-payer-healthcare in the past and the NNAF had a decent Charity Navigator rating and seemed like a good alternative. I also liked that they had “abortion” in their name because it might bug conservatives more.

FIVE – It would make girls think I’m cool …maybe? This was not a real consideration because I didn’t actually believe it would happen, but it did occur to me it might look like I did it so girls would think I’m cool. So, I dunno, I’m just mentioning it here so I seem less suspicious. Unless mentioning it makes me seem more suspicious. Look, either way it hasn’t worked.

Anyway, the #1 reason I did this was a total failure. I vastly overestimated how much my YouTube subscribers would even bother to look at my music videos that were in no way connected to The Simpsons. Bad miscalculation, girls! I lost some subscribers as I always do, sure, but there was no indication I’d pissed them off any more than usual. No one left me angry comments about the abortion fundraising because practically nobody commented. I ended up trying to gatekeep something from people who couldn’t care less about it existing in the first place. Kind of disappointing, not gonna lie. Maybe I blew my wad with the Tucker Carlson video. Oh well, at least they got upset about something.

In terms of how well this gambit worked on people who don’t hate women, I suppose it’s hard to tell. I will say that almost nobody bought S4J at the listed price and usually gave more. Actually, the most common donation was $10, which I agree is not a bad price for an album. I think it would be in poor taste to ask people whether they gave more money because of the cause or because they wanted to support me or a combo of both or if they wouldn’t have bought it at all without the abortions being part of the deal. I imagine the answer is different for everyone anyway, so who knows!

I should note, however, that when I yelled about S4J on social media, I mostly kept telling people to buy it, but I truly don’t know (and Googling a little bit didn’t elucidate it any further for me and I quickly got bored of trying to figure out) what the best way of getting Bandcamp to boost your music is. I don’t know if it’s sales or getting people to follow you (which they technically can do independently of owning the album) or getting people to leave positive reviews (which usually means asking them to go to the trouble of registering a Bandcamp account first) or a combination of both. But I do think being able to broadcast a bigger amount of overall money donated looks good and (maybe?) makes others more inclined to get involved.

I donate the money to the National Network of Abortion Funds every Bandcamp Friday (the first Friday of every month and the day Bandcamp waives their usual fee on sales). As of the time of this writing (keeping in mind many of the sales did include Bandcamp’s usual fee and even on Bandcamp Fridays there’s still a payment processor fee), there’s been $285.34 donated to the NNAF.

But the pre-fee amount of $347.01 feels impressive for something I listed at $3. I’d say even if my vengeance against my YouTube subscribers fell through, I don’t see any major negatives to donating all the money like this. I probably won’t do it for whatever the next release is though, just because, unfortunately, I will need money eventually. We’ll see if people are willing to pay when the only cause is my stupid ass! If it starts to look like nobody’s buying it, I’ll backpedal after a couple of days and be like UHH HEY I JUST DECIDED THIS ONE WILL GO DIRECTLY TO AOC 2024 PLEASE LISTEN TO MY MUSIC.

Promotion

Let me say up front that, like every namby-pamby artist type, I hate doing PR, I know nothing of PR, and, in releasing this album, I learned extremely little about how I’d do it for the future. The honest truth is that the most successful promotional effort of S4J was the tried and true strategy of nepotism. Okay, not really nepotism because my understanding is the definition of it implies family was involved and my family has not been responsible for much at all with the album. My sister didn’t even listen to the whole thing, wtf, and my dad listened to it but didn’t buy it, wtf!!! The biggest familial support I got was my cousin’s husband who threw a lot more cash at it than I was charging and said it was good.

But if we extend nepotism to include friends that give you a leg up, probably like 90% of the people who heard my album were directed to it by my friends Veronica and Oliver. They make their living through Veronica’s webcomic, which I am linking to here. I am confident the traffic they get from this will finally legitimize them. You’re welcome, friends.

Veronica and Oliver are the most famous people I know and they shared my music with their fans and got people to buy it and check it out and without them I am quite sure there would have been a lot less engagement and I would’ve been a lot more depressed. Some of their fans already know me from silly videos and Twitch, so they were already willing to support me, but I never would’ve reached them in the first place had Veronica not promoted me with retweets and such back in the day, so any way you look at it, I owe the majority of the attention S4J got to these two friends of mine. So thank you both again and forever!

Additionally, since Oliver has been running an internet business for years now, he’s also where all the good PR moves I made came from and all his predictions about how my music was likely to perform on different social media platforms pretty much came true. So, yeah, the main thing I learned from doing my own PR is that I don’t know much and I’m always just going to ask Oliver what to do. Also, again, playing live still feels like integral promotion for me that I haven’t been able to do, so there’s still that to come, some day, in theory…

I’ll go over how some social media platforms and blog promtion websites reacted (or didn’t react) to me posting about my music. I already covered YouTube, and on platforms like Instagram and Soundcloud I have so few followers that I feel like I can’t really even assess how people reacted because I’m basically posting into a void with three people floating around in it, so I won’t bother discussing those. Not that I don’t think Instagram and, duh, Soundcloud aren’t a useful way to grow a music fan base. I just don’t fucking know how to do it so my experience with them at the moment is nigh-irrelevant!

Also, before we get started, here’s my Linktree in case you want to check out my failing strategies on any of these platforms for yourself!

Twitter

I hate Twitter! Facebook is objectively the worst website on the internet, but it holds no allure for me. Twitter, however, I find addictive even though it stopped being fun forever ago and is just a screaming, frothing mass of political in-fighting. It fucking sucks! I’m also bitter about it because I never managed to build a decent following on it. Nobody likes me.

In fairness to nobody, I have all but given up on Twitter. I still occasionally get sucked into doomscrolling, but I gave up my own account for clinically dead over a year ago. I mostly just retweet political opinions I agree with that phrase it better than I could, make the occasional completely nonsensical tweet, sometimes post something about how much Twitter sucks, and once every three to four months I say something actually funny.

*starting serial killer documentary* Time to get inside this killer's mind….

*after documetnary* whoa, I get it now.. this guy liked killing

— Joe Versus (@Joespirational) February 14, 2019

Unfortunately, of all the social media I’m on, it’s probably the most conducive to spreading info about my creative projects to a public forum. I feel a lot of shame about self-promoting and find it quite difficult, but I had a little adrenaline from the album’s release that fueled me in posting shamelessly about it for like two or three weeks. After that, the shame returned in force because I started feeling like the people who already got the album were just having to see me hock it at them again and the people who didn’t want anything to do with it were having it repeatedly and annoyingly forced on them.

I never arrived at a specific method or way of advertising the album. I just shouted about it a whole lot. Veronica, who has experience with this sort of thing, did advise me at one point to maybe not be so self-deprecating because if you’re downplaying your work and saying it’s not that great, why would anyone bother with it? This is an obviously good piece of advice that makes tons of sense the moment you’re given it, so I’ve since done a whole two or three earnest tweets.

These days, I post the NNAF donations every Bandcamp Friday and I don’t say all that much except “here’s how much has been raised, it’s Bandcamp Friday, please go get my album.” I also post video clips featuring my music that I really made for TikTok, but figured why not put them on Twitter too?

The saddest thing about my Twitter account is I used to have a more popular one (not that popular; my follower count was in the 200s instead of 100s), but I got banned for a goofy, aggressive tweet about republicans. The biggest loss is that Mitski was a mutual. She followed me pre-Be the Cowboy, we interacted a few times, and she liked some of my tweets. I had at one point entertained the notion she might give my music a listen, when it was finished. But then I got banned and, after making a new account, felt too awkward to be like “uhh we were mutuals before, can you follow me again?” though maybe I should’ve, I dunno.

By that point, she was a lot less active on social media anyway. And when I finally released S4J, she was, as she is as of right now, off social media entirely. But who knows! In the version of the universe where I didn’t get banned from Twitter, maybe she would’ve still been addicted to the internet like the rest of us and would’ve told everyone to download my music and I would’ve opened for her on her next tour. You know, Ashton Kutcher’s butterfly effect .

Bottom line: I hate Twitter and don’t know how to act on it, but it’s probably been my most successful social media for music promotion because, you guessed it, Veronica has kindly retweeted me a whole bunch of times. But otherwise I don’t know how much anything I do on there matters. Thank you, Vero!

Below is my current pinned tweet. Couldn’t tell you how many units this baby has moved.

https://t.co/uvnKbn0Igz pic.twitter.com/vguMbNMCwX

— Joe Versus (@Joespirational) December 3, 2020

Tumblr

I hate Tumblr! Not really. The honest truth is, for my money, Tumblr is the only good social media site left, mostly because it’s been totally forgotten by everyone except the freaks who refuse to leave, so it’s just us stragglers posting inane shit. Plus, it’s still never fully given into the social media plague of the company curating your feed behind the scenes, so you get your nonsense unfiltered and as you like. Furthermore, the image of Tumblr people that people who don’t use Tumblr have of it being a no-fun zone where everyone bristles at everything and people get canceled for failing to be familiar with the most recent edition of the SJW lexicon is outdated. Tumblr went through that phase and emerged stronger, angrier, and more irreverent. Twitter now far better embodies the old image of Tumblr people have, and the Twitter zombies can’t even see that. Tragic…

So Tumblr is a fun site to waste your time on, but to promote a personal project? Get fucked, snowflake! On the one hand, you have to admire the spirit of the place. Everyone hates being advertised to and Tumblrites viciously assault and mock any ad campaign that foolishly attempts to tap into the market of forgotten weirdos. Unfortunately, they seem to hate being advertised to across the board, so they are likely to shun you and your personal project, too. There even used to be a post with a healthy number of notes going around about how Tumblr is the social media where it doesn’t matter how many followers or clout you have, nobody gives a shit about your work.

It does make sense. It’s mostly a site for quick hits, letting you view images, short videos, and (usually brief) text posts in rapid succession. If you’re not laughing or wowed or informed or shamed in a couple of seconds, you’ll likely scroll down to the next thing. This is in no way exclusive to Tumblr, but there’s also an annoying tendency to only give posts that are already doing well the time of day, as though they’ve been vetted so you now feel confident enough to stamp ’em with your likes and/or reblogs of approval. I feel I’m generally fine with going to bat for a no-note post, but I’m sure I’m also sometimes guilty of the behavior I’m describing.

Oliver told me that Tumblr is probably not gonna be great for advertising anything, but my best chance was to really highlight the abortion fund aspect. Tumblr may have made it through its overzealous SJW period, but its progressive slacktivist heart still beats strongly beneath everything.

So, yeah, my music has gone all but entirely ignored. I share effectively the same stuff on Tumblr as I do on Twitter, so I’ve also been posting the short video clips I made there. A few times I got a like or two. I think there was a reblog of a music clip once ever? But, indeed, the post that has performed the best (i.e., at all) is the long one I add to every month where I mention the abortion fund and how much has been donated thus far. However, also fitting with Oliver’s predictions, Tumblr users are happy to share stuff for a good cause, but that’s as far as their involvement goes. I can only attribute one sale to Tumblr to a mutual who knew me from my previous internet stuff already and who I’m quite sure had no interest in my music, but just started to feel bad for me seeing all my no-note music posts. (I should confess I can’t help myself these days with being combative and whiny, usually mentioning somewhere in the post or the tags something to the effect of “I know tumblr doesn’t care, fuck you.” It probably doesn’t help, but I also doubt it’s a major factor in my posts’ failing.)

It’s irritating because Tumblr is now the social media I have the most followers on and yet it’s really no good for anything except making me laugh sometimes (but, make no mistake, I do highly value that). I feel much more embarrassment about pushing S4J on Tumblr than I do anywhere else because the engagement is so nonexistent I just feel pathetic futilely bothering everyone with it.

However, the most hopeful thing I can say is that, shortly before Mitski really blew up (the post-Puberty 2/pre-Be the Cowboy era), I would share her tracks on Tumblr sometimes and wonder why no one gave a shit about her because it seemed like Tumblr people would like her. But now that she’s a big deal and everyone has heard “Nobody,” I can’t hardly move around the site without bumping into some 10,000-note Mitski meme that isn’t even fucking funny. So what I’m saying is I just have to become a reasonably famous musician in the real world so that the people on Tumblr who have heard of me can fit my lyrics into an established meme template that will get shared around and piss me off!! Fingers crossed!

Facebook

My understanding is that Facebook is still one of the best places to be if you’re looking to undermine democracy and keep people up to date with your tour schedule. I have dutifully made a page as such, which will hopefully be of some use when I get to play live somewhere. But as far as functioning as a promotional space for me now, like roughly all the other social media on here, it’s hard to say what good it’s doing me. I guess so far I’d say it doesn’t seem to be doing a whole lot.

I don’t post as much on the Facebook page as I do on Twitter or Tumblr because so far the Facebook page is largely followed by my Facebook friends. Though I did make a post warning everybody first, I did that annoying thing that everyone with some pitiful personal project or business does where you invite everybody on your friends’ list to like the page for your bad poetry or your mail-order tacos for chihuahuas home business. Currently 49 people like the page and I’d wager something like 45 of them are already Facebook friends. I would assume there’s a way for me to check exactly who’s liked the page, but if there is, it requires an arcane and circuitous ritual of mouse-clicks that I can’t be fucked to take more than two minutes to figure out!

Let me also add that the page has 49 likes, but 55 followers, which befuddles the fuck out of me! Following, as far as I know, is the more obtrusive thing to do; it’s what shoves a notification in your face when the page so much as exhales. Why would you follow something, and then go: “But like it? A bridge too far!” I don’t get it.

Anyway, I just feel less inclined to bug this collection of mostly acquaintances I haven’t bothered to unfriend (and who haven’t bothered to unfriend me) because the majority of them almost certainly liked the page as a courtesy. I can certainly confirm that almost none of them extended that courtesy to picking up the motherfucking album!

I also just hate using Facebook and view it as the dying oldster social media, so, again, unless I’m touring, I don’t see much cause to post there often. But maybe rumors of Facebook’s impending demise are vastly exaggerated considering how regularly it manages to upend the political systems of so many countries. It’s possible I’ve got this all wrong and Facebook is my ticket to stardom and I should be posting to it as regularly as any other social media. My Facebook band page is a public page with the potential to reach total strangers, after all.

To wit, I do get the odd view, like, or follow on the page and sometimes a rando even likes a video. (Something that will frustrate me to no end is that I seem to also get a random view or two on my old, defunct joke band pages like every week; I can usually count on these more than someone visiting my current band page. Cool!) For some reason I’ve got the most “engagement” (whatever the fuck that means because it doesn’t appear to mean likes or shares) with my covers of “Listen With Your Heart” from Disney’s classic racist cartoon, Pocahontas, and my cover of the Black Knight 2000 pinball machine theme (which isn’t even a great cover; I can actually play the opening on the guitar now). That video also has one comment on it from someone, written in Arabic. To that end, I’ve noticed some of the random likes and follows I’m getting seem to be from people with Arab-sounding names and I wonder if they just see my Egyptian last name (the page is titled Joe Versus but every post is published by Joe Matar) and like it because I’m a member of the tribe? Actually, I’ve also gotten a couple of Latinx-sounding names. My last name happens to mean “kill” in Spanish, so maybe they’re living life on the edge and following me for edgy content?

Or maybe they’re all bots! I’d check for telltale robot evidence but Facebook makes it hard to follow people’s names back to their pages, which is fair enough. Everyone deserves their privacy and a STEADY DIET OF SOCIETALLY DESTRUCTIVE MISINFORMATION!!!

Some helpful advice I can give anyone with a personal project is that you should not give Facebook your money to advertise on it. For one, Mark Zuckerberg will use your dollar bills as kindling to stoke his bonfire of squirming Rwandan babies. But, more importantly, it won’t get anyone to really look into your project. Buying ad space on Facebook is something they give the proletariat access to, but it isn’t actually there for the average schmo like myself; it’s for big ad buys from mega-conglomerates and dishonest political campaigns who are typically banking on pre-established name recognition.

No, I did not give Mark any money! I know someone who had Facebook ad credit so we tried using it to do ads for S4J for kicks. I had realistic expectations for this as I didn’t expect it to do much of anything as the same problem persists as before: why check out the music of some random joker you’ve never heard of just because they (ostensibly) spent money on a Facebook ad?

Well, it’s good I had my expectations so low because they were met with flying colors, all of them different sickly shades of brown! Get it?! Cuz it ended up being shit!!

Absolutely no one bought or downloaded the album. It was still being sold for $3 the first day we ran an ad, but I decided, while it was getting all this ad exposure, it’d be better to switch it to free to increase the likelihood people would download it, maybe. And, yeah, that didn’t work. If you check out the graph below, it shows a huge bump in visits to my Bandcamp page from Facebook for a few days in February. But scroll back up (or just take my word for it) to the Sales and Plays graphs and you’ll see no fluctuations in the former graph and a few wee, lil’ bumps in the latter.

I also changed which track would play first when you land on the page like four or five times while the advertising was running. This seemed to change approximately nothing. In fact, all plays of nearly every track were partial plays (more than 10% of the song but less than 90%) or a skip (track was stopped before the 10% mark). In full, there were 13 full plays of my songs on ads that ran for 5 days. And one of those plays was the whole album listened through on one day, meaning that it seems very likely one person listened to the whole album and one other person listened to one song (“People Are Famous”) in full. That’s all! I should add that there were still direct visits to the page on these days, so there’s actually no telling whether the people who got there from Facebook were in fact the ones who listened to the songs in full! Very possibly someone who already owned the album just happened to listen to it again that day! Wahey!

We actually ran two ads. One that had the album cover ran most of the time but, before that, we ran an ad using this image of my late cat and I because I figured people would click on it just cuz it had a cat. It seemed to work, but apparently as soon as people got to the Bandcamp page and saw there was no more cat content, they fucked right off again! (Joke’s on them because if they downloaded the album they’d get the PDF featuring more cat pix!!) We did get some people liking the ad, whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean, and it did seem to me as though the likes flowed more freely with the cat picture, so I assume they were just liking the cat.

The ads also let people find their way to my Facebook band page, but I don’t think they did much once they got there. I got notifications about big boosts in visits and that nebulous so-called metric of “engagement,” but it didn’t result in any comments, follows, shares, or likes. So, all in all, do I think you should give Facebook money ever? If you need help ushering in an era of global fascism, sure! But if you want to promote your indie record, fuck to the no!!!

Twitch

I have a box under my Twitch stream that yells at viewers to go get my album and every time you join my chat the rules clearly spell out that you must download my album, something I’ve seen chatters flagrantly disregard. But I don’t regularly try to force people to get the thing on Twitch. I’m sure there are more opportunities than I’m making use of. Every time I walk off to get a snack or use the bathroom, I could play my bullshit in the interim. I even made instrumental versions that could be used as background music, potentially. (EDIT FROM THE FUTURE: I have since played these instrumentals on my stream and now you can even buy ’em for an exorbitant fee, the pricing of which was based on Oliver’s advisement. The price of the original release has also been raised and I am now just keeping all the money. So much for my altruism! If it helps, no one has bought the original album since I stopped donating the money, so I am technically still a saint.)

But my active Twitch followers are rather a small group who I know all bought the thing already and I don’t wanna keep forcing them to hear it. My view counts seem to suggest there are lurkers who duck in and out every stream. Maybe I should be playing it for them and seeing if I happen to net any suckers who like the noise? (Alternatively, it’ll just make people leave sooner.)

I do try to do something related to my music when I stream on Bandcamp Fridays (like, last time I played a big reel of all my music videos). Some mutuals showed up for my impromptu gig and bought the album (but I think my constant mentioning of it on Twitter coupled with the live performance was what pushed them to eventually grab the thing). Everyone else that I can think of who told me during a stream that they were buying or had recently bought the album were all people who grew to know me over time, but were originally introduced to me by way of Veronica and Oliver.

So I guess I’d say, yeah, Twitch has led to some sales but only in combination with all the other junk I’ve done on the web to “build” a brand(?), plus, again, my friendship with my famous webcomic friends. But I’m definitely keeping it in mind as a platform I could make better use of in the future to exhibit my music.

TikTok

I didn’t have a TikTok when I released S4J, but Oliver pointed out how many indie types these days get their start when someone ganks a snippet of their song and dances to it and then it goes viral. So I went ahead and made a TikTok account and I must say it was a great idea. No, it didn’t lead to plays or downloads of the album. I’m not even positive it led to anyone visiting the Bandcamp page (you can’t do hyperlinks on TikTok so people would have to do some work to get there). But it did lead to a little bit of confidence boosting, which is not nothing, if you ask me!

I don’t know how the TikTok algorithm works, but, seemingly more than any other social media I’m on, it shows a surprising degree of benevolence toward total nobodies. On every other network I use, the primary way people who don’t know me are going to see the stuff I post is if I’m lucky enough that the people who already know me deign it worthy to share around to their followers and then tell two friends and they tell two friends and so on. When I first got on TikTok with zero followers, my first video got 479 views and 2 likes, my second video got 364 views and 18 likes, my third: 376 and 40 likes, and my fourth got 490 views and 100 likes (and I have a whopping 13 followers now)! Dang, I’m already famous!

In TikTok reality, these are piss-poor numbers. The average popular TikTok account gets tens or even hundreds of thousands of views. It seems that posts from people with no following regularly manage to hit around 100-170 views, but the likes are not always a certainty, so getting 100 likes on a video that was just the bridge from the “People Are Famous” music video is pretty encouraging!

I almost never open TikTok to scroll through the recommended video feed, but all they seem to recommend me are either videos of young women doing sexy dances or videos of people telling me how to go viral on TikTok. I’ve ignored all the advice in these because frankly I never follow any advice of how to go viral for the sake of going viral and will only do such a thing if and when my life depends on it and/or it’s easy. Also, these are just random people on TikTok claiming to know all the algorithm secrets, so I’m not sure I buy the shit they’re saying anyway.

The one piece of advice I heard that rang true to me was that a good practice (and one I was accidentally already usually doing) is to get off of TikTok right after you post because the app wants you to come back and sink hours into it. Therefore, it’ll show your video to more people so that they might like or comment on it and you’ll be enticed by the notifications to log back in. This sounds dystopian enough to be true!

The only other advice I make an effort to follow is from this site, whoever they are, and their list of the best times to post on TikTok. Since I have an ass-backwards sleep schedule, I typically post Tuesdays around 4 AM and Fridays around 5 AM and then I don’t look at TikTok until late that night or the next day. This all seems to kind of work, except for the occasional video that gets literally zero views. TikTok’s algorithm must have some specific problem with these videos because I’ve even tried deleting and uploading them again on another day, only to get the same effect. (With the exception of one that did pretty well and was the second clip I ever posted, the clips that seem to reliably fail have all been taken from the “Nothing Doing” video, which features little British kids from the 70s running around and wreaking havoc on a farm. I wonder if TikTok identifies little kids in videos and chooses to keep them off feeds more than others to dodge in advance any possible litigiousness of viral videos to do with children? Just a theory!)

Otherwise, although it feels possible I might just be getting the TikTok algorithm’s Minimum Pity Engagement (or MPE) engineered to keep me posting on the site (it seems perhaps telling I hit largish viewcounts early on, even with a “Nothing Doing” clip) and I’m just having delusional confirmation bias, I was expecting absolutely no engagement so even 15 likes feels like a win, especially considering I’m probably not even using TikTok correctly.

I post fairly infrequently (even less often now that I’m out of videos) and I took the maximum video length of one minute as an opportunity to fill that minute with as much music as possible. So, nearly all my videos are a minute’s worth of a song over some lightly edited public domain footage or a minute of me performing a song from my Twitch performance. I imagine I should be going for much shorter snippets. I find it hard to showcase what’s good about my music in really tiny sections, but maybe I should shoot for 30-45 seconds (the “People Are Famous” bridge that performed rather well is 43 seconds).

It’s possible I should go back and chop videos down and post smaller clips, but I’m feeling pretty done with the video promoting for this album and I’m more likely to start focusing on new material, whenever that’s ready. It also seems as though, just like with how people often judge guitar-driven music based on seeing it played live, people on TikTok sometimes respond better to the footage of me playing rather than the public domain stuff (which is admittedly quite an odd, but, I would figure, eye-catching thing to stumble across on TikTok). So I’m considering posting me playing snippets of new songs when I feel ready enough to show them but before I’ve started properly recording them or anything. In general, with all my music video stuff, I think it might serve me better to start putting myself on camera more, tying a personality to the music.

I’ve also kept my TikTok largely limited to music. I’m not sure whether or not I should! I have plenty of comedy videos I could cut out excerpts of and post there. I tried posting a goofy anime clip the other day on a whim (it got okay engagement). I’m not sure if it’d just make the account’s brand more confusing to suddenly fill it with joke videos after posting music clips almost exclusively, or if it’d be worth getting people to come for the silly stuff and stay for the music (though that shit clearly didn’t work on YouTube). I really don’t know! But as of right now, largely out of laziness (I don’t wanna have to find and edit loads of funny clips that fit TikTok video length 🙁 ), I’m keeping it primarily music-centric.

Anyhow, no, I never went viral on TikTok and I didn’t get crazy engagement on any videos. But I got enough likes and views to give me the sense that I might reach more people if I continue posting music and it continues to sound better (I believe some people found TikTok success without even being on TikTok; someone just grabbed a piece of their song from SoundCloud and used it in a video and they got popular that way). If nothing else, TikTok got me to make a whole bunch of public domain mini-music-videos and I had a great time making those and fucking love how they came out. Eventually, I’ll release them on YouTube as one big reel (it will get 10 views, 2 dislikes, and 6 unsubscribes).

Byte

Another suggestion by Oliver was that I join Byte. “What the fuck is Byte?” you ask? Yes, we’re all wondering the same thing.

Byte is the follow-up to Vine, the best internet video platform for comedy that has ever existed. Byte is like Vine in that it is also a video platform that forces you to upload your content through mobile (TikTok has no such restriction). It differs from Vine in that it sucks and nobody likes it or has even heard of it.

It was a decent idea on Oliver’s part, that Byte is so much more small and unknown that, compared to a juggernaut like TikTok, it might be easier to break through the chaff and get some popularity on there. That’s sound reasoning! But I’ve actually gotten far less engagement on Byte than on TikTok and feel relatively ignored on it.

It’s possible I’m undervaluing my performance on Byte. Maybe a few likes on most of my uploads (though they seemed to taper off over time) is cause for celebration. Also, Byte apes the TikTok feature of letting you use someone else’s audio in your video and, though that never happened to me on TikTok, it happened once on Byte! Some eye doctor posted a weird video of footage taken of the inside of an eye and set it to 15 seconds of “Multiplex.” It was an odd juxtaposition that didn’t work, in my opinion, but he had a decent number of followers so I guess it’s nice some more people got to hear some seconds of my music.

He didn’t credit me in the video description but he did drop my hashtag, #JoeVersus, in the comments, except that you have to make sure the hashtag goes “live,” rendering it clickable, and he didn’t. So it was a dormant hashtag one would have to copy-paste or manually type in and search for themselves. Needless to say, I didn’t get an influx of views or likes from this. I considered mentioning the hashtag issue to him but it seemed petty and exhausting, so I just told him thanks and mentioned that I had an album and gave him the link. He liked the comment and I received no subsequent listens or purchases of my album. Feels so good to be famous!

I am being a sour grapes little shit here. It is encouraging that someone liked some music of mine enough to use it in their own video. It was just underwhelming and TikTok, surprisingly, feels more encouraging on balance. These days, I rarely get even two likes on Byte and frequently get none at all. Byte lets you post into categories and I almost always get one like from the same account of a girl who also posts under the “musicmakers” category. I’m not sure if she actually likes my stuff that much or if she’s just networking. But, if I practically never scroll through TikTok, I fully never scroll through Byte and look at other people’s content. I did it once when I first downloaded it and it made me sad. But maybe I need to be liking and following and building a community of fellow Byte rejects to get the most out of it. No thanks! I would like to add I did go look at that girl’s account once and she seemed a perfectly capable musician, though the short video length makes it hard to truly assess anyone.

I mentioned before that I find it hard to cut my music down to impressive-sounding super-short clips. Well, I’ve had to with Byte because videos on it can only be 15 seconds long. I think it’s a shit limit, frankly. It’s not short enough to inspire the wild creativity that Vine did, but it’s not long enough to communicate anything complex and feels irrelevant when TikTok gives you a whole minute.

Anyway, when I remember to (and I often don’t), I occasionally still post my 15-second stupid little music clips on Byte. But, mentally, I’ve written it off.

I should note that the very last video I posted on Byte (as I’m out of videos for now), of me performing a bit of “She Hurts,” suddenly got me my first ever Byte share (they call them “rebytes,” smh), which led to a BIG FAT WAD of 4 likes. Comparatively, the last clip I posted on TikTok (which was from the “Nothing Doing” music video that the TikTok machine loathes) got literally zero engagement and I deleted it in shame. So, I dunno, maybe in the long run Byte will be my ticket out of this dump aftetr all!

Incidentally, if there’s a way to link to your Byte with an URL outside of the Byte app, I wasn’t able to figure it out and have stopped caring to try.

SubmitHub

There was a period of time in my life in which I wrote shitty short stories and then tried to get them published in even shittier online journals. I came away feeling like it was a big, stupid waste of time and energy, and, in some cases, was maybe even kind of a goddamn scam? Much in the way the professional art world exists primarily as a money-laundering service for the very rich, I feel the lit mag submission system exists to bat struggling writers around like a cat playing with a doomed mouse, occasionally squeezing $15 or so bucks out of them along the way, you know, just like a cat does with a mouse.

There are major lit journals and magazines out there that you may have heard of, ones that are associated with universities, and then there’s all the other ones. You can generally assume you aren’t going to get into the ones you’ve heard of (I have no clue how anyone ever does; your dad needs to be Shakespeare or something). The university-affiliated ones also very probably don’t want you, but getting into one of them isn’t necessarily a total impossibility, maybe. As for all the other ones, you can for sure get into one of those! And your work will reach a readership about equivalent to what you’d get if you printed up your story and threw it out the window of a moving car. And then a couple months later, the journal will go under.

You see, anyone can start a lit journal. You basically just need a URL, a website capable of displaying text, an email address, and you’re good to go! I could change this very website into an online lit mag tomorrow if I wanted! One time my mom handed me a postcard that had the name and submission info of some friend of hers’ new lit journal as though she were cluing me into some great opportunity to get my work published and not just what was effectively some dork’s personal website that they’d lose the verve for and stop updating in a couple months. Many years ago, at the dawn of the internet, I ran a “comedy” website with a friend. Late in its life, I got one of my very serious stories published in a lit mag. I had the thought afterwards to compare the traffic of our site with the lit mag and found we dwarfed them easily. And then, a few months later, they went under.

The worst thing about lit mags is that some of them have the gall to ask for money from poor, unknown writers — people who almost certainly don’t have money to throw away — for the honor of them reading over your story. I get that lit mags have to read through lots of garbage, but it still strikes me as uncouth to ask for money from us stupid writing losers, especially when you still might just reject us and especially when, if you didn’t, we’d get the reward of being published in your no-circulation, unknown journal that’s going to shutter in two months. Some lit journals actually make print editions so they need money to cover those costs. Getting printed on real paper feels more prestigious, but is it really? Now you’ve gone from your work getting onto an unknown website that someone might stumble upon by way of a Google search to getting published in a print journal that only weirdo freaks who spend money on printed lit journals will read. Do these people even exist? If so, they are fucked up and can stay the hell away from me!

Did you know you can submit to the New Yorker for fucking free? It looks like the new policy is you have to submit by snail mail, but it used to literally be a page with a box you just copy-pasted your entire story into. You didn’t expect to actually get a response, obviously; there’s every chance they put that box there to appease the frothing writing masses and it actually all just went into a spam folder housed on a server in Detroit, but, still, it was fucking free! (And now it’s only the price of a stamp.)

Anyway, the majority of short-lived shit lit journals (six more will have gone under by the time you finish reading this parenthetical) accept submissions through a submission system called Submittable, or at least that was the case last I checked (even the New Yorker uses Submittable, though for cartoon submissions). I remember combing through some insane website I’ve since forgotten that endeavored to keep an updated list of all the lit journals presently accepting submissions, color-coding them to indicate whether they were active now, whether they cost money, and so on. It was a massive database of shit that in my memory ended up looking like some kind of exhausting, batshit schematic rather than a helpful, organized listing of who might publish my writing.

But just about all the listings used Submittable, which made the whole thing feel like more of a conspiracy. It felt like all the lit journals agreed to get together and do everything the same way, creating this machine designed to grind down hopeful writers. Sometimes they’d even get a few bucks out of you, but mostly they were happy enough just to feed on your lifeforce. Toss your stupid manuscript into Submittable’s insatiable jaws, you fool! You probably won’t get published, but, then again, you might! Either way it will never feel like an achievement. You submit and submit and submit to Submittable. And then, eventually, you die…

Would you be surprised to learn that there’s a Submittable equivalent for online indie music blogs? Well, there is! It’s called SubmitHub! Have I used it?! I have! Do I like it?!? Uh-oh!

Take everything I said about Summitable and apply it to SubmitHub because it’s pretty much the exact same thing, except it feels even more like a scam. Submittable is just a system that a lot of lit mags have found to fit their needs. SubmitHub is technically the same thing, but you can actually do all your submitting through the SubmitHub website because they run a database of all the music blogs that use their service. Very convenient! And it also makes the submission process feel all the more like a one-armed bandit.

The other reason it feels even more like a scam is because quite a lot of the blogs, or at least the ones that SubmitHub rates highly for having the most audience reach, expect you to pay them! If you’re down in the gutter with the unknown lit mags, most of them have the decency to not ask for money (or at least this used to be the case; I can’t say for sure now). Music blogs, however, are gonna need a little cash to listen to your shit for 3 minutes. It’s not normal money, either! SubmitHub has a whole credits system where you pay them and then you get credits to submit your songs to blogs with.

The prices are 5 credits for $6, 10 credits for $10, 30 for $27, and 100 for $80. These prices seem kind of reasonable, I guess? Though, when you’re the #1 indie music submission service in town, reasonable by what metric? I got the 30 credits and only used like half of them. …I think? After you buy the credits, the submission process only gets more confusing. When you choose to submit to a blog, you’re asked the following:

I find it weird the standard credit is even called “credit.” It’s really just a limitation on how often you’re allowed to submit a song for free. The four-hour limit, as well as the overall lack of perks, as well as the fact that loads of blogs don’t even take the standard credit, all seems geared toward making you buy premium credit. After you choose premium credit — because, what, are you going to go with standard credit like a peasant or don’t you want to be SubmitHub royalty? — you get this bullshit:

You’ll notice there’s a hyperlink there to try and understand how this part of the process works. I read it over multiple times. I still don’t understand. Much as it is with the premium credit, many blogs only accept one kind of feedback over the others. I have no clue what the best option is, but since I had bought the stupid SubmitHub Funny Money anyway, I figured just go for the gusto? I guess?? So I chose the “I care about feedback” option every time, though I find it a bizarre demand of the people running these blogs because it actually forces them to listen to a couple of minutes of the song and furthermore forces them to get back to you within a small timeframe (I believe it’s 48 hours). And then, on top of that, they have to come up with a couple sentences of original feedback that sound fake-thoughtful.

So it’s like… if they didn’t hate my music enough already, now I’m forcing them to earn their SubmitHub kickback by jumping through these little hoops. Mind you, I still think this seems like a darn good scam. I’m sure they hear a lot of garbage music, but it’s still only a couple of minutes of pain and and then they barely have to write a paragraph pretending to care about it. But, when SubmitHub whales keep forcing them to listen and give feedback, I get why they wouldn’t feel favorable of, like, any of the music after a while. Still, I kept choosing “I care about feedback” because it seemed like the best option out of three options I didn’t hardly understand!

I submitted to–actually I’ve no goddamn clue how many blogs I submitted to offhand because I’m looking at this list of my submissions and it’s confusing nonsense, just like everything else on SubmitHub. I guess some submissions cost more credits than others? Maybe? And you can use multiple credits to simultaneously submit to multiple blogs? I think? I dunno. I did all this shit months ago and it was already befuddling then.

Long story short, nobody put my music on their kakadoody blogs. Admittedly, I submitted almost exclusively to higher traffic blogs with, I suppose, more “exclusive” tastes, but once you scrolled past those, the audience reach numbers quickly started looking pathetic and I started getting lit journal Vietnam flashbacks. Indeed, I managed to find some redditors talking about how your reward for getting accepted by some of these places often ends up being rattled off alongside a bunch of other indie chumps in a paragraph like, “Here’s what we’re listening to this month:”. It wasn’t too many blogs in before I began to wonder what the benefit was of getting a name-drop on blogspot.com/user/BlaineLovesIndies.

Incidentally, the little feedback blurbs I forced out of the bloggers were boring and mostly unhelpful, yet also disheartening. They all found a way to spin it to sound mostly positive but then would drop in a vague thing like, “we’d like some more development on the production” (fair, I suppose) or “the lyricism isn’t really up to what we’d like” (fuck you, I’m a gorgeous lyricist). Sometimes, even though they didn’t like me, they went to pains to sound positive and the net result just left me perplexed. One guy’s response seemed almost entirely positive (he claimed to have “dug it” even!) but he still rejected me anyway. One blog sounded positive enough to me that I thought maybe they just didn’t like that particular song, so I sent them another. Their forced!!! response this time started out, “Again, we recognize the talent here, but..” in a tone not unlike a girl trying to get rid of a nice, but persistent guy who doesn’t know that he smells.

I submitted “People Are Famous” to one place that was into metal and seemed maybe less pretentious than the average indie music blog and I got the feeling they hated me more than any of the others! Unlike the other responses, theirs had more negatives than positives (though it still ended by blandly saying they “recognize the skills and artistic effort”) and frankly my takeaway was they were saying, in so many words, “Who the fuck do you think you are, dabbling in this genre? Stay the fuck out.”

I’ll admit I gave up fast on this process (I still have a bunch of SubmitHub Coolbux I could burn through if I ever feel like I have the energy for it), but I did get the sense that my music doesn’t scan well with the rather self-serious, fancy-pants indie blog scene. I mean, I’m saying that to nurse a wounded ego, sure, and, as detailed in the first part of this screed, I at least recognize my production could stand to improve, but I don’t doubt there’s some truth to this as well. Music, indie and alternative music especially, is a pretentious field and just reading the coverage of some of the acts these blogs do choose to publicize gives you the sense that the curators of this unknown music are about as pretentious as they come. I mean, I’ve always hated practically all music journalism for the pseudo-intellectual, flowery, uninformative claptrap it is. I was bound to be turned off by the indie music bloggers and they were likely to not know what to do with me and my half-jokey, lo-fi bollocks.

I don’t know if there are better blogs outside of the SubmitHub crime ring that are better to send your music to. I just know that all my searching around for places to promote my music kept drawing me back to the SubmitHub vortex and I hated it there. I have since considered writing a deeply petty song called something clever like “Fuck SubmitHub” just so that I could have the pleasure of submitting it and forcing indie blogs to write responses addressing the obnoxious content within. I have not genuinely developed this idea yet, but maybe some day!

Oh yeah, you can also choose to submit to influencers on SubmitHub. That’s right, you can submit your song to some Instagram bastard with the hope they’ll like your music enough to use it as background while they waffle on about skin care products or whatever. The very idea of this makes me want to kill myself, but I did submit to one influencer for a laugh. The song was deemed “not a good fit.”

Musosoup

Musosoup is a site where you put together a campaign for your music project (either in advance or after it’s already out) and then a mod looks it over and, if they think it looks good, puts it live on their site. Your campaign then pops up for content curators (which I think just means music blog people) who can decide whether they want to link to your stuff or not. You pay £15 to have your campaign up for 45 days. As the days go by, your campaign moves closer to the top of the pile, so you’re more likely to get people considering it near the end of its run. Once your campaign goes live, Musosoup sends you an email reminding you not to fret if you don’t get a bite early on, as things should pick up later on in the campaign. Or, if you’re me, they never will and nobody will ever cover your stupid, shitty album!

Maybe they just tricked me and I should have the same animosity toward Musosoup that I do toward SubmitHub, but I don’t. I read up on them before giving them money and they seem to be a legit place (that or they’ve got paid plants around the web talking them up as one) that does sometimes get people music blog coverage. When I submitted my campaign — which consists of filling out a bunch of questions that help give a feel for what your music is like — they approved it pretty fast, probably because it was an already finished project with cover art and junk. Even though they put it up lickety-split, I got the feeling a mod did look over it and listened to the music some, because he added some tags I hadn’t and they were accurate (rap-rock was in there, for example).

You can check the status of your campaign and see the blogs that looked at you and then chose to reject you! I got a few rejections early on and tried to keep the positivity Musosoup suggested about the campaign picking up steam later, but there was a point still early in the campaign where — with the exception of one blog that looked at my stuff and then just never submitted a decision on it ever — the rejections were getting consistent and I had the thought “no one’s going to cover my album.” And I was right! I just had the sense I had with SubmitHub that blogs listened to a bit of my DIY nutty noise, looked at the goofy album title, and went “nah.”

It’s possible the problem is my music is HORRIBLE but as of right now I will continue to stick with the theory that me and music blogs don’t understand each other and we will never be friends. If nothing else, I’ll make whatever comes next have a less stupid title. Maybe that will trick them.

Incidentally, if your campaign goes nowhere, Musosoup gives you a free coupon to do your next campaign. They specifically say in the email that it’s for “your next release,” which implied to me they don’t want you to try again with the same release advertised with different copy and/or promo images, but rather they mean come back when you have all-new music to promote. They give you two months to use the coupon, which is somewhat generous, but if you only just released one project, two months to churn out another is a laughable amount of time (unless you’re releasing one or two songs at a time, which many people do these days; I’m not sure whether or not Musosoup lets you promote just one song, incidentally).

I could have emailed to ask if they meant a new release or if I could just submit my album again under a new campaign, but I didn’t really think it was going to do any better a second time anyway and I knew I wouldn’t have any new music ready in two months either. So I let the coupon expire! But I might use Musosoup again in the future. £15 is a not unreasonable amount of money for a campaign you put up once and then ignore and let it do its thing (or not) for 45 days and it’s far preferable to actively submitting stuff and reading rejections daily through SubmitHub’s Fake Money for Bastards Credit System.

Reactions Were Vast

To return to what we were talking about ten years ago at the start of this half of the postmortem, the majority of people who heard and reacted to S4J were friends, family, friends of friends, internet mutuals, and a few people I guess I can just call fans. The little blurb reviews above from my Bandcamp page are all from such people (volcanojoe is the other Joe who sings on S4J; the Joe at the bottom there… I sort of know him), but that they gave a shit enough to write a review at all is nothing to slouch at! Whether they all actually liked the music or just want to be nice and supportive of me, hey! I’ll take it. I also think it’s nice that everyone has a different choice of favorite track, again confirming all my music is equally bad/good.

To reiterate, considering the circumstances, I must classify S4J as a success. All the little icons displayed in that screengrab are people who own the album and have Bandcamp accounts (and who, in some cases, had to first make a Bandcamp account). I mentioned before that I have no clue what specifically helps you get bigger on Bandcamp, whether it’s sales or followers or some combination, but I do know that anytime you visit a Bandcamp page and see it peppered with loads of these icons and a bunch of reviews, you can assume that person has carved out a solid following. I’m obviously not there yet! The fact that one of the reviews on there is still, well, me, attests to that.

As an aside: I do wonder if I should’ve maybe badgered people more about following and writing blurb reviews, but shameless nagging doesn’t come to me naturally and I already did enough of it to get people to buy the album; trying to get them to do more seems hard! Furthermore, Bandcamp is a ramshackle website that requires a nonsensical process to leave a review: you have to go to your own user profile page to see your music collection and write the review for the album there (and you can also choose your favorite track). Furthermore, a few people wrote reviews that, for reasons unknown, won’t show up on the page! I tried troubleshooting this issue with my friend Matt and eventually we gave up! Bandcamp just plain don’t like some reviews! Actually, for some people, whether they wrote a review or not, even their icon won’t show up! I know I’m missing at least two people who should be listed as supporters! Thank you, Bandcamp tech!

But to return to the topic at hand, I may have a Bandcamp showing that communicates “I have a bunch of really nice friends,” but that’s pretty good compared to the average unknown Bandcamp artist. Here’s a funny story! The New Jersey state newspaper is The Star-Ledger and every Friday they print an entertainment section. Recently I read an article in there about a local gentleman who’d been recording at a studio in Jersey City and releasing stuff on Bandcamp. The article had quotes from the producer he recorded with who spoke of him glowingly. Overall, it talked the guy up like he was already a little famous (one line was something like “And why not? He has the talent and the looks.” It’s possible the article was written by his mother). Intrigued, I visited his Bandcamp (I have since forgotten it and his name though I found his music palatable) and discovered he had a few single releases and literally one supporter on each (possibly his mother). What I’m saying is apparently you can get the state newspaper to write you up and still nobody will give a shit! With my Bandcamp following, I’m comparatively kicking this twenty-something fellow New Jerseyan whose name I’ve forgotten’s ass!

Basically, I’m saying, for my particular situation, I’ve got a decent showing on Bandcamp. As for offline and other non-public forums? Mostly I got no reaction from people after they got it, which is fair enough; they bought the fucking thing, what more do I want? It probably wasn’t their cup of tea and it’d be much worse if they tried to eke out something mildly complimentary they didn’t actually believe.

Some people said something mildly complimentary about the whole of S4J that I didn’t actually believe. I mean, maybe they found the music basically fine? But the type of broken my brain is made me think “yeah, yeah, you don’t really fuckin’ care for it, do ya?” I more appreciated when people mentioned specific tracks they liked, and that, again, there was a surprising variety in which tracks everyone seemed to like best. A few people told me there were bangers on it! I said in the previous part that it’d be a big deal to me if people could find something in my music relatable, but I’d also just like to have made some bangers, so that was very nice to hear! Also, my friend Sammy has since told me there are things that are relatable about my album, so I have achieved all my goals and can spend the rest of my life playing video games.

Oh and my RUDE musician friend James told me it sounded like SHIT production-wise, but I don’t fully disagree. He did say he was impressed by some of the song composition, which was encouraging, and, as detailed previously, I hope in future releases to not end up with the same quality of sound, so overall this was helpful to hear. Otherwise I might’ve just kept screaming into digital USB compressor mics all my life.

Even though I’ve been puking a variety of stuff into the internet since 2001 (trust me, I get that I should’ve given it up by now) and it’s been an endless schooling on lowering my expectations, I guess because this was a big thing that I worked really hard on for a long time and which even included some irl emotions, I have to admit I imagined certain reactions that never materialized. Mainly I thought, with all the screaming about death and loneliness, I’d be opening up a can of emotional worms and would have to discuss concerning subject matter with friends and family. I mean, look, the honest truth, is that I was both worried about this and also, I think, on some level, hopeful for it? This was never an outright stated goal, but when composing some of the really downer shit, my subconscious motivation was something like “This’ll show ’em! They’ll see how sad I am now!!” I had mostly released comedy stuff and this was going to have some real feelings on it and it’d be like this big wake-up call for everyone who knew me or something? This is a weird way to think! And not really the same mindset I’m in now. More on this at the end (believe it or not, this will end eventually).

Anyway, my worries were unfounded! I underestimated how much people seem to respect the whole separating the art from the artist bullshit! I think everyone let me get away with saying this bleak, suicidal nonsense and just focused on the music. Or even more plausibly they chose not to address it because, I mean, it’s an awkward position to put people in. It’s weird behavior to put out art saying how you “really feel” and hope it’ll make the people who care about you inquire as to your well-being, not to mention a super-immature way to open up about your issues. I even feel a bit like a prick saying this here because it seems like it’s prodding at any friends who read this far (hello, both of you!) to talk to me about these subjects now.

So, uh, you don’t have to, friends! In fact, I think you’ve already heard all I have to say about being alone and how dating is literally impossible. I’ve never been legit suicidal either. As I’ve said, it’s really more just the whole mumbling to yourself that you wanna die like it’s some kind of mantra. Standard millennial behavior, really! Also I don’t do that anymore, except at very low points, which are far rarer these days. More on that at the end! But, anyway, if this postmortem leads to anyone reaching out to let me know they’re “there for me,” I will kill myself.

As far as family goes, the reaction was even more muted. I don’t know what my cousin’s husband who said the album was good (or my cousin, who apparently also heard it) really thought about the dark shit, but we’re probably not close enough for them to feel all that comfortable broaching these topics. My dad may have heard the whole thing but he’s Egyptian and his hearing is going and I honestly doubt he understood like 80% of what I said anyway. My mom, as noted, only heard two tracks. And my sister only bothered to listen to, like, one. So my worries about having to have serious discussions with my family about the content of my music were wildly off-base because my family clearly DOESN’T CARE ABOUT ME AT ALL AND THEY’LL BE SORRY.

At one point I semi-jokingly considered calling the album Cry For Help, but I think that would’ve just shielded the whole thing in another layer of irony(?) so I don’t think it would’ve changed much (it’s still not a bad album title imo; I can only find one previous instance of it being used as one).

Springboarding off of this, another way my expectations were kicked in the nuts is with friends, mutuals, and people who’ve followed my internet bullshit for years who made little to no effort to engage with the album. This is another thing Veronica and Oliver are familiar with and they sagely told me how you can’t really expect friends to buy your shit or be cheerleaders for it. You might want people to do that, but it’s not a great way to be because they have all manner of reasons for not touching your project and, unless you don’t mind becoming the annoying dude who shamelessly nags friends to get his shit, you’re better off just letting it go. Being that dude is also potentially a good way to force people to admit to you why they chose not to buy or share your work, which might not be a conversation you’re ready to have.

That said, I gotta admit it was and still is a surprise to me some of the people who don’t wanna grab my $3 bullshit. The low price tag was meant to make it a no-brainer for friends to just buy the thing even if they didn’t want to listen to it, but I dunno! Some of them clearly super don’t wanna! And some can’t be bothered to share it even once! That makes a bit more sense to me because sharing is like a public endorsement, but does it still hurt when it comes to friends, fans, and mutuals you sort of expected support from? Yeah, a little! Did I notice the times people messaged me to catch up and when I mentioned my music they conveniently responded to whatever else I said but ignored the music part? Sure I noticed, but just barely, hoho! But, as I said, this is an education in letting it go. Do I find it a bit wounding? Sure. Am I going to let it ruin our friendship? We’ll see… I mean, of course not! Is the friend who I’ve witnessed consistently liking and retweeting stuff from me unrelated to S4J mere seconds after my album-promotion tweets thereby repeatedly affirming they’ve made the calculated decision to deliberately not engage with my music now forever on my list? Well, it’s not a physical list, no. 🙂

It is worth adding that I also came to learn that, get this, not everybody is thinking about you (when I say “you,” I am referring to me). In fact, most people are probably not thinking about you (me), as unjust as that so clearly is. I mean, if I consider times I’ve been in a similar situation, when a friend releases a personal project, there’s almost certainly been occasions where I’ve seen it and noted it, but my mind is just on something else. It might take a reminder or two that I should share and read/listen to/watch their thing. And with some friends and mutuals that’s all it took. I’m not saying I had to nag them directly; I just posted about it a whole bunch and eventually they came through. I know this is obvious stuff, but releasing the album was the most important thing in my life at the time I was doing it, so it felt like it should be a big deal to everybody. I had to take a step back from it and realize, whatever, people are concerned with their own shit and in a pandemic some people are concerned with their own really heavy shit.

I didn’t want to end this section on a negative note, so I left the responses I found most heartening for the end. First, as previously mentioned, that my dad found some merit in it and recognized the hard work that went into it made me feel good (he also remembered the title as Music For The Jerks). Someone who I assume I know from elsewhere on the internet, but I’m unsure who they might be, showed up specifically after the release for two of my music streams to say S4J was really great, that everyone should get it, and that they’d already listened to it like 6 times! Even if only so many people responded positively (or at all), hearing this is the kind of thing that makes you feel really encouraged because it makes you think, well, if there’s one person like this out there, I just need to reach the other people who will like my stuff enough to listen to it 6 times.

Similarly encouraging are people who have told me the songs have gotten stuck in their heads or that, after listening to my noise, they found they were singing it to themselves later. I’ve actually consistently had a few people tell me this sort of thing since my first joke band’s joke album; maybe I should’ve taken this shit seriously SOONER, IDIOT!

It was also of course very nice and flattering that Sammy was interested enough to ask me to write this postmortem and also that he’s given me some analysis of the album and individual songs that probably sometimes give me more credit than I deserve, but he definitely articulated some stuff I didn’t know how to say or never would’ve said myself, but it all sounded correct! I must remember to include him in the Special Thanks section of the next release…

What also tickled me were my two friends who sent me videos of their kids enjoying my music. I feel like children shouldn’t hear some of my music, but some songs are basically harmless if they don’t focus on the words too much. My one friend showed me her kid dancing around to “Nothing Doing” and another friend sent me her newborn baby giggling and kicking her feet to me crooning “I want to diiiie.” How sweet! Seriously though, it feels like some kind of victory if a kid responds well to your music. I’m making this up entirely but kids probably mostly just dig a song for being a catchy bop and are therefore maybe some of the most honest critics? You hear me, SubmitHub? It also made me think I would maybe genuinely consider making kids’ music at some point. I feel like there’s no reason to dumb it down musically; you can probably mostly keep making the music you want to make, just without the bad words and the constant references to death.

Finally, the friend with the baby also told me she liked “Pity Party” best (which is incredible on its own because nobody likes “Pity Party” best) and that it reminded her of listening to the Pixies in high school. That’s about the highest compliment I can imagine!

It Never Ends!

I do feel as though the work on the album and then the other work on doing internet PR and making music videos is basically done. The last major thing I did for it was release a third music video, one for “Who Cares Susan,” in December (did it perform any better than the ones I released all at once? No, not really!). I’m currently out of videos to post on Byte and TikTok. I make some posts about how people should buy the album every Bandcamp Friday because I might as well. I try to do some kind of “event” or extra thing as a promotion on Bandcamp Fridays too, but I’m running out of stuff to do. I had a few stragglers who got the album for previous Bandcamp Fridays, but the last one was the first time that nobody bought it. So as of right now, barring some random sharing or discovery of Songs For Jerks that miraculously reaches an untapped vein of people who love it bigstyle, we’re pretty much done here.

The fact of the matter is, though, the PR will never truly end. For one thing, I’m still gonna upload the reel of public domain music video clips I made to YouTube, not that it’ll do a goddamn thing! I’m waiting on it because I originally had plans to do another music video, for “Get Round to It,” but at this point I’m not sure I can be bothered and, if I don’t, I’ll just do public domain clips for it, which I’ll slap onto the end of the reel. I don’t feel like there’s any particular need to worry about timing the release of these remaining videos, however many I do; my YouTube subscribers don’t give a shit any which way and can all die!

I also understand there’s multiple ways to get on Spotify that I think only cost a bit of money, but I need to look into it more (NOTE: it is now on Spotify). I was going to wait longer to make S4J free but I just abruptly pulled the trigger on that, so there’s no real reason to not just slap it on Spotify and let them exploit me too. I’ve also noticed that most people selling their own music seem to upload all their tracks to YouTube these days. Since I’m giving the fucker away now, I might as well go ahead and do that too, at some point. When I dived into the indie music blog abyss, I was also intending to look into whether college radio was still a viable option for getting music played and whether I could manage that somehow. I don’t even remember what, if anything, I learned about that as a possible PR avenue. I think I just got sidetracked with all the SubmitHub nonsense and forgot about it? So maybe it’s still worth looking at.

Beyond that, I’m intending to do other projects that I’d make more music for (probably without vocals), but maybe I’ll also stick some S4J songs in there as a last-ditch attempt to drive people toward the album. I’ll put the new stuff on Bandcamp as its own release, but the S4J stuff will be missing so, if they want to feel complete, people will have to get both. Like taking candy from damn baby!!

Oh and of course there’s still the whole performing live thing. I really dread the logistics of this stuff. I’ll be coming to gigging — all the assembling acts for shows and contacting venues and blah-blah — completely green. The idea of cold-calling places and having to coordinate with other people and whatnot, oh, it just makes my skin crawl. But I’ve performed live before, several times for strangers. If I can get past the hurdles to get me in front of an audience, I should be okay!

Should I Even Have Done This?

Whyyy did it take so long to do this damn album and was it even worth it? Well, look, I did do this damn thing all on my own, which, as previously discussed, I probably shouldn’t have?! But, for the purposes of being nice to me, let’s ignore the hypothetically plausible scenario that, had I involved other musicians, I would’ve ended up with a better sounding work faster. Since what we got was an almost wholly personal thing, two and a half years is pretty fucking good! Please note that Mitski, who records her music in music studios and has a producer she works with, took two years to put out Puberty 2 after Bury Me at Makeout Creek and then another two years before she put out Be the Cowboy.

I am not trying to diminish the output of Mitski who is (HEAVY SIGH) eight years younger than I and has five albums under her belt. I also know she tours all the time so therefore songwriting and recording has to be done when she’s not doing all that. Overall, I suppose I am willing to concede to Mitski that she maybe works just a tiny bit harder than I do. But, still!! To do all this shit on my own with my lack of mixing knowledge and my ramshackle recording setup I have to set up and put away every time? Two and a half years is pretty good! And a little bit of it was done while I still had a nightmare job that took so many hours from my life it makes me want to commit acts considered objectionable by the FBI, those losers! And furthermore, during that time, I also filmed (with my friend Keran’s help) footage and collected a lot of other footage online and then, after finishing the music, I did a fuckton of video editing, all of which I cobbled together in 4-5 months. I worked hard on this motherfucker! So I think I did okay, MOM!

Also, the amount of time I took sitting on unreleased tracks let me go back and make some major edits that really did help (though it meant I would send multiple versions of the songs to my official vetters, Joe and Matt, claiming each was definitely the final one this time). I’ve mentioned returning to tracks to bump up the volume on the vocals or the bass, which I feel was a very good move. But then there’s bigger additions like the lead electric guitar riff on “Nothing Doing,” which was added well past when I had first dubbed that song “done.” Parts of the song felt quite barren without it.

I also agonized a lot over the second chorus in “Get Round To It” a good while after it was effectively done, eventually mixing in this jangly electric guitar strumming that originally only showed up at the song’s very end. I feel that addition really tied the whole song together and it’s one of my absolute favorite moments on the whole album. Also, the ending of “Pity Party,” where it goes all super-Pixies, used to not have my wailing falsetto in the background. Months after mixing it, I decided to go back and record that and am so glad I did because the song really sounds incomplete without it and that ending is another of my favorite bits. Again, I don’t think mixing a whole album alone like this is something I’d ever want to do again and one would hope bringing in other musicians and/or a producer would lead to discovering things like this more easily, without needing to sit on stuff for months, but, for the way I did it, yeah, it worked out.

JUST QUIT MY JOB CUZ I FIGURE IF ANYONE'S GONNA WASTE MY FUCKIN TIME IT OUGHTA BE ME

— Joe Versus (@Joespirational) June 5, 2018

I understand that when people have questioned the worth of me spending so much time on this, it’s not just “hmm, that seems like a long time to work one one thing!” but more about how, even if I did work hard, it was on a passion project with no obvious returns and that I am already the horrifyingly old age of — if you read this far and didn’t already know and hadn’t figured my age out by now, this is the big reveal — 38, which is well past the life expectancy of the modern American male (when I started working on S4J in earnest I was 35, if that helps). (Frontman Joe Casey of one of the best new bands going right now, Protomartyr, is 44, if that also helps.) (I got violently mugged in 2014, which surely fucked me up more than I already was, if that helps too!) Truly, I don’t feel any regret for having spent so much time on this. What I regret is not doing it sooner.

But, look. We’re in a pandemic. We weren’t in one when I started this project but we we’re already in a fucking climate crisis that’s only getting worse and on top of that there are all these Nazis and shit! I get that I should worry about my future but I’m also privileged enough to not have to work right now and every day the state of the world and this country makes getting into some profession that means nothing to me seem ever stupider. I did that shit for a lot of years already and I find it offensive, frankly, when anyone attempts to impress upon me the importance of joining the workforce when the workforce as it is now takes our lives from us and comes nowhere near compensating us agreeably for that injustice. And further, that our governmental apparati repeatedly make clear they are not going to protect us and, on the contrary, are going to usher us further into existential catastrophe in the name of profit. There’s no job security anymore; heck, there isn’t even fundamental continued existence security! So why not put all my weight behind some trash of my own? Fucked either way!

I recognize that none of my radical nonsense rhetoric means anything unless I go join a movement and get UBI passed, and I’ve hit a point where I’m thinking maybe I’m at least disciplined enough now to work on the shit I care about more regularly even while doing some kind of job. It also might be nice to exist more in the world, rather than just in a gross bubble of solitude in my room. These years have required me to train myself to work on my own stuff consistently (if most of your life you’ve held normal jobs where people make you do things for money, it’s hard to transition to motivating yourself to do your own work for nothing), but the coffin came is that “consistent work” by my current standards still often ends up being a few hours a day after a shocking amount of procrastination! So I’m not sure how much worse off I’d be with a job. I waste a good chunk of time daily, no matter how much I’m given.

I’m probably lying to myself here because I’ve thought this way in the past and invariably there are no good jobs that don’t make you want to die and that don’t ask for so much of your time and energy that you just want to get high and play video games once you get home, so you stop working on your own shit almost entirely. But, well, everyone is fucking dead now, so maybe there’s some kind of position that’s opened up that I can do that will fill the requirements of not taking over my entire life and not being morally repugnant and/or productively hollow (my last job, data entry for a pharmaceutical advertising agency, was both). Because I really just don’t think I’ll be happy if I’m not pissing away some of my time making music or videos or whatever. I’ve seen what’s out there in the real world! And it’s not good enough!

This is why, yes, no matter what impact this project had or will have on my life, it was absolutely worth it because I made something for me. There were times I was so fucking happy with the stuff I was coming out with. After like a month of mixing, I’d finish a song at three in the morning and would be jumping and dancing around my room listening to it. I’m pretty much over the album now, but I’ll occasionally listen back to some of it and think “hey, that’s really nice.” What’s also nice is I don’t think I ever need to make a whole album again. It never had to be an album, really; most people making music on their own don’t saddle themselves with stupid, mammoth undertakings like this, but I am fucking old and I wanted to see if I could follow through on a big project like this just to have something to show for myself in these, my twilight years. And I did it (eventually)! And now the goal is to see whether I can make better-sounding music, different kinds of music, and background music for other projects. I would love to make more albums in my life, but if I’m still making music all on my own, I don’t think it needs to be that much all at once. An EP or some singles seems fine.

It’s sort of nice that I’m “over” the album now. During the making, when there were still like three or four songs left to mix I was getting to the “uh-oh, maybe this is just becoming like a shitty job to me and I don’t wanna do it ever again, just like everything else.” I remember feeling like I wished I could say, “Okay, I finished this album so now I don’t have to do anything else FOREVER!” though this was obviously not a real consideration. I am cursed to live this capitalist existence for a lot longer, it seems… :’-(

It’s good because that feeling of Songs For Jerks being some kind of end-all, be-all opus for my life faded away really quickly. I recognize now that when you put this much work into one massive project, it doesn’t actually feel like a momentous release upon completion. I had little explosions of accomplished joy with individual songs and sequences in my video editing. But it’s harder to conceive of the album in full as a finished product because it feels like a fuckton of work that I just stopped doing one day. I’ve seen people in creative industries say this kind of thing before, but it really is interesting to experience firsthand. It’s an odd phenomenon, because I find it tough not to view other works like they’ve just popped out fully formed, even though I’m aware of all the work behind them. It’s been a very worthwhile experience to see it from the other side.

The other reason it’s good I’m over S4J is because I already feel I can do stuff that sounds different and is more interesting, varied, and (in theory) better. I’ve already dinked around with some music ideas and recorded a tiny bit, too, so I think my fatigue during the album’s creation was more a problem of doing too much for too long on my own. Unlike my doofy Simpsons summary series, which I’ve found, the few times I’ve returned to it, I enjoy it for an hour or two and then I’m right back to hating it and wishing it was over again, there are still so many aspects of music I find fun and exciting. There are still steps to the process I dread and wish I could get over with sooner (again, involving others might help with this), but mostly music is neat! And it’s one of the only things I really get excited about making.

Also, being over the album doesn’t extend to playing the songs off it. I’ve heard of a number of cases of popular artists getting sick of performing the same songs over and over; luckily I am not popular and am nowhere near this point. Probably the fact that I barely practiced these songs while making them helps. And also that there’s only been so many times I’ve played them in full with all the screaming and loud singing accompaniment. And also that I just plain haven’t performed more than two of these songs for anyone (with the exception of the one Twitch stream). Anyway, the times I whip out the guitar and sing and play feel great! Sometimes I get really into it, even just playing by myself. Usually when I pick up the guitar and I’m just trying to bang a practice out in like a half-hour, I end up wasting more time because I just like playing and singing. I feel I really do enjoy performing a lot, so I hope I can make it happen!

Oh, I must also add (this is the “more on that at the end”) that something that makes everything feel a touch less daunting and which also might improve my productivity is that I’m on FUCKING MEDS NOW!!!! I must detail to what extent this is is the case just to be accurate, so, again, apologies to the two friends who already know this part. I’m not actually on a high enough dosage of antidepressants to qualify as being medically treated for depression because I was prescribed them to treat IBS!!!!! My doctor said it’s specifically not depression that’s being treated but that patients often say they feel better overall anyway and, fuck knows if I’m just imagining it or if just NOT SHITTING ALL THE TIME!!!! makes me happier, but I’m positive it’s different from how it was before.

I’m still a lazy sonofabitch but at least I don’t regularly hate myself for it. At least I don’t feel like I lose entire weeks to despair and regret! At least I don’t go through periods of time assuming my friends hate me! My feeling is there’s SOMETHING wrong with me and I should’ve been on meds since probably high school. I probably should go to therapy and maybe be on MORE drugs; I am working on it RIGHT NOW and we’ll see what happens though I don’t have a ton of confidence in things going well with my much-despised government-funded healthcare, but we’ll see! I’ve been pleasantly surprised before! I mean, I got on these IBS meds through Medicaid, after all.

There is also the very worryingly real possibility that part of why I’m in a mostly okay mental state is because of the pandemic. I was already mostly sitting inside by myself working on music before it, so I was in a good position to… keep… doing that. But I also hate being beholden to people, I hate being told what to do, and sometimes I hate feeling the obligation to be engaged with society entirely. Working, dating, and being around people in general is exhausting shit and I really do feel that it’s been a big weight off my shoulders to be able to say the most sensible thing right now is that we all stay home. I’d be singing a different tune if I wasn’t a spoiled suburban baby and had to work or had lost someone close to me to covid, but, well, I’m a lucky, privileged piece of shit!!!

This may seem like a tangent, but my life was centered around this stupid-ass album for almost three years, so just about everything is relevant. I could add a section about how my diet changed during album production if you would like ten more pages? 😀 But I mention the change in mood specifically because — whether it was undiagnosed clinical depression or IBS or being in pain from my viciously awful posture or my garbage shit job (I absolutely did need like a year of recovery from my garbage shit job) — I was in a very different way for effectively the entire process of making Songs For Jerks. It’s truly a wonder to me I could peel my carcass off the floor to ever plug in my guitar and amp and mic, let alone put 12 tracks together.

It’s not like I’m a perfect ray of sunshine now. I’m still lazy! I still can’t seem to tackle more than one project at a time (I don’t really wanna think about how much time I ended up devoting just to this self-indulgent postmortem)! I can still get in a good, self-hating mood after as little as missing a few hours of sleep! I’m still daunted by the prospect of work that lies ahead of me and of facing the outside world again! But I know I like to perform, I know I like to make music, and I know I can finish an album. I’m not done yet! More SHIT to come. Deal with it!