So, I’ve been WRACKING MY BRAIN trying to figure out how to market my music not only in an increasingly post-Covid environment, but overall in a glutted-internet, post-music-industry miasma of a techno-punk dystopian nightmarescape of an online environment… <ahem>
Anywhoo… as I sat through yet another time-share style “free training,” awaiting the inevitable sales-pitch for the Program™ that will launch my lucrative new artistic career (these things are a bargain at c. $900 +/-, y’all … “double your IQ or no money back!”), I was invited to think about my own personal fandoms. What are the pop culture Things (be they bands or film franchises or particular artists, whatever) that I not only love, but love so deeply that my fandom of that Thing is part of my identity, part of what makes me who I am?
My personal list is pretty long ~ too long to get into here. Bands/musicians from King’s X to Tommy Shaw, from Rush to Paul Simon, from Queen to the Indigo Girls, come to mind instantly … and that doesn’t even begin to address a lifetime of film and television scripts (Star Wars, LOTR, Princess Bride, Hudson Hawk, etc.) I’ve committed to rote memory merely from repeat viewings. 
But that’s just a sample of my fandoms, and it’s beside the point.
The point was the follow up question: after thinking about the things that *hook* us into our own fandoms … we were asked to consider what, in our own art (in my case, music) would *hook* our “fans”?
I realized that I’d never really thought about it that way.
I’d never really considered the possibility that I might (someday) have fans.
To put it mildly, the question completely flipped my thinking around …
… thanks for the demo, George!
I mean, many of us have heard or been taught at some point not to create art for anyone else but ourselves. And honestly that’s been my goal as I’ve tried to learn how to record my music: to make recordings that I, personally, would love to listen to & spend time with.
But to turn around and ask myself “What is it, specifically, that I have to offer, that I have to say … that someone out there needs to hear?” ~ that’s a new one for me. So new that I don’t yet have a clear answer.
And apparently, that’s a major stumbling block in terms of marketing my music. It’s no good in this day and age (and in the aforementioned glutted marketplace) to be too broad or too diverse. I mean, it’s always been a liability for artists who are “too original,” who don’t fit neatly into pre-packaged labels & genres according to the divider cards in record stores*.
*For folks who are a bit younger than my GenX self, a “record store” was an actual geophysical location ~ either freestanding or in what we called a “shopping mall” where one could purchase physical hard-copy media (vinyl records, cassette tapes, CDs) containing commercially released music.
We’ve gone beyond genres like “rock” or “country” or “folk,” all the way to “melodic progressive nu-death mathcore metal”**. The trick, the alleged experts supposedly say, is to identify the micro-niche of your music, your sound, your thing … and then market your stuff to that specific (pre-existing) audience. That’s the magic of the internet, after all: no matter how specific & rarified your tastes, somewhere on the Web you can find a whole community of folks like you.
**I might have just made that one up. But you couldn’t tell without looking, could ya? 😜
[Now, here’s the part where I admit that I wish I had a following of fans whom I could ask ~ what makes you a fan of my music? What do you get for yourself out of my art? And how exactly would you classify my music, in terms of sub-genre or micro-niche? Because to my ear, I’m rather all-over-the-map. But perhaps there’s a connection between my lack of clarity in answering that question, on one hand, and my lack of a throng of die-hard fans, on the other?]
At any rate, it seemed like a potentially fruitful conversation to start here. So I’d love to hear y’all’s thoughts as fellow Creatives: Have y’all got a following of fans who really engage with your artistic work? How do you see your own work as a potential “fandom” that folks might get into? Or do you?
Whatever your thoughts might be ~ post ’em up in the comments! Looking forward to lots of perspectives on this one.
CTW