Every three months, I take a solid day to review, plan, and basically just think about this business.
The point of this is to get perspective. It’s very easy (as I’m sure you know) to get lost in the weeds of what you do each day. The trouble is that if you keep your head down for too long, you’re likely to find yourself lost when you do happen to look up.
Taking a day to think and plan helps me to stay aware of what I’m moving toward; it reorients me to my goals.
Well, I had my quarterly planning day for Two Story a couple of weeks ago. Following the advice of people wiser than myself, I avoided Panera and settled down at a decent-enough place for some decent-enough coffee. I took out my notebook and my laptop, fired up 12 hours of deep, smoothed brown noise, and got to thinking.
(Fun fact, I listen to that brown noise video literally every day. Paired with noise-canceling headphones, it’s an absolute miracle for locking in focus. The only potential distraction is the top-tier comment section underneath the video, which I have pretty much memorized at this point but which I constantly refresh just to be sure.)
In today’s newsletter, I’d like to (briefly) share the results of that day of thinking.
For the most part, this newsletter will be totally inapplicable to your own music marketing efforts, but maybe you’ll find it interesting. And if you don’t, hey, it’s my newsletter, and I don’t have an editor to tell me when something is a bad idea.
Sorry.
What happened last quarter
Is it only me, or does each bit of time feel like more of a blur than the last one? I used to be able to list every World Series champion from the past decade. Now I can’t remember who won the Masters yesterday. I swear, time speeds up when you get old.
(Relatedly, time is not real.)
As best as I can recall, here’s a list of things I did over the previous three months:
Launched a membership. Okay, this I definitely remember. The membership was the big thing for the business in Q1; my goal was to onboard 50 artists and help them move toward one million streams.
At some point soon, I’ll write much more about it, but for now I’ll just say that launching the membership was simultaneously the most challenging and most rewarding thing I did in the previous quarter.
I’m very glad to have done it.
Grew my advertising agency. This one was actually a bit of surprise. I’ve been running Meta ads for clients for over a year now and not much about the agency feels new, so progress in this realm doesn’t feel as obvious.
But looking back, I realized that my load of clients has steadily increased. I’m currently at 9 active clients, which is just one short of my all-time high, and I haven’t been below 6 active clients once over the past quarter.
I wasn’t necessarily planning on growing this side of the business (I try to limit my client work, because I try to protect my time), but with my head down in the weeds, it just kind of happened.
This is why it’s important to look up.
Passed 2,000 subscribers on YouTube. I launched my YouTube channel in October of 2022 with the goal of getting to 1,000 subscribers in one year. About one year later, I crossed the 1,000 subscriber mark and immediately achieved eternal fulfillment and inner peace.
Just kidding. As soon as I hit 1,000 subscribers, I came to find out that actually I would need 2,000 subscribers to achieve eternal fulfillment and inner peace. So for the past five months I’ve been chasing that. And I’m happy to report that last month, I arrived.
Only now it seems like eternal fulfillment really happens at 10,000 subscribers. I’ll report back when I know for sure.
For real, though, thanks to everyone who’s watched one of my strangely-lit, blinking-impoverished videos. I don’t really consider myself a YouTuber, so reaching 2,000 subs does feel like a solid accomplishment.
… And a bunch more things happened, too. But this newsletter has already gone on for too long, so let’s get to the next part.
What I’m planning on doing this next quarter
I always come out of these retreats with a simple plan, only for that plan to turn into a convoluted maze of to-dos over the following three months.
But here’s my for-now simple plan:
Grow the agency more. I’d like to grow my work here by about 50%; last quarter’s growth was a bit of a happy accident, but I think it reflects a wide-open opportunity. Meta ads can be super effective for Spotify growth, and with the right systems in place, I think I can deliver good campaigns efficiently.
On that note, shameless plug: If you’re interested in having my agency run Meta ads to help you grow on Spotify, here’s the place to apply.
Grow the membership more. I’m planning to do a relaunch of the membership next month. I’ll spare you the details for now, because I’ll be emailing about it a lot in the near future. Stay tuned.
Try new marketing things. I’m currently testing a few products and services – including, among other things, Hypeddit automated ads, a new playlisting company, and some TikTok stuff – and I’ll report back in this newsletter and on Youtube as to what works and what doesn’t.
Historically, this type of content has played a large role in driving traffic to the blog and the YouTube channel, so it makes sense to keep creating it. I don’t want to lose sight of that in the midst of all the other stuff.
…And I’ll be doing more things, too.
Shoot, our music reviews and interviews (which Tom heads up) are a whole other side of the business that I haven’t even touched on. And there are plenty of other marketing odds and ends that I’ve got on the radar.
Things are probably too busy. But the above is the high-level for what I’ll be working on in April, May, and June.
I’m curious: Do you think the plans make sense? Let me know, and if you think I should pursue something that I haven’t mentioned, shoot me your idea, too. I can’t promise I’ll follow through on everything (in fact, I can promise that I won’t follow through on most things), but I really do value your suggestions and feedback.
So hit me.
