Last night we recorded some more vocals and it looks like we have added most of what needs to be added to these two songs. Now it’s time to start cleaning up, taking away what isn’t needed.
I feel quite pleased because recording requires a lot of setting up, mix checking, checking inputs and outputs and finding the source of any issues. Editing just needs a boot up and putting on headphones and you can get straight to works so it fits into my schedule much better.
I will still need to record another song this week or next so we can focus on getting half the album finished and ready to send out to mixing and mastering while we start work on the other half.
For all intents and purposes we are on schedule for an October release!
Since we just released a live album and I thought I might not have much time to promote it once this recorded album is finished and I move my focus to promoting that, I decided to go to town on social media, posting short after short from our recent live performances.
As with YouTube, Instagram proved a bit manipulative. The first 4 trial reels I made reached 400 people and got a total of 10 likes from strangers and one follow. Not bad! 10 more people exposed to my music and primed to see it again.
But then the algorithm got to work at manipulating me. The next day I tried again and the videos reached….no one…
Trial videos are meant to go to people who don’t follow you, so you don’t get the priming you get when your friends like things you post. It’s relying entirely on metadata to send or not send out your content.
I realized that the 100 “free” views per video is not meant to be consistent. The algorithm is seeking who it thinks might like your posts and once it decides on a demographic for you it chills out and shows you to just a few people it thinks will like you. But it gets it wrong…often and as with the video on YouTube that reached 5000 elderly Korean women, my music was only reaching Indians.
While I’m sure there is someone who would appreciate me in India, I don’t think there’s an especially large audience for what I’m doing. Not like Japan and America where more than half of my influences are from and there are scenes I am a part of.
The good news is that unlike YouTube, I can learn about the people. Their profiles give much more information than a YouTube user usually does. YouTube is a place of mostly consumption. Instagram has more interaction.
Despite being shown to 500 Indian people only one Indian liked my post, most likes were from Spanish speakers which makes some sense. I think my music would appeal to people in South America even more than North America, for reasons I can’t quite pinpoint. Not the masses but a significant minority.
The problem is that I want to find people in cities I can sustainably build an audience and visit often (somewhere nearby). Melbourne, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur…. Literally anywhere in Japan…
I typed the description in Japanese hoping to send the algorithm a signal to show me to Japanese person. It went “Japanese…hmmmm well Julio in Argentina is 1/4 Japanese and watches anime….” No hate to Julio, he seems cool, welcome Julio….but wtf is the point of metadata?
The algorithms…doing their best for the little guy. To be fair Instagram gets a whole lot more attention from my IRL friends than YouTube or Facebook or X so it actually does seem to do something posting there. I don’t know why I do better there the. Fb or X, I imagine it’s 2-3 friends who send much better signals to the algorithm on my posts.
But like anywhere with algorithms, it’s an uphill battle if you don’t make content with high dopamine spikes meant for everyone. Niches need to be very clear and showy in order for it to know where to put you.
That’s not me, obviously.
I decided to stick with it for the entire week and if I reach more than a single person who seems interested and any sign that I’ll be sent out to more, I will continue. If not I will go back to optimizing entirely for my IRL scene. Instagram is risky because I risk alienating my existing friends who think posting once a day is spammy and won’t interact with that much or even half that much.
I realize that Reels and Stories and Carousels reach completely different people. Not everyone scrolls reels and so only friends who like many of your posts see those, they go mostly to strangers with short attention spans. Not ideal for my content BUT Instagram attracts many more music fans who want to interact and know the artist better. Interactions can form, even starting from reels.
If someone with a Spanish sounding name comments on my video on YouTube, I know someone possibly from South America likes it, and if the analytics say “Chile, Brazil, etc, I know someone from there is seeing it, but with Instagram I can peek and see that “Oh, they actually like music like mine! That’s a good fit!”
I can feel myself already starting to burn out trying to appease the algorithm any more than I have been though so let’s see where this goes.
