Reflecting on the release

on a rainy Sunday

A couple of dates for your diary:

Saturday 23rd March I’ve got a headline show at the Victoria. Tickets here.

Tuesday 30th April is my EP launch at Servant Jazz Quarters. Early bird tickets here.

Hope to see you there!

Broken

My song Broken has been out for just over a week now. It’s my first release in two years, and thinking about it in the lens of time and days or years passing, I realised that it’s also two years since I wrote the song. It’s a long time to be sitting on something, but actually, I think the song needed the time and space to evolve into what it became. It was a skeleton, which every few months, had another layer of being added to it.

I think it grew as I grew to understand what I was really saying in that song. It’s funny, you can write something and believe it has its meaning set there and then, but that changes with the passing of time and all that comes with it.

Broken was written in anger and desperation, but I see it more as a song about knowing, about acceptance. It is about understanding the damage done, knowing that things hurt – that you are hurt – and that the pain can stay with you for a bit, but that doesn’t mean you’re broken.

A picture from the festival in Valdivia, Chile in January.

The release

I’m amazed by how ridiculous the process of releasing a song is. I’m so proud of this song that I wanted to get it into as many people’s ears as possible, but it’s meant that I’ve had to engage in the bizarre world of pitching to blogs, playlists and radio. It’s like your selling yourself, but kind of the other way round. There’s a whole market targeted to ‘independent artists’ encouraging you to pay to be reviewed or playlisted. And to me it feels like such a horrible concept, but from my (admittedly, very little) experience, it’s sort of the only option if you want to reach more people. For transparency, I paid a guy £150 for a month’s campaign pitching my song to Spotify playlists. I did it as an experiment to see if it would be worth it, but so far it’s got me on one playlist that’s garnered me 100 extra streams. And I doubt any of those people clicked onto my page to listen to my other songs. I don’t think I’m gaining any fans by doing this, but then again, how else is anyone meant to find my music?

I also signed up to sites like Submithub and Musosoup, where you pay a small fee to allow you to upload your song and pitch it to bloggers and playlisters. But in reality, you’ll not get anywhere without paying a lot more. I paid Submithub £10 just for my song to be listened and then rejected by playlisters. Some give you feedback, which included comments like the song is “a bit too sad” and another saying he didn’t think the recording was done very well – “just giving you my opinion as a professional engineer”, they wrote. I can only read that as a bloke talking down a woman’s song and chatting shit. (my music has been engineered, mixed, produced and mastered by some of the most talented people I know, and I hope you’ll agree, even if you don’t like the song, that the quality of the production is excellent.)

With Musosoup, for example, content creators will approach you with offers asking for an extra fee. Obscure music blogs have asked me to pay over £15 for a 100 or so word review of my song. An Instagram account of cute dogs offered using my song on one of their stories if I pay them £18. Other people have asked me to pay a tenner to do an Instagram post about me. I declined all of these. These content creators only exist because of the musicians and artists they write or post about, yet they’re charging them for it.

I think we all know the industry is broken, but I really wonder what the answer is for emerging, independent artists. How have we got to a place where you have to pay for the honour of someone maybe adding you to a Spotify playlist that might then, maybe get you some more streams? Not that you’ll make any money from it anyway. Is the answer just playing more live shows? It could be, but then in so many places in London you just get paid 50 quid and a couple of beers for performing. It’s unsustainable, but I’d never want to stop doing it. So I guess we just have to navigate this strange and unstable world, hoping that someone might at least buy a song on Bandcamp.