Hey folks. Hope everyone's doing well, and congrats to @Sebastian Jautschus on successfully doing big life stuff :) My vote goes to the monthly focus topics here. I'm not doing a whole lot of creating or releasing right now but I think the things we talk about in these sessions are so useful. @Martin Eibisch gave us some fantastic info about his experience with marketing and running ads in the last one that I was around for. And I'm sure there's plenty more wisdom to be shared from everyone on other topics too. Aside from that, I'd be down for using this community to explore collaborations more once I'm back into the flow of creating. Personally I can get a little stagnant when I'm writing solo and I'm sure plenty of others experience that too. So making the most of this place as a collaboration station would be pretty great I think.

This is a really cool topic to get everyone's insight on. I won't be around for the call tonight but if you're recording it @Sebastian Jautschus I'd love to be able to watch it back. And apologies that I haven't been around this month to contribute to the discussion; we sadly had a family member pass away recently so naturally my focus has been elsewhere. Looking forward to catching up with you all in due course!

Amazing, congratulations to you both! 💛 Tuesday next week is absolutely fine for me.

@Sebastian Jautschus Man, I feel so bad that I've only just gotten around to listening to this, you really took the time to go through it! Thanks. The birds in the background sound very sweet by the way! Really interesting to hear your thoughts on those questions. It sounds like you've got a really clear picture of what you expect and what you don't expect whenever you're doing promo and audience building. You said something like 'people don't go on social media to find music', and I think that really sums up the whole challenge of getting follow-through to people streaming/buying your music. Your angle of looking at it more as building a relationship instead of trying to get that immediate click-through onto your Spotify or whatever makes so much sense. On the topic of how to get around that cringey feeling of selling yourself, so sorry for not sharing our conclusions there, I thought the post was getting long enough! But we felt it would help her if she could find ways to promote herself that felt authentic to her. So it didn't have to be cringey lip-sync videos, and it didn't even need to be direct appeals for people to go listen to her music. Of course, that doesn't mean it's easy to think of content that would be natural and authentic, but one interesting thought we had was teaming up with another artist (ideally a friend) who's in a similar position and sort of making each other your social media 'consultants', if that makes sense. So instead of thinking of a bunch of ideas to promote yourself, you think of those ideas for each other. That was something that was appealing to her, mostly because it felt like taking a step away from 'selling yourself'. You're still doing the work, but you're doing it for each other. And by the way, I like your concept of considering the benefit for people of stepping into your world. It's a good way to think of it. It makes it feel a lot less like you're selling something to people.

@Max Fedoseev Thanks for sharing, Max! Interesting to hear that both you and @Martin Eibisch have gotten your best results once Meta has identified a 'lookalike' audience for you. I guess that means there's a difficult phase to go through at the beginning when the algorithm is still learning, but it's a case of sticking with it.

Should be okay for Thursday here 👍

So sorry about my bad internet connection on the call, guys! Just dropped out completely for me. Will try and get it sorted and join you again next time. Nice speaking to you all, albeit briefly!