I don't know what to tell the folks that already are popular online, but it truly is a joy if you can kill the voice in your head that draws you to want to make something viral or go big1. Making things for your friends to enjoy (and specifically for your friends to enjoy) is a real pleasure. And like, no offence to the majority of you, but often when I'm making a post here I'm making it because I hope a few specific people I think are cool will enjoy it (and I'm more happy when whatever my target audience was does enjoy it than if it does well more broadly).
It sucks that the only real option for video (or I guess, that it seems like the only real option for video) is these few big places where, if you aren't grinding toward that big view count you're failing.
Shout out to @catalina & co for specifically fighting against that with trash.cloud
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I do not claim I've completely succeeded at this
this is what drives me as an artist these days. making things for myself and to share with my friends. anyone else who finds it and supports me is an (extremely appreciated & genuinely cherished) added bonus
i never get the most album downloads but i get enough that i could fill a nice venue with the listeners. i never get the most views on youtube but i could fill a theater with the viewers. etc. etc. that's cool--but! i can't let that be the sole reason i make stuff. that's when it turns from Art into Content imo
almost all of those big production accounts trap themselves, too. You've hired editors, producers, researchers... and now you have to always have ideas, or you can't pay them. So the ideas become flat and aimed at a much broader audience, eventually their spirit isn't in it, and they either get burned at best and disappear at worst.
Youtube is great if it gets enough people to pay for the work, but where youtube started and where the best of it is, is still people with cell-phone videos documenting things they think you should know about, or documenting things they have as a service to you, or whatever.
I try to like every one of those videos I see, even if it destroys the recommendation algorithm (And whoever thought 'I want the person to know I liked this' and 'boost this to others like me and recommend stuff like this to me' to be together needs to take a long hard look at their life and consider a new career). those people deserve to have other people randomly find them.
But the big ones? started out this same way, posting shaky cellphone videos, or bad audio, or whatever, and just grew as their audience did. Or phone cameras and microphones grew with them, which is more likely.
until recently. Now you can get like... basically VC to hook you up with gear and a starter following and people to hype you.
The trick to youtube, and substack, and twitch and anything else people can make a living on? They use those people to convince you it's possible. that if you just put out ENOUGH of the content that MORE PEOPLE like, you can get paid, too. Make it your only job. If you just produce enough that most people will want to see. if you grind. for free.
for free.
it's a lotto ticket.
I realized this when talking about NFTs -- the fact that some sold for millions made people grind out tons of free #content just to, generally, find it wasn't worth more than they were already making with what they wanted to make, outside of the chosen few.
Before twitter, there was a revolution in blogging because Blogger was a free blog hosting service. People made terrible blogs, not because they were bad at it, but because writing a blog no longer required you to know how to Write. People just logged their lives, things they cared about, things they wanted you to know. You didn't have to make it look like a magazine, it already didn't look That Professional with the default themes.
art is what happens when people do things for themselves, not for their audience, outside of places where it's actually for the audience. But a lot of recent stuff is something insidiously between those two, that i don't think most people even see themselves being consumed by until they end up falling out of it. And on the gripping hand, just like artists and musicians before us, sometimes? You gotta sell out so you can eat.
