Chapter 29

The next Saturday morning, the sun wasn’t even up when my phone rang. I was exhausted and almost buried my head under the pillow to ignore it, except I knew it was an important call. All week I’d been waking up at the crack of dawn to call into this or that radio station, listen to the DJs make the same handful of jokes, and talk about our album release. At least on those days, it was only a little early, since I usually got up with the sun to go to school.

Today was release day though, and the call was even earlier. The clock read three forty-five and I knew the first call was scheduled for just after four, followed by fifteen more calls, with the last one ending just about nine-thirty, which was too late to go back to bed. On top of that, I still had practice with Chef, a date with Sydney, another set of calls starting at four and going until basically just before we went on stage tonight, and of course our gig tonight that wouldn’t end until midnight. We’d also played the night before and I hadn’t gotten home until twelve-thirty, which meant I’d been in bed maybe three hours, and it had taken me almost an hour to fall asleep, since I was still flying high from the show and excited about today’s release.

I might try and catch a nap at some point, but today was going to be grueling.

“Happy release day,” Warren said when I picked up.

“Uhhh,” I mumbled grumpily.

“Tired?”

“We played until midnight last night,” I said, although he knew our schedule and would have known that.

“If this was easy, anyone could be famous.”

“I’d settle for not being obscure.”

“I’m doing what I can. We’ve got a lot of calls today and you’ve got to keep up the energy. Remember what we talked about. People need to hear you talk about your music and be excited enough to go out and buy a copy, or at least stream it. You’ve done well all week and we’ve gotten good feedback from the stations you’ve been on, but today’s going to be a long one and the first time you’ve done more than one station in a day. You’re going to get tired of it after the first few, but you need to push through that and keep the same energy throughout. We can’t sound good in the eastern markets and then drag ass for the west coast.”

“I’ll do my best. So, when do we start finding out numbers? I’m dying to know how sales are going.”

“The big charts update on Tuesday for the previous week, but we’re not going to be looking at those. Unless you go viral or are an established name, it would be very unusual to see you on those.”

“Even the new artist charts?”

“Yeah. In the old days those charts were all about radio play, but these days it’s basically a chart of viral hits. The internet has really changed the game on all of that. Hell, unless you’re a big name, all of the charts are pushed more by the internet than anything else. Even the big names get pushed if something really goes big on Byte, or maybe a few of the smaller social media platforms, and it can push the big names off number one on the main charts. Only for a week usually, but it’s made the whole market kind of unpredictable.”

Byte was a short video app where people posted dancing, lip-synced songs, and just talked about whatever. I knew most of the kids at school used it, although I hadn’t ever used it myself.

“I thought Kent said part of their streaming and internet market was putting it on Byte?”

“Ohh, it is, but hundreds of clips from songs are put on there every day, and that doesn’t count all the voice clips made into lip-syncs, which is several times that number. It’s tough to break through with that kind of volume, and the sub-forties demographic has gotten very hard to market to. Anything that sounds like a commercial gets ignored completely, and if they hear it too much, they’ll even go out of their way to not listen to the song or buy it.”

“Ohh, I kept hearing people talk about streaming, and I thought it was like the radio. I’ve never used any of the social media apps, so I don’t really know how they work.”

“That’s something you’re probably going to have to fix, honestly. The industry thought they had it figured out with millennials, who seemed to respond to influencer suggestions. As long as the influencer wasn’t too blatant about it being a paid promotion, it worked about how traditional advertising worked, but anyone under twenty seems immune to that too. Anything that even smells like advertising, even advertising adjacent, has them running for the hills. Now we can only put a sound up and pray.”

“So that’s it? When he said marketing on social media, I thought it might be more.”

“We do more, but I’m trying to give you an honest expectation. We’re still trying the whole influencer thing, and we do promotional posts, but those get shit numbers. If you were starting out ten years ago, the old rules would have still applied, but you’re coming into this in a whole new world. The truth is, no matter what anyone tells you, when it comes to advertising these days, no one knows anything. Ohh, every week we get some whiz kid or guru who swears they’ve got the secret sauce, but I haven’t seen any of that work, yet. Best thing you can do is build your own social media following, and interact with them, and hopefully, they share your posts with their friends, and so on. Generally, the more genuine things are, the more likely they are to go viral.”

“That sounds like something I should have been doing while touring.”

“It really is, and I’m surprised your last manager didn’t push it, ‘cause it’s one of the first things I talk to my guys about. Merch is great as a barometer for enthusiasm, but people aren’t stopping a fan in a store asking if the band on their shirt is any good. Social media though, you get some pick up at every show, especially during it. The kids will still have their phones up and post videos of a show they’re at, but if they don’t know your handle, or if you aren’t on social media, you won’t get tagged on it, and no one will know it’s you. Of course, you have to be careful.”

“About what I do on stage?”

“That too, but I meant what you say on social media. It’s important to be real out there, but it’s super easy to get canceled, and the minefield is completely unknowable. It’s not just about avoiding the usual minefields of politics, race, and religion anymore. Every group on every side of the aisle, including the middle, has their sacred cows that, if you cross, they’ll come for your throat. Hell, sometimes you don’t have to say anything at all, and they’ll still come for you, and send their horde of fans after you. A lot of these guys make a lot of money by being in the news making people mad about something, which means they need content, and it’s impossible to know where they’ll swing. If it wasn’t so important to getting your name out there, I’d actually tell anyone I manage to stay as far from social media as possible, but it’s a two edge sword, because you also can’t really make it these days without it.”

“I thought all press was good press.”

“I mean, it is, don’t get me wrong. There are a lot of people who stake out one particular demographic, piss off all the others, and get popular. And it doesn’t even seem to matter what demographic that is. Pro-LGBT, Anti-LGBT, pro-religion, atheist, Pro-gun, anti-gun, you pick a topic, there’s someone making money being a popular figure on every side of it. But you’ll notice that the really big names work very hard to not silo themselves in one position, because it locks you into a set audience size. And of course, it’s possible to get all of those people from both sides of an issue mad at you for the exact same statement. Anyway, I’ll get off my soapbox. Just, get on social media, post often, be genuine, but avoid the obvious danger zones and ignore the trolls, because their entire goal is to get you to join them in the mud. They tend to disappear if you ignore them.”

“I’ll try,” I said.

I needed to talk to my friends and get their thoughts. I hadn’t even had a steady internet connection or a cell phone until we moved to Wellsville, and since moving here I’d been so damn busy I hadn’t even considered getting on social media, but I knew he was right about its importance. I swear half the conversations at school were about something everyone saw online. I’d even seen it with Hanna when that picture of her went around the school. His warning made me a little nervous though, so I needed someone smarter than me to help me figure out how to deal with this. Sadly, it wasn’t going to be Hanna, who was almost as much of a Luddite as I was.

“Okay, speech over, I have some good news. It’s short notice, but I got you a spot at the Nashville Music and Wine Festival. I already accepted for you guys, so I’m hoping you can make it, because it’s a great opportunity. You’re filling in for one of the morning groups who had to pull out because their lead singer ODed.”

“Jesus, I hope he’s okay.”

“I understand he’s going to be okay, but he was admitted and the doctors waved him off of performing. The people running the show were desperate, and I know a guy who’s on the committee that selected the groups. I’ll be honest, the pay isn’t going to be great, but there are some huge groups closing it up, including Ronnie Ralston, who’s headlining it.”

That was interesting. Ronnie Ralston was a giant name in music. She’d grown up on some kid’s show and became a music sensation when she hit puberty. She sang a super happy version of pop that was amazingly different from my style of music. We both covered pop, but at opposite ends of the spectrum. Of course, she also sold out stadiums with huge dance teams, pyrotechnics, and giant glitter cannons. If even a fraction of her audience turned up, he wasn’t kidding about the kind of exposure it would be for us. If they didn’t hate us!