Old Lightbulbs yelling at cloud
Hey it’s Brandon. Happy Saturday – hope you’re doing well.
Last week’s theme in Kid Lightbulbs land seemed to be the seemingly normal promotion tactics as musicians that I grow frustrated with as I age. Read on to witness this old man yelling at some clouds!
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Music reviews are a red herring
posted Aug. 11, 2025
Watching some of my music friends show the result of their pursuit of getting write-ups about their music has left me ultimately convinced that “submitting to get your song/album reviewed” is a red herring. I don’t see it as a viable or worthwhile path to any sort of growth of fanbase.
With AI eating search, folks increasingly less likely to even find that review. Reviewers are desperate for traffic, and thus need to rely on a tried-and-true method in 2025: volume. Churn out review after review, use AI to do that and evaluate thousands of submissions without even listening to most of them, and then generate the dozens of reviews based on what an AI (again) summary says might be the most hypeworthy songs, and you’ve got a music blog. Even if you do take that incredibly mechanical approach, your blog will likely struggle to get even meager traffic, at which point I find myself asking, is any of this worth it?
There are obvious exceptions — the Hearing Things blog and my friends writing at Groove Art Universe, as well as mainstays like Pitchfork and Fantano come to mind — and I would love to read what they each have to say about my music. I think they are viable paths to fans. I hope they continue to exist.
But I didn’t passively submit to them via some service. I’m friendly with the folks at GAU. I hope to slow build enough of an audience myself to get the attention of Hearing Things. I don’t think some random slop post will accelerate that much.
What’s the other obvious alternative? It’s hiring a PR agency. I could do that, but it’s a lot of money. I don’t want to spend the money right now, and tbh I know few of us can realistically afford it.
So I welcome slow, thoughtful, passionate, word-of-mouth to find my others.
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Video exhaustion
posted Aug. 9, 2025
I recently started taking advantage of the library card I’ve had for 3 years (support your local library!) and basically never used to read the sequels to my favorite sci-fi book The Three-Body Problem. (It’s an excellent book series that I highly recommend to virtually anyone.)
Since then I’ve really struggled to enjoy or even want to watch much video. It’s excruciating to me these days. I don’t want to stare at a tv screen for an hour let alone a phone screen for 17 seconds. I think this is a fascinating development though it’s frustrating given how hard everything has leaned into video.
I keep trying to make li’l videos to promote the current single and I just can’t bring myself to right now. It’s even more draining than it already was. The fact that this doesn’t bode well for “building my audience” doesn’t feel great, but I keep telling myself that the audience I seek does not need a 90-second video to consider the depth & scale of music I put into the world.
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If any of these resonate with you, I’d love to talk about it! Drop me a message on Bluesky or Threads.
Talk soon ✌️