MD of Motive Unknown, working with the world's best labels and artists across campaign strategy and marketing. Recent campaigns include the UK #1 albums for Wet Leg, Fontaines DC and The 1975 for Domino, Partisan and Dirty Hit respectively.
Claimed my 'thank you' gift from @bonsai to celebrate the fundraise! 🎉
LOL after the highs of my first exclusive track on here close to selling out all 100 editions, but my second exclusive track (posted same time, same day of the week) barely getting any regretted much less any collects, I'm feeling a bit puzzled. Was it the track? Was it lack of reach? Baffling. Just somehow feels a bit.... odd. 🤷🏻 Feels like an inconsistent experience for artists sharing music on Lens somehow.
Another EXCLUSIVE track for the Lens fam. This one is a different alias of mine, focusing mainly on pretty deep, bass-heavy beats designed to be real headphone listens. Great music to work to. So, get the 'phones on, get comfy, and sink yourself into it... Also gonna offer this one up to the @bonsai fam to grab if anyone wishes to. There's also a 50% referral reward, so good reason to mirror this to your friends. Enjoy!!
Prepping another track for your @bonsai loving ears - upload coming shortly!
Very excited to have my man @mylesg joining Lens! Music people, FOLLOW MYLES, HE IS ONE OF THE SMARTEST PEOPLE ON THE BLOCK.
OK @carlosbeltran - let's give this @bonsai a try shall we? As an experiment I'm offering up this track EXCLUSIVELY to the lovely Lens fam, and I'm making it a limited collectible. This track isn't up on SoundCloud, ain't up on Spotify, ain't on any other Web3 music sites: only on here for you lovely people! Furthermore I'm only asking for 10 #bonsai to own it which, last time I checked anyway, isn't a huge amount. I've also set it to be a limited edition of 100. I'm keen to see how this all shakes out, so hey - spread word if you can, and I hope you like the track. Muchos gracias and have a wonderful day! 🙏
Sounds like I have some things to learn - @bonsai being one of them! Come on @carlosbeltran what you saying?!
FINALLY!!! After what feels like about a year in the wilderness thanks to various wallet issues (too boring to explain), I am BACK!!! Right - what did I miss? Nothing much, right 😁
Here - have a work-in-progress bit of dub. You can even collect it if you like. 😉
Happy "Threads Release Day" everyone. Yes, arguably the most notable social media platform launch of the last few years finally happened today, hoovering up some 10M users (though plausibly 15-20M by the time you're reading this) on day one.
Meta's strategy here has been shrewd, using Instagram to allow users to sign up with their Insta handle, and replicate all their Insta follows at the same time, thereby handing most of us a fairly decent audience right off the bat.
This will all be yet another nail in the coffin for Twitter, which at this point is just an embarrassing husk of its former self. As Musk's ownership becomes a comedy of errors, I suspect no one would raise an eyebrow if we learned that he'd just thrown the ultimate shit fit and turned the whole platform off.
But what about artists; how does Threads shape up for them? Ironically, it might just prove to be a boon. Instagram has become the dominant music social media channel for artists in the last few years. Yes, TikTok may nudge past it in the "potential to break new music" stakes, but as a place for artists to post their own thoughts and expressions, Insta remains king.
What that now means is that most artists may well have a lot more followers on Instagram than they did on Twitter - all of whom are now being primed to move across to this new platform.
Looking at one of our long-standing clients, Killer Mike, I can see that he has over 1.7M followers on Instagram. Twitter? 531k. Whilst it's a stretch to just assume all those Insta followers will cross over to Threads, if more than half do, he's already reaching more people than he ever did on Twitter, and with posts that can actually link out to the rest of the web too.
Ergo, Threads might actually have real benefits to artists in the social space.
Of course, it is early days. This might all tread the path of Clubhouse and other fleeting zeitgeist apps, tailing off to a quiet death in months to come. Right now though, it feels like Meta have been pretty damn clever here. Twitter was never a complex beast: you post your succinct thoughts and people read them. There's arguably not much to clone there. Ergo, with that Insta momentum behind it, Meta might just pull the rug on Musk - and it would be karmic if so.
In the meantime, let's keep an eye on this and see where it leads. For now I'd suggest installing it, claiming your artists' handles and generally getting familiar. The egregious data collection is certainly a sticking point, but just as with Facebook, don't rule out restrictions ultimately being enforced upon the platform. Let's not forget that just about every western government is moving to clip the wings of Big Tech, after all.
Meta have confirmed that you will not be able to advertise on Threads for "this year at least" according to The Guardian. When it does open up though, the awkward truth is that it might also be a far more effective place to run paid marketing than Twitter ever was.
If it lasts then, Threads may just prove to be a genuinely positive development for artists, both organically and as a paid ad platform.