See How Teenage Wrist Promote Their Tour By Telling a Story

Plus ideas for your next newsletter

Oct 09, 2023

If you didn’t notice, HEAVY METAL EMAIL is now SOCIAL MEDIA ESCAPE CLUB.

This is a club for folks looking for ways to sustain and build community without relying 100% on social media.

If you ever think “what would I even send to my fans” in a newsletter, here’s some prompts you could use to kick-start your writing.

OCTOBER PROMPTS FOR EMAILS (AND SOCIAL MEDIA, I GUESS)

Mon, 9th: Indigenous Peoples' Day
Tues, 10th: World Mental Health Day, National Hug a Drummer Day
Wed, Oct 11th: National Coming Out Day
Sat Oct 14th: Universal Music Day
Sun, Oct 15: National Business Women's Week starts

Yes, you could reach out to your fans when you’ve got something to sell, or a new product launch, sure.

But… if you’re an artist that’s still trying to grow a following, you can’t just imitate what the big guns are doing and expect the same results.

A band like Beartooth can do this because they’ve been around for over 10 years, sell out venues in Australia on co-headline tours, and probably have 25,000 people on their email list (probably more).

Another approach is what Teenage Wrist did with their recent newsletter, writing 300 words before even getting to their upcoming tour dates (which are all linked, btw).

“i’m coming at you from the floor of soda bar in san diego, waiting patiently for my generic charger to bring my phone back to full juice. spiritual cramp is sound checking, and boy do those guys have some shit to say that i can relate to. deeply poetic verses like, “wake up in the morning and i think i’m gonna die”, “i’m sick of looking at my phone” and “i wanna smash my phone”. seriously… i’ve spent countless hours over the past four weeks in the back of the van opening and closing my instagram account, refreshing my email, waiting for the fleeting dopamine hit. it has officially stopped coming. i need to find a new vein. i wanna smash my phone.”

You share feelings and emotions and stories through your art, so try doing the same thing when you send an email to your fans.

Neil Mason talks about this in his Artist Development Newsletter:

“Be the artist continually creating a great escape, and you'll be the artist that people turn to whenever they need one.
And we all need one.
The trick here is to connect the narrative from your music to your social media, your concerts, your merchandise, and on and on.
The best escape artists meet their audience in their emotions by showing they have been there too and they understand.
Then, take your audience on a journey to escape their troubles, and as a by-product, you will escape yours by creating the audience you once wished you had and making the money you once wished you made.

Don’t compete on the final product - a zillion songs are uploaded to Spotify every day, and trying to set yourself apart from that noise is tough.

Like, look at what I do; there are 1,000 other people writing about email marketing for bands and artists on the internet.

But I’m also trying to help you get away from social media, while most of those marketing professionals are telling you how to optimize your TikTok account.

That’s not me, and that’s hopefully why you’re reading this.

Hey, come talk about this stuff with other folks on a similar journey

Join my free SOCIAL MEDIA ESCAPE CLUB meeting on Wednesday, October 11th from 12:00–12:30pm ET. Click here for the Zoom link.

ANTI-SOCIAL

A vulgar display of social media hostility

‘After Deleting Twitter/X Headlines, Elon Musk Will Hide Reply, Retweet And Like Numbers’ - Fortune

‘X users report unlabeled clickbait ads that you can’t block or report’ - The Verge

‘Publishers reckon with declining Facebook referral traffic as the platform pulls away from news’ - Digiday

I’m Seth Werkheiser.
I help artists escape social media, reach their fans directly, and make some money.

Support this holy errand and become a paid subscriber (price going up in 2024).

Email: seth@closemondays.com
Web: closemondays.com