On specificity
Good morning! Sheets of rain are whipping at my windows, and my coffee is hot. It’s a cozy Tuesday here in bonnie Nova Scotia.
Recently, I attended a webinar and learned that to market yourself correctly, you must first identify a colour palette for your Instagram grid. "Hold up pictures you want to post next to the palette," the expert said, "and if they clash, don't post them".
This expresses Baby's First piece of advice in music marketing and visual branding: niche down.
The idea of niche-ing down never resonated with me because it felt antithetical to the amorphous experience of ~being an artist~. It seemed to require reduction or simplification for the sake of communicating with an "ideal client", which was exactly the opposite of what attracted me to making art.
I didn't realize that what they meant was to be specific.
To be specific is to be generous. The art that I love the most, that sticks to my mind and is available to recall, is art that very quickly tells the viewer who it is for. By this, I mean that it either tells you it's for you or that it isn't.
In The Art of Gathering, Priya Parker takes this one step further and asserts that to exclude is generous. "Thoughtful, considered exclusion is vital to any gathering", Parker says, because "over-inclusion" indicates a lack of understanding of and commitment to your event's purpose. When I got to the chapter on exclusion the other day, my hackles went up, but I can see where she is coming from. I think I can extend Parker’s principle here to apply to art and music.
By excluding the majority of listeners (viewers, readers, etc.), you invite in the minority that knows you're for them, and vice versa.
As far as I can tell, this doesn't require simplification at all. We, as humans and as consumers of art, have a massive capacity for metabolizing complexity. We have the remarkable ability to witness a piece of work so pinpointingly specific and personal to whomever created it and think, "Wow... that's so me."
It's generous to be specific because you offer a "that's so me" moment quickly. It's confusing, as an audience member, to be in limbo on this: if I attend a live show and no risks are taken, then I don't have the opportunity to learn whether or not it's for me, and I can't fully embody it.
I wrestled for a while with whether or not being specific meant being predictable, which might also mean boring. But I realized that being predictable isn't inherently boring- you just have to be predictably really fucking good.
If you can manage that, then your audience will trust you, and once you have their trust, you can do whatever you want.
By the way, I think it’s awesome when people have cohesive colour palettes on their Instagram pages- it’s definitely an effective way to establish a visual brand. The idea of doing it personally makes me want to jump off a bridge, but that doesn’t make me more or less of an artist- just a bit dramatic.