Should streaming counts be hidden for the mental health of artists? Earlier this year I posted an Instagram story about an artist who approached me with 642,983 cumulative streams of their top 5 releases on Spotify over the last year. …

Location: The Mystic Lodge in the Catskill Mountains of New York. It was 18 degrees outside but the wind chill made it feel closer to zero. I was struggling to breathe as the swirling winds were pushing the smoke from the woodstove back down through the top of the Teepee…

What Really Keeps You From Becoming the Artist You Know You Can Be And What To Do About It. — This blog post came to me one day while taking a quick hike at Storm King Mountain, a short, rugged, bang-for-your-buck of a hike an hour and a half north of New York City. …

I grew up in a shallow and tranquil valley in upstate New York, five miles west of the village of Cooperstown in a sleepy hamlet called Fly Creek. My childhood property home takes up the southern half of a short side road named Fork Shop Road. The banks of Oaks…

Growth through Limiting — Chaos. A word that could accurately describe life as an artist. Try to find a career path with more uncertainty, with a greater breadth of highs and lows. It is also an accurate reflection of where we are as a society. Can anyone recall a greater level of day-to-day anxiety? …

MEASURE THE RIGHT THINGS “Measurement is fabulous. Unless you’re busy measuring what‘s easy to measure as opposed to what’s important.” -Seth Godin You release a new single and immediately obsess over your streaming count. Or you obsess over your follower count and engagement on your preferred social platform. Usually both. These are easy things…

Busting the Narrative and What Artists Can Learn From Forests. — It’s late 2020 and I’m going for a hike through deep snow, listening to The Daily podcast. This particular episode, featuring Suzanne Simard, a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia, shared how she discovered that trees use underground fungal networks to communicate and share resources, uprooting…

The Delayed Return Environment of Releasing Music — “In modern society, many of the choices you make today will not benefit you immediately. If you do a good job at work, you’ll get a paycheck in a few weeks. If you exercise today, perhaps you won’t be overweight next year. If you save money now, maybe you’ll have…

The artists who saved me. — As per Spotify, I spent a full month’s worth of time listening to music this year (4,380 minutes). This doesn’t account for the additional time listening to terrestrial radio like KEXP and WFUV. Time well spent I say. 2020 called for a deep level of introspection given everything we have…