Marketing for artists has always been part of creative life. Artists have always had to help their work find an audience. The goal hasn’t changed. The path has.
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Table Of Contents
In the beginning, I was incredibly naive. Sharpening my ax seemed straightforward. Discovering the tree’s size was something else entirely.
What do most people do? I have no clue. I bought SEO for Dummies. Then Marketing for Dummies. Maybe a couple of books could help me out, take some notes, and get on with the creative work.
I could barely get through them. If these books were for dummies, I’m not sure what level I’d measure myself at. Dumb? More like ignorant. Dumbfounded would be a better description.
I was walking into an entirely different discipline.
Get a website. Social media was unavoidable. Then SEO. Clueless as to why I needed to know it? Next came video. Somewhere along the way, releasing a song no longer seemed enough. Then I discovered analytics. I remember staring at graphs and scratching my head. Now it’s AI.
When you suffer from short-attention-span theater, what is a sane person supposed to do?
I spent more time trying to figure out what to call the article than writing the opening paragraph.
The Work Around the Work
The work is still the work.
A blank page still has to be filled.
A canvas still has to be painted.
Songs need to be written before anyone can hear them, and that hasn’t changed. What changed was everything waiting beyond the finished piece.
Finishing a piece used to feel like a marker. Now it feels like permission to start another round of work.
The manuscript is done.
Now something has to help people find it. Now the piece needs a place to live, a way to travel, and a reason for someone to stop long enough to press play.
The painting is dry. Now it has to compete for a few seconds of someone’s attention as they scroll past a thousand other images.
The creative work hasn’t disappeared. It has become one responsibility among many. And every new responsibility asks for the same things. Time and process.
Was It Always Like This?
I am sitting here at my desk, hacking away at my laptop and thinking about Mozart. What did he do without search engines, YouTube, and SEO? Should I sit here and snivel when he spent years bouncing across Europe in a carriage looking for patrons? Think about what he and his family faced. The roads, weather, illness, and uncertainty.
Michelangelo didn’t work in a quiet studio, isolated from the world.
Michelangelo didn’t have to worry about SEO.
He had to worry about popes.
One commission could take years. One political upheaval could bring it to a halt. The next opportunity depended on the right person noticing his work and deciding he was worth the risk.
His days weren’t spent thinking about algorithms.
He had people to persuade. Contracts to survive. Payments to collect. Powerful people to disappoint as little as possible.
Talent was only part of the job.
Then I thought about Samuel Clemens.
The man practically lived on trains. He wasn’t sitting at home waiting for readers to discover his books. He climbed onto stages all over America, telling stories to packed halls because every lecture sold more books. His audience didn’t come to him.
He went to them.
I can relate to to these kinds of efforts. There was no thought of SEO in the eighties. We carried a stack of posters, looking for the next telephone pole, ready to announce the next gig.
The Gatekeepers Keep Changing
As the centuries passed, the route between the work and the audience has not remained static. Neither have the entities standing along the way. Those are the gatekeepers. They decide, in one way or another, what gets noticed.
Every generation of artists has had to figure out who those gatekeepers were.
If you wanted your work to move forward, you learned the system. You learned who made decisions, and what opened closed doors.
That hasn’t changed.
What has changed is who those gatekeepers are and what they expect from the people hoping to get through.
Today, some of those gatekeepers are no longer human beings sitting behind desks. They are platforms, search engines, recommendation systems, and algorithms. They influence what gets noticed long before another human being ever sees the work.
The gatekeepers are still there. What’s changed is how much of their work now lands back on the artist.
The work doesn’t stop when the craft is finished.
Somewhere along the way, the lines blurred. Jobs once spread across publishers, record companies, production crews, and marketing departments began finding their way back to the creator. Not all at once. Not in every field. But enough to change what it means to work independently.
Our task reminds me of early Hollywood.
Before everything became specialized, the work demanded whatever was necessary. There wasn’t much room to say, “That’s someone else’s job.”
That sounds familiar.
This is what we signed up for.
Whether we understood it or not.
Whether we like it or not.
The Real Cost of Creative Visibility
I’m not writing this because I’ve figured it out. I haven’t.
I’m writing it because I’ve found myself asking questions I never expected to ask. Questions about discoverability. About gatekeepers. About why finishing a piece no longer feels like the finish line.
I don’t have a blueprint or a formula. There are people who claim they do. You get to decide for yourself whether they’re the outliers, or whether their systems actually work.
They’ll tell you they have the answer.
For only so much doe-ray-mi, you can succeed to, They’ll show you how. Be clear, they are selling certainty.
Putting cynicism aside, a hole I take pleasure in going down, we are standing in the same place as countless other independent creatives. The task is to understand what the job has become and what it now asks of us.
Maybe that’s the first step.
Not pretending we’ve solved the problem.
Simply recognizing the landscape we’re working in.
Can We Help You?
What does your job as an independent creative really include?
Because sometimes the wisest voice in the studio has four paws.
Continue The Journey
The Fire of Inspiration: A Journey into Artistic Genius explores the content of these posts in greater depth.
Thank you for spending part of your day here.
If these thoughts resonate with your own experience, I’d love to hear about it. Leave a comment and tell us what the job of an independent creative looks like from where you’re standing.
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