A Story of Artistic Social Media Irritation:

Apologies in advance for my bad formatting, I'm new to Markdown Styling(or whatever the term is for it). Any tips in the comments are appreciated.

My name is Kevin. I'm a jack-of-all-trades creative who has spent the past ten years making music, poetry, and telling stories.

Until a few years ago, I was fully focused on the craft of my work, without doing anything to learn the business side of it. I wanted to be the type of artist whose work inspires people, and I have spent thousands of hours on my creative skills to do this.

I've made five albums of original music, over forty short films, written hundreds of poems, and I recently published my first novel. Much of this I have pulled down in order to re-release it this year in a concerted effort to make the final push to becoming a self-sustaining artist(and I hope it works...)

The Problem: The marketing side of art has always been a struggle for me. I have felt utterly dejected spending hundreds of hours on social media content and profiles without receiving any return for my work from those companies.

After creating 40 videos for YouTube last year, my content was demonetized for an arbitrary reason. No surprise, I couldn't reach a rational human being to dispute the claim, and the amount of money they took from my account was so small, it wasn't even worth fighting it.

Then earlier this year, as I was scheduling 40+ YouTube videos for re-release alongside my novel and an album I just finished, YouTube changed their monetization policy and my 180 subscribers suddenly weren't enough to validate me as a worthwhile creator on YouTube.

The Irritation: This is how my Social Media existence has panned out over the past five years:

Facebook: Hundreds of hours creating content, over $50 spent on marketing: $0 received
YouTube: Hundreds of hours creating content, over $500 spent on marketing: $0 received

The frustration of these massive companies not respecting the very content which makes their platforms valuable has been a nagging problem of mine.

So much so, that I decided to delete my Facebook several years ago, and I have stalled my engagement on YouTube.

At one point I considered completely changing gears to go back to school and become a lawyer for the purpose of launching a class action lawsuit for the unethical copyright practices of one of these companies. I'm glad I didn't. I don't think it's the best use of my skills.

The Resolution: Steemit, the possible solution to my social media blues.

About a month ago, I was playing a gig at the Boulder Film Festival and someone I met there told me about Steemit.

I immediately thought it was an interesting idea and I've spent the last month researching this platform.

I'm cautiously optimistic about Steemit. I think it could completely change the way social media operates and I'm excited to be a part of the experiment.

I'll need to spend a bunch of time on some type of social media platform to promote my content coming out this year, so I can either yell into the sound and fury of Facebook and YouTube like everyone else without much hope for any return, or I can put my effort into Steemit and (at the very least) connect with some forward-thinking people interested in seeing the current social media situation solved.

This will be the first post of many I make on Steemit, and I'm excited to get started.

I'm hoping this platform allows me to make connections with a great forward-thinking community that values good work.

Send me a message, comment, or follow me :)

-Kevin

P.S. The reason my username is TheDreamFlow, is because that's the name of the creative collective I'm starting in order to promote my own work and eventually bring other artists into the fold. https://thedreamflow.com/

I'll be writing much of the content on The Dream Flow's feed, but I will also be including a great group of creatives I work with. Each post will include the name of the author of the content, but for a while it will just be my work.