Attention Steemians — Want Upvotes? We Need YOU To Create Excellent Music Content (Including Music Journalism)
There’s a new @Curie sub-community specifically designed to support quality music content.
You’ll see it if you look at the latest Curie post, towards the bottom of this list, the “music” group, there’s me!
Huge thanks to @kevinwong for inviting me to be a part of the new curation crew alongside him and @edje. It’s going to feel amazing to have this new platform where I can help support the best music content.
There’s just one small problem…
Steemit Needs More Great Music Content!
I am going to be completely honest in this section. No punches pulled.
Many new steemians contact me for advice. They say: “Steem is so unfair! I post great content and don’t get any votes. This is crap.”
99% of the time when I look at their profiles, they have one or more of these problems:
(1) Not Enough Posts (for example they’ll have posted maybe ten topics so far)
(2) Crappy Content (just not good at all, bad grammar, short posts, no images / bad images, etc)
(3) Not Enough Community Engagement
Looking through the “new posts” area of the music tag, you can see what I mean: https://steemit.com/created/music
Many of these posts are literally somebody just copy and pasting a YouTube link to a popular song. Other people do a little better, posting an old original song, but add no text and just beg for support.
You can see them even without clicking through, take a look at this photo:
4 of these are just YouTube copy + pastes. The other ones are OK, but nobody will notice them UNLESS they are participating in the community via discord / comments
The Easy Way to Make Great Music Content
You don’t need a great band or any experience to make good music content. All you need to do is put in a good effort and meet a few minimum requirement.
In my opinion, here’s what you need for a good music post most of the time:
-A minimum of 300 words (400+ is ideal)
-At least 3 images (videos count)
-All Original / New Content.
-Also: Avoid writing content that sounds like it came from a boring textbook. If you look at some music posts, you’ll see what I mean.
That’s it.
Any well-formatted post with good grammar that meets those four criteria is likely to qualify for Curie upvotes or Curie Music sub-community upvotes. Those are worth anywhere from $10 to $80+ in steem.
I am literally looking at every single post under the music tag every day, scouring for good content. If you make 3-5 great new posts each week, you WILL be noticed.
Help Me Help You
I want to help you. Please, help me help you!! Post quality content and you will be noticed, you will be rewarded.
Best of all, it will help steem grow. We need more quality content here to attract new users. In my opinion this is one of the biggest and most important aspects of growing steem.
A Few Examples of Excellent Quality Music Posts
(1) https://steemit.com/raleigh/@heymattsokol/math-rock-and-half-pipe-skate-action-at-shredfest-3-show-report-raleigh-life
(2) https://steemit.com/music/@winstonalden/operatic-female-voices-at-the-fringes-of-metal-music-diamanda-galas-and-laure-le-prunenec
(3) https://steemit.com/music/@buckydurddle/walkin-music-a-musician-composing-for-clients
Good luck with your future content creation! If you have questions or want to debate me on any of the information in this post… let’s talk it out in the comments!
Good advice. What is a good way for me to get more engagement on some of my songs. I composed transformative songs to accompany Tarot cards from a game. I have these songs on YouTube, so when I upload, I share here too. All these songs I perform on my piano and recorded and edited myself. I try to write a description about the particular piece, but I don't have much to say. However, I'm open to suggestions. I always tag them in music and tarot and dragonage.
Hmm.... it's tough, there's definitely no right answer to getting more attention for your music.
It's a combination of a few factors, any of which can be the missing link depending on your situation:
(1) Quality of Music
(2) Connections / Friendships / Collabs with other likeminded musicians / your "scene"
(3) Your Story / do people connect with you as a person / content outside of music
Maybe try to combine your more in-depth tarot posts WITH the music posts? Going for one super in-depth awesome post each day, like a combination of music AND deep tarot analysis, could be enough to get your stuff a bit more traction.
Overall at a glance it looks like you're doing a lot of the work that you need to do. I'm impressed with your activity on steem. Keep striving to make your content even better, especially focus on formatting and making it look good on steemit specifically.
One last tip - pay a LOT of attention to your post title, first sentence, and first photo. Those are the things that people see from the topic list, so that's what they use to decide if they'll click on you or not. That stuff is like 50% of the battle, lol
Cool, thanks. I had noticed about the image early on, like thumbnails on YouTube. I tend to make sure my first sentence is something that will entice readers, like a tag line, or jumps right into it.
Your idea of combining some of the analysis elements with the music is one that inspires me. Since my thumbnails are all very similar for those songs, maybe I can put the image of the card, write up a piece of my analysis, like the portion that is the narrative description of the card where I analyse every symbol in it. That way, it's not too much test for those who don't want to read too much, but allows for readers to be enticed. And I can still include the full transcript in separate posts, which is the transcript of what I say about that card in my videos.
Thank you for those tips, it got my ideas flowing. Sometimes we simply need to bounce ideas to find the best solutions ;)
Great content is a must have for every category and music probably more than any. I actually don't tend to spend time there cause of all the re-posting of songs from YouTube.
But this happens even in the topics that I do spend time in daily. If a person wants to be taken serious they need to create original, evergreen content. That being content that is not someone else's and can bring value even after a year's time. That is why I chose to stop doing weekly crypto recaps. It's so short lived and wont value anyone in even a month's time from now.
Great post Matt. Happy to have met you man.
"That is why I chose to stop doing weekly crypto recaps. It's so short lived and wont value anyone in even a month's time from now."
That's a great call swab, I agree with you completely that evergreen content is the best way to create value for other people. It builds up over time until you have years of good, relevant content under your belt.
Hopefully the quality of the music tag will go up as these curation projects kick in to incentivize the good stuff. Cheers dude!
I'm so glad I found this post! Have you seen my blog about EDM culture and the people who attend Electronic Dance Music festivals and shows? It's called The Dancing Dreamers, and I am really looking forward to providing quality music content on Steemit through that blog. I hope that future posts I make can be considered for your curation :)
Yeah dude, the blog looks good! I like it. One recommendation is that you should avoid using upvote bots in the future - because if the post earns more than $1, I can't submit it for curie support. Trust me - the curie support is worth more.
Followed you, looking forward to more content.
Thank you for the advice, I was completely unaware that posts that earn more than $1 become ineligible for curie support! That makes perfect sense though. I'll keep that in mind for my future posts and try to just have faith that my posts will be seen and grow organically. By upvote bots, though, do you mean even using the free bots on MSP?
Thank you for following me, I truly appreciate it! I'm heading to a music festival in Southern California in a few days, so I am really looking forward to pumping out some quality content for The Dancing Dreamers real soon :)
Yea I mean any "bot" that upvotes you. They usually do more harm than good.
Good luck with the music festival, sounds like fun. Cheers!
Gotcha, I'll definitely keep that in mind going forward. Thank you !
This has long been a bane of mine that the music section is just full of YouTube videos / unoriginal content. When I first joined I expected that section to be quite different. I mostly only look at the originalmusic tag now and have policed a few people using it for mainstream band posts. I would like the sections to stay as true to their intention as possible, it makes our browsing experience much better.
You and me both!! It is quite frustrating, like you said...
We have a pretty good community for a few topics - Cryptocurrency and Homesteading, for example - but others are lagging behind. I do appreciate the Open Mic Project, but I think we need to do much more to build up the music side of steem.
Luckily, with Kevin Wong & Curie's support, we have a lot of new resources available. Hopefully this Curie music curation group will be able to influence more great content creators to contribute music content to our platform.
Hopefully yes! Also isaria is heading up a music curation Project so good things seem to be coming. In all my rambles i forgot to congratulate you on becoming a curie curator :) congrats!
Yessss Isaria rules!! and thank you :-)
You always have awesome stuff to post about man I always enjoy and get a lot out of it. My problem is that I have a lot of passions including music and songwriting . So I have a question , do I NEED to stick to one niche? Or can I post music one day then blog the next, then vlog the next ? Or should I stick to one thing I'm good at ? See this is where I get messed up.. hopefully u can provide some insight ! Thanks !
Hey Steven, this is a tricky question for sure. I think this depends on the stage of your career you are at.
Early on, try everything. Vlog, blog, do covers, originals, music videos, beats, songs, lyrics, whatever. Anything that interests you is worth trying.
Over time, refine it. Figure out where the overlap exists between what you love and what other people value. Hone in on those skills, define your niche, and go from there.
In the end, the most important thing is quality. Don't be satisfied, always push to do better and better. You don't win until you have the best content in the entire fuckin game, and that takes years, maybe decades, to get right.
Thanks! I’ve been getting frustrated with the lack of attention for recent posts lately. Trying again today! Hope you enjoy.
https://steemit.com/music/@dandelion/live-turkish-music-video-dandelion-lakewood-and-damla-eker-bir-sana-bir-de-bana
Part of the problem may be that you have only left one comment on other people's posts in the last month. If you start by engaging with other content (I often recommend 5-10 comments per day), you may find that your own stuff gets more attention in return.
Also keep in mind steemit viewership is pretty low overall - this topic only has 30 views, even though I have over 1,000 followers.
That’s true. I guess I am wary of spamming people with comments...seems like a lot of folks just posting “upvote me back” or using bots. I just wanna share my content and maybe earn some crypto tips.
Of course spamming is bad... I'm not suggesting to post "upvote me back," but I AM suggesting that you read other people's content and engage with it by sharing your real opinions or thoughts. Join chats, either steemit.chat or Discord channels, and meet people there. Participate in open mic. There's a million ways to do it... if you "just want to share your content," then you should expect to make maybe a dollar or two per post at most. It takes work to earn money here.
thank you for the post @heymattsokol. Hopefully we will se a change here, soon. It is also kind of frustrating spending a lot of time trying to make a good post and interesting content but only having a few people reading it. But I do not even wonder that not that many people visit the "music" site now. I will take this to heart and try to do the posts as best as I can!
Good luck. You might have some increased success with your future posts if you follow the guidelines that I explained in this topic.
Thank you :) will do my best!
Lolz, I beg to differ!
Great initiative; good luck with it all, I'm hoping dSound contributes to a greater music community on Steemit.
Cg
FAKE NEWS! lol.
I hope you are right about DSound, IMO it needs to be a lot more consistent and faster before users will be able to use it on the regular.
I recently posted about a musical group based in California that does something different than the usual fare and their music helped me snap out of brooding in the negative.
I hope you'll give it a look and maybe discover something new (link). :]
Start music!