Flood The Channels: On Marketing, Art, and Taking Up Space

Originally written as notes for a talk for Women In Music Boston. Some slides included as screenshots.

I am a marketer by profession, although I’m the kind of marketer who will forever rail against a society where one’s professional affiliation is the first thing we respond with when someone asks “what do you do?”. It’s not that I don’t find my work satisfying; it’s that I don’t really believe that our employment status should be the core thing that defines any of us.

It’s easy to market a product when you’re fairly divorced from it, when you’re not self-conscious about what you’re doing. Marketing for a company is about learning as much as you can about a product, the audiences you’re trying to reach, and what they need.

At my day job, I work best when I’m collaborating closely with a team. Sure, some of the work ends up being mine, and I often challenge myself and feel proud of the results, but it rarely feels personal.

While I have my own personal feelings about capitalism and advertising, most humans have been dispossessed of the ability to survive without participating in this system which normalizes not only the selling of our labor but the omnipresence of corporations in all realms of our lives.

We live with a tacit understanding that products and brands are going to take up a certain amount of space, and there’s a safety to expression under the umbrella of a brand.

However, as a woman, there are repercussions involved with occupying the spotlight or asking for attention for anything besides being pretty. In past romantic relationships with straight men, I’ve been accused of “self-centeredness” for my ambition, for voicing my own needs, needs which in retrospect were pretty basic. Early in my DJ career, before I would have called it a “career” at all, a man told me it seemed like I was on my way to becoming an “it girl,” and he didn’t mean that as a compliment.

“Manspreading” became a term for a reason. There’s still a lot of taboo around women taking up space, women having appetites for anything from food to sex to attention (see: Appetites by Caroline Knapp).

As a DJ, it’s not effective to simply market my music: I would argue that the most successful DJs also market a persona, and as someone who’s not much of a performer, that persona is inextricably tied to my real self. For some musicians, their alias is a costume; for a band, there’s a group involved, there’s collective accountability, much like there is for a brand.

But as a solo DJ, I am me. Sometimes I play with different facets of myself: more feminine, more masculine, heavier sounds, lighter sounds, relief, aggression, sentimentality. But these are all, at their core, parts of myself.

Because DJing is an improvisation synced with the energy of an audience, a time, and a space, it often feels very raw. I listen to my old mixes and I can feel where they missed the mark. I can hear what I was reaching toward, and I think I’m closer to that indescribable thing now, but I don’t know if I’ll ever get there. And yet I try, again and again. It often feels ridiculous to ask other people to come and be a part of that strange experiment.

Marketing is a bit of a taboo in the art world. By marketing yourself, you’re suddenly perceived as inauthentic, commercial, as having some sort of ulterior motive for creating. It’s not just music: friends involved with other types of art, gender aside, have faced chiding remarks for their efforts.

But marketing is how we get booked. Marketing is how we expand our reach to collaborate with the people we’ve always dreamed about collaborating with. Marketing is how we expose ourselves to new experiences that help us grow as artists.

DJing, in particular, is an art form that’s collaborative by nature. If you DJ a set without an audience to communicate with, did that DJ set even happen? For me, the “purity” of a DJ set isn’t about me holing up and avoiding outside influence — it’s about how fluidly I’m able to communicate with a room and find the sweet spot where what I’m trying to express connects with something the audience, too, is striving to feel. I am happiest DJing when I feel like I’m part of the space itself, when I’ve dissolved into the atmosphere and become the music I’m playing. But how do I get those gigs?

I intended for this talk to be a bit more tactical: how do you market yourself as a musician? But I think most of us probably understand those tactics, and if we don’t, it’s easy to find them on a million marketing blogs. I think a lot of artists struggle with something entirely different: the idea of marketing themselves at all.

Are there ways of promoting your art that don’t fit under the umbrella of marketing? Maybe. How do we even define “marketing”? Social media is so central to how we communicate that sometimes real interpersonal relationships end up being instrumental in our development as artists, or our ability to get booked. Sometimes, it feels like everything we do is a performance. Some might say that’s particularly true in the age of the internet; Erving Goffman’s been saying it since the ‘50s.

Is “marketing” about intent? If you’re not promoting your art to make money but to achieve another end, does it even count as marketing? Should it be taboo to ask for money in exchange for art? In what situations do artists deserve to be paid for their labor? Is art that’s been paid for, within a pre-existing capitalist system, somehow less “pure”?

I don’t have the answers to these questions — I think we all need to answer these questions for ourselves.

Marketing yourself as a musician or performer or artist isn’t about tricking people to get them where you are: it’s about putting yourself out there, taking up space, and ignoring the voices that will tell you that you’re not entitled to the attention.

It’s about building the communities we’re a part of so there’s more space for everyone. In areas where support for the arts isn’t the default, all we have is each other and the community infrastructure we can only build together.

Don’t resent other women (or other musicians in general) for making noise. Help boost each other’s voices. Don’t be afraid to share your work, even when it’s not perfect.

The more we can flood the channels, the more we’ll all benefit from normalizing women’s voices, and queer voices, and voices of color, and nonbinary voices, and trans voices, and all of the other voices that have conveniently been left out of history.

It’s up to us to decide who’s allowed to take up space and speak for themselves.