Why Mindset Is the Real Foundation of Your Music Career

Cyber PR Music Podcast Season 3 Episode 2: Getting Your Mindset Right with Julie Flanders

Cyber PR Music Podcast | Guest: Julie Flanders

Ariel Hyatt: I am Ariel Hyatt, and this is the Cyber PR Music Podcast. Dispatches for the new music business. This show is all about helping independent artists stop chasing buzz and start building bonds. Real fan relationships that lead to income and long-term, fulfilling careers.

Welcome to the… I don’t even know what season it is of my podcast. It’s the winning season. It’s the winning season because you’re here. Oh, and because I have a new book. And because I’m so psyched you’re here.

Julie Flanders: It’s a great new book.

Ariel: Thank you. So what we’re doing this season is unpacking From Buzz to Bond, and we’re focusing on the Bond Marketing Funnel, which we have many episodes to get to. But the reason Ms. Julie Flanders is here today, not only is she my mentor and my friend, she’s an extraordinary musician in her own right who has had every flavor of musicianship, from being signed to Sony, to world tours, to making music in her own living room. The full spectrum. And you’ve shown that longevity is possible, that having a lifelong career is possible.

Julie: And it has not been easy. All those years have not been salad days.

Ariel: Yes. But the reason Julie is here today is she comes into the room before we can begin to unpack marketing and strategy, because she’s all about mindset first. Julie, welcome.

Julie: Thank you so much.

Julie’s Journey: Music, Business, and Hypnosis

Ariel: Before I start bombarding you with questions, because I’m boiling over, can you give us an introduction? I always hate reading the hundred-word bio. Tell us a little about your musical journey.

Julie: I grew up doing music. It was my thing. Music and running track, which are both, for me, solitary activities. I practiced and practiced and practiced, and I ran. I went to school thinking I was going to study classical music, and I got there and found out that wasn’t what I was going to do. So I broadened out into other creative areas: theater, acting, and all kinds of transformative art forms, including my primary one, writing. As a result of immersing myself in so many different ways of learning, one of the things I picked up was hypnosis and trance states, which are incredibly powerful for creative flow, for connecting with something that broadens, deepens, and widens a person’s perspective and options. When I came out of school, I don’t think I’d learned that you don’t automatically go from being a creative person to knowing what to do with it.

The Foundation of October Project

Ariel: Where in that journey did October Project, the band you founded and that still exists today, come to light?

Julie: It’s interesting, because what ended up happening was I got a day job as an executive recruiter. I’d had a little job in PR first, worked in that for two or three years, then moved into executive recruiting, and as a result I really learned business. That was the first time I realized creativity wasn’t limited to the arts. I was looking for people to help invent what was called “home banking” at the time, but it turned out to be the content that would animate the internet. I was looking for people who could think in technology and bring that through their creativity into forms that existed but hadn’t been used at home. Because why would anybody ever use a computer at home, right? I was helping people understand why you’d want to.

Ariel: And how did that translate into a band?

Julie: The economy changed, and my boss said, “This economy is going to change. You already care more about the people looking for a job than the people paying you to find somebody. Why don’t you start something to help people who are looking for a job?” There was no such thing as career consulting at that time. I was at a boutique executive firm, and I started a career counseling area. To do that, I had to study a lot, and I applied it to myself. I realized I was unhappy in business. I started a band and acting school in the same year. The first person I really learned this from was Barbara Sher. Do you remember her?

Ariel: Yes.

Julie: She had this idea: you can’t do it the way other people do it, you have to do it your way. I internalized that, applied it to myself, applied it in the world, and started teaching it. By the end of a year I was in a full-time acting program, starting a band, and counseling people, and the band took off.

Success at Sony and Café Sin-é

Ariel: And then you got a deal with Sony.

Julie: We did. And it wasn’t day one. It took a long time to find our voice and put it into the world the way we intended. We played all over the city, but we became residents at a tiny café called Café Sin-é. I also had this idea that the best way to move in the world was to help other people, so I used to put together evenings with three artists, and we’d all agree to bring an audience for each other’s projects. Each project was different, but they’d all appeal to the people who came. We filled the house; we played with each other. At Café Sin-é, we played with an artist named Jeff Buckley, who became super famous, signed a week or two before or after we were there.

Ariel: Yeah, and his famous album, which I did publicity for. My first job in the music business.

Julie: I don’t think I knew that.

Ariel: Yeah. You and I have all these amazing sliding doors. My first job was working for Katherine Schenker and Live at Sin-é.

Julie: Wow.

Ariel: Jeff Buckley was her developing tiny artist. She had Sting, Peter Gabriel, Tina Turner, INXS. It was incredible. Anyhow, I digress.

Julie: No, but it’s that kind of thing, the synchronicities of the people you resonate with following you across time. It matters. And I’ll tell you, in my executive recruiting job, everybody I helped came to my gigs. When I started to make the transition, I didn’t think those two worlds had to stay separate. Sony told us, “You can’t bring your real world into your music mythology.” I completely disagree with that now. I don’t think our band would have built if I hadn’t taken the idea that every fan mattered, that there was a moment a fan went from being a fan to being a friend, and you’d share yourself with them differently. That built the band. Someone also gave us very wise advice: “Your record label can amplify what you do, but it will not give you anything you don’t give yourself. You must sell your first ten thousand albums yourself.”

Ariel: And you did.

Julie: We did. We were all in. And that’s the thing I’d tell artists: you have to be all in. If you’re even one molecule less than all in, work on that. Give yourself more support, more nourishment, more reason to do what you’re doing.

Mindset Before Marketing

Ariel: This is the thing that’s honestly alarming about how creation happens now. Something brews and happens, and then it immediately goes on the internet. You have to show behind the scenes, show you’re in the studio, show something’s happening. Marketing is so confronting, and it’s so hard to get right. It’s not just vomiting your soul all over every camera you can stand in front of. I keep coming back to this: how do artists get their mindset right? Sustaining a long-term career won’t happen unless you understand you’re in this for the long game, that it might take five, eight, nine, ten years just to reach what everybody else thinks is the starting line.

Julie: I’m launching a project right now that I originally wanted to do with all live musicians, specifically because that felt counter to everything happening around us. Then the pandemic hit the week we were scheduled to start in the studio. So instead of live musicians, we made it in a tiny capsule of a home studio, trying to make it feel grand anyway. Now, years later, after finally adding live musicians, it’s coming into being. It’s more fully formed creatively because of the wait. I think when people put marketing before their creativity, they fall out of love with their career, unless marketing genuinely is their creativity. You have to be in love with what you’re doing, because it’s hard enough that you need that love. For me, the love comes from the work itself. When you’re doing something that really serves your career, you don’t get tired from it the way you do when you’re forcing yourself. Burnout is a sign you’re making yourself do something that isn’t right for you.

The Fundamental Question: “How Do You Want to Feel?”

Ariel: When you were mentoring me, you taught me something that’s one of the most valuable lessons I’ve ever learned, and one I love passing on to artists. We’re so busy worrying about the voice, the brand, the fans, the marketing, the advertising, the release dates, the waterfalling, getting it all out into the world. I remember I was traveling constantly, speaking, writing books, and I’d come home and have a session with you, sort of flailing, and you asked me a simple question that grounded me and still shapes how I advise artists: “How do you want to feel?” Why are you doing all of this? I still have to ask myself that.

Julie: Yeah, because I think that’s where the essence of someone is. It tells you a lot about who you are. If you ask somebody what they really want, a lot of the time they can’t answer it, or they answer with something that isn’t really possible: “I want to play the Super Bowl,” “I want to be on SNL,” “I want to be on the cover of Rolling Stone,” “I want a massive review in Pitchfork.” And the real question underneath that is, why do you want that? If you want it because you think it’s going to fill a hole or a deficiency in your emotional life, you’re not going to be strong enough to get it in the first place. What you actually want, underneath that, is usually some form of validation. And if you can self-validate, you’re already ahead. So it comes back to the feeling. When you find the feeling and know it’s right, you can use it as a compass. Is this leading me toward that feeling, or away from it? I just had an artist I was working with who’d been told all sorts of things that might be theoretically true, but this artist wants to perform live, wants people in the room. There are a million ways to build a strategy that doesn’t require that. But telling a performing artist not to perform, because it makes more sense to a digital marketing person, is wrong for that person.

Ariel: No question. And the digital marketing person might even be technically right, based on what we’re told about algorithms right now. But there are two things you wrote about in your book, From Buzz to Bond, that I think are genuinely valuable. One is the composite character I call John Dough. He has the resources to buy the ads, force the flow, and then nothing comes back.

Julie: Right.

Ariel: So how is he actually feeling? This person, John Dough, is very privileged, made a lot of money, and is making music now, actually really good music. He’s been on the road with famous people. He’s hired a huge team to do buzz strategy. A million plays on Spotify, hundreds of thousands on YouTube. Everything looks great from the outside. Now it’s time to go on tour, and no booking agent will touch him, because he cannot draw.

Julie: Right.

Ariel: He goes into a venue and there’s no physical correlation. It doesn’t manifest.

Julie: Right. You can’t pull it out of the air.

Ariel: That was a huge eye-opener for me, getting to go behind the scenes with an artist client who has seemingly unlimited money. You’d think that buys you the front of the line. But bond marketing and bond creation aren’t sexy. It’s a long game. It’s figuring out how to deeply connect with your audience, and part of that is knowing who your audience actually is. A lot of people want their audience to be different than it is.

Knowing Your Real Audience

Julie: That’s true. There’s a natural audience for what you do. If there isn’t, maybe it stays a hobby you do for yourself. But if you’re going to put it into the world, there has to be a place where what you offer meets somebody who wants to receive it. A lot of the people doing marketing, when we started, were pretty dismissive of anything by women. Our music wasn’t appealing to certain boy marketing executives, and they couldn’t see beyond what they personally liked. If it wasn’t for them, they couldn’t imagine how to market it. I’ve dealt with that a lot with different artists over the years. A really good marketer doesn’t have to personally like something to see who else might. Take an artist who sounds a lot like October Project, or like Ethel Cain, Mazzy Star, Portishead. If you don’t think that kind of music has legs, you don’t understand how successful it can actually be. John Dough is probably not really asking, “Who would genuinely want to hear this?” There are bands that never wanted to tour at all, who built an entirely online presence instead. I think that’s legitimate too, these days.

Ariel: I think so too. It’s not about “this way or that way is the only way.”

Julie: No. And you can’t get tired of looking for new ways to do it.

Ariel: I know. The only predictable thing I’ve noticed, thirty years into this business, is the guarantee that the game will always change. And the question you asked me is still the right one: how do you want to feel? It could be happiness, satisfaction; that was my guidepost. I wanted to feel elated. We work with a lot of Christian artists, and their vision is that they want to feel like they’re spreading a message; that’s their motivation. We work with artists who’ve gotten clean and sober, and they want to show future generations that you can lead a genuinely happy life after coming through the darkness of addiction. Everybody has a different flavor of the feeling. But the feeling can never be a million hits. It’s not a number on YouTube. It can never be whatever you currently think success looks like.

Julie: People come to you all the time needing exactly that, a revisioning of the goal, and a replenishing of the energy that motivates it. If you’re going to locate how you want to feel, the next question is: how do you want your audience to feel?

Closing

Ariel: This is not about more followers or more streams. It’s about real fans who actually support you. If you want to go deeper, check out the free Buzz to Bond webinar in the show notes, or visit Cyber PR Music for over three hundred articles and strategies for today’s music business.

Less buzz, more bond.