On Platforming, Pushing Traffic and Playing Bach
Video vs. Print: Which One Will Win?
In a violin competition, the judges may consider at least 100 factors.
Like in figure skating, you have players who are highly technical and players who are highly musical, whose interpretations surpass the glitches of notes that fall a quarter-tone flat.
As for the players themselves, they’re thinking about arm height, elbow trajectory, finger strike, bow grip, shifting, and the five zones of play between the bridge and the fingerboard.
In 10 weeks of working to expand the reach of my work on several social media platforms, I’ve reflected on my training for music competition.
I recalled two important lessons: Choose your genre carefully, and don’t overplay it.
As a competitive player, my strength was musicality — to a degree that I outscored players who never missed a note, but whose performances landed like keys on a typewriter.
Because I won on musicality, I tended to play up the big phrases.
Until I played Bach.
For a violinist, Bach is more percussive than melodic. He repeated lots of notes. He built quick, short strikes into the parts. When you play Bach, you play it in a way that’s crisp and abrupt — not showy.
However, I was showy. I went after those notes in Bach. Boosted the crescendos. Took the phrases from a small bow to a full bow in half a measure — until my teacher told me to stop.
“Use the string,” she said. “No need to push. When you strike a string repeatedly, it builds the sound on its own.”
In other words, the string creates its own crescendo.
If you try to crack the code on how to manipulate social media algorithms, you’ll find plenty of free advice.
The thing that rises to the top: If you want to pierce the algorithm, make sure you strike and strike often. Repeat the notes. It’s just like playing Bach.
You can knock yourself out producing a big crescendo with one phrase — or, in the case of the big content platforms, with one installment. But really, you’re just trying to get that algorithm to create its own crescendo around your work.
In 10 weeks of studying the reach of my work on several platforms, that’s the №1 thing I’ve learned: Strike the string with that bow as many times as you can, but don’t strike it too hard. It’s all about getting the string to vibrate. You don’t have to win the International Tchaikovsky Competition every time you sit down to play.
On one objective measurement — the number of subscribers — the performance of my work on YouTube and Medium has run fairly even. Subscriber numbers on both platforms have increased at the same rate.
That’s not to say, however, that success on one platform will boost success on another.
You can’t use scrolling platforms like Twitter and Instagram to boost your work on content platforms like YouTube and Medium.
To build an audience on YouTube and Medium, you have to draw on the audience that’s already there.
People go to Twitter and Instagram to scroll, not to watch a video or read a story somewhere else.
Yes, the readers on Twitter audience are reading words, but that doesn’t mean that they want to read a longer piece while they’re scrolling. Rarely can you push them to Medium.
They will gladly read quotes from an essay, however, particularly if you package it nicely for Twitter.
By the same token, you can’t push the Instagram audience onto YouTube, even though that audience lives on a visual medium. However, you can harvest video clips from your work on YouTube and serve it on Instagram.
Like the Twitter audience, the scrollers of Instagram will appreciate your efforts when you meet them where they live.
When you think about Bach, you can make things as simple or as complicated as you like.
Recently I read excerpts from two books about the composer — one simple and one mind-boggling.
The complicated reading came from “Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician,” by Christoph Wolff, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize that was published in 2001.
I stumbled over this sentence about the tuning of organs, and its influence on Bach (bear with me):
“In 1690 [Johann Georg] Ahle wrote an ode to the advantages of well-tempered tuning, developed by Andreas Werckmeister, which allowed for harmonic triads on all semitone steps of the scale.”
I stopped. I mean, the role of a new technology in the composer’s experiments with “extreme chromatics” was interesting, certainly. However, the best thing I could have done was stop reading right there.
Why? My teachers made me play Bach for a purpose. They wanted to teach me not to overthink things.
I read more from a different book, “The Social and Religious Designs of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos,” by Michael Marissen, because I was preparing to play one of the Brandenburgs.
This book was much simpler; it was 168 pages long, and most of it was in English.
In his introduction, Marissen wrote why Bach employed unconventional uses for instruments: His employer, Prince Leopold of Köthen, would occasionally sit in and play the viol de gamba, a baroque instrument that resembles a cello.
Bach — wisely so — wrote the parts to accommodate the prince’s limitations.
According to Marissen, “Bach knew how to write a piece in such a way as that no demanding passages were assigned to the prince, who was thus spared the embarrassment of exposing his technical limitations to his chamber musicians.”
The book presented a pragmatic look at Bach, who, for me, provided an early lesson in pragmatism.
Sometimes, when I’m studying how to work with social media effectively, I feel like I’m back in my violin teacher’s studio.
The platform coaches offer endless entreaties on how to game the algorithms. A common refrain: “If you do this, YouTube will reward you.”
It’s like being told: “If you don’t overplay it, the music school jury might give you an A.”
The current digital technology boom is no different from the last one, really, or the one before.
The central difference is that now, big companies are offering good tools for people to build businesses however they like.
In my own work, the effectiveness of platform manipulation depends on the platform.
My channel analytics are showing that YouTube is starting to create a crescendo around my work. Yes, it’s still a steep climb to get a bigger audience, but the care and feeding of the channel is producing growth.
As for Medium? I’m seeing little sign that regularly posting work is building any form of momentum — whether it’s long work, short work, heartfelt essays or briefs.
I’m not quite ready to declare that print is dead, but the written work is showing little ability to grow an audience.
I will continue. I will watch. I will wait.
As you may know, musicologists — and platform coaches — will drive you crazy if you let them.
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