I sell shovels for a living

It started with a sponsored post. A music marketing one, naturally, because once the algorithm knows what you do for a living it feeds you your own industry all day. This one was selling a blueprint. The image was typed out like a ransom note: big names had noticed, majors had watched, and the whole system could be yours for $7.60.

The man behind it has a real success story, which is exactly why the pitch works. But it was the comments underneath that got me. Someone had dropped a link to a blog post by a writer and musician called Dom Garnett, taking the whole model apart. His argument runs on family history. During the Australian gold rush, one of his ancestors realised digging was a mug's game and got rich selling shovels and supplies to the diggers instead. The modern music economy, Garnett says, works the same way. The reliable money isn't in making music. It's in selling musicians the dream of making it.

I run a music marketing company. By his definition, I'm a shovel seller.

And he's mostly right.

The uncomfortable part

Here's the thing nobody in my industry likes saying out loud. A marketer gets paid when an artist buys a campaign. A course seller gets paid when an artist buys a course. A playlist company gets paid when an artist buys promotion. None of those business models needs the artist to build a career in order to work.

Read that again, because it's the whole problem. None of them needs the artist to succeed.

That's not an accusation. It's just the incentive structure, and incentives shape behaviour whether anyone intends it or not. When your income doesn't depend on the artist's outcome, it gets very easy to sell things that look like progress instead of things that are progress.

Which is why so much of what gets sold to musicians is proxy success. Streams. Followers. Reach. Placements. Numbers that go up and screenshot nicely. What you actually need is slower, harder and much less photogenic: a growing number of real people who care whether you make another record.

A lot of what's marketed at musicians is bullshit dressed up as opportunity. So the least I can do is show you how to spot it.

How to spot the grift

The discount that never ends. The course "normally" costs £997 but is £49 today. It will be £49 tomorrow. It has never been £997.

The countdown that resets. Urgency is manufactured because considered decisions are bad for conversion. Anyone rushing you is telling you something.

Flattery plus blame. "Your music is amazing. It's not your fault, the algorithm is broken. I'll show you the system." This is the sharpest trick in the whole playbook, because it converts by telling you exactly what you want to hear. Your talent is a given. Your lack of results is someone else's fault. The fix is for sale.

Guaranteed numbers. Anyone guaranteeing streams or followers is selling activity, not audience. The numbers will arrive. They just won't mean anything.

Screenshots without context. Whose budget? What genre? What did those streams turn into six months later? A dashboard with the good bits cropped in is not evidence.

The course is the career. The tell isn't that someone sells education. Teaching is honest work. The tell is when teaching success has quietly replaced having it, and the main skill on display is selling the course you're currently buying.

No mention of failure. Real marketing fails sometimes. Mine does. If failure never comes up anywhere in the pitch, you're not reading a service description. You're reading a dream.

Where the shovel argument breaks down

Here's where I part ways with the conclusion, though not the diagnosis. Selling shovels isn't the scam. If you're actually digging, you need one.

A mastering engineer sells a service to musicians. So does a booking agent, a rehearsal room, a van hire firm, the person who built your guitar. Every one of them earns more predictably from music than most musicians do, and nobody calls them grifters. Because the question was never "is someone making money from musicians?" The question is: does the shovel dig?

Does the thing being sold actually do what they say it does? A shovel seller becomes a grifter at the exact moment they stop selling the shovel and start selling the gold.

And there's a second test, which is harder to pass. Would the seller ever tell you not to dig? Every honest trade turns work away sometimes. A good producer tells you the song isn't ready. A good agent tells you the routing makes no sense. If a marketer has never once told an artist "don't spend this money yet", they're not advising you. They're billing you.

The part that costs me something to write

Would I pass my own tests? Mostly. Not always. Here's the honest version.

Years ago I watched a radio plugger on a panel at a London industry event say he only works on records he loves. I've wanted that position ever since. I don't have it yet. There have been artists I've taken on because the business needed the work more than I believed in the songs. Not music I thought was terrible, I turn that away. But music I wouldn't have chosen, promoted with money that was real to the person spending it.

Two things keep that from being the grift I've just described. The first is humility. I've been wrong in both directions about what connects, and so has every A&R department in history. The second is the line that doesn't move, whoever is paying: I will tell you what the marketing can and can't do, and I will not tell you the shovel is gold.

But I'd be lying if I said the gap between the work I take and the work I'd choose doesn't bother me. It does. Which brings me to a pint by a canal.

The pint

About a year ago I sat with a friend who advises founders and tried to explain a feeling I couldn't name. The business was working. Clients were coming in. Every request was reasonable on its own: a quick campaign here, a push there, something live by Friday. And a lot of the time I could already tell the quick version would disappoint. Not because ads don't work, but because no single tactic can carry the weight of a bigger problem on its own. Which leaves you choosing between delivering something you suspect will fall short, or pushing back and being difficult.

He listened for a long time. Then he handed the whole thing back to me in one sentence: "You can build a business around what people ask you to do, or you can build it around what you believe is worth doing."

He later wrote our conversation up, better than I've told it here. It's worth your time.

The diagnosis wasn't that I'd abandoned what I believe. It's that the work had drifted from it, one reasonable request at a time. I suspect most honest people in service businesses know that drift. This piece is partly me correcting course in public, so it's harder to drift back.

The own money test

The filter I keep coming back to is one question: would I recommend this spend if it were my own money?

Say you've got £1,000 for a release. The reflex answer in my industry is to feed all of it into ads and report on the numbers. Sometimes that's the right call. Actually, let me be more honest: sometimes it's the right call and I'd still hesitate.

Because if it were my £1,000, the conversation looks more like this. Spend some of it finding out who actually reacts to this music. Spend some capturing those people somewhere you own, an email list rather than an algorithm's short-term memory. Hold some back until something shows real traction, because doubling down on evidence beats spreading money across hope. And take seriously the possibility that your best marketing spend isn't digital at all. A show people talk about for a month. A strange limited object for your first fifty fans. One video you're proud of instead of thirty you're not.

Those aren't a formula, and you should be suspicious of anyone who hands you one. The point is smaller and more useful: "marketing budget" should never automatically mean "money fed into Meta to generate reportable activity". It should mean "money spent making more people care", in whatever form that takes.

Streams are not fans

You know the celebration post. "This campaign did 74,000 streams." Okay. Who are they? Can you contact them? Would twenty of them come to a show in Manchester? Would any of them notice if you stopped?

Usually, nobody knows. That's rented momentum: numbers that live on a platform, belong to the platform, and stop the moment the spend does.

Here's the maths that changed how I think about all of this. To recoup £5,000 from streaming alone, you need roughly 1.67 million streams. To recoup it from fans who'll spend £40 a year on you, across a ticket, a record and a t-shirt, you need 125 people. Not 125 thousand. One hundred and twenty five human beings.

Both numbers are hard to reach. But they're not the same kind of hard. One is a lottery. The other is a list of names you could build, person by person, if your marketing was actually pointed at it.

Where I stand

So here's the position, and you can hold me to it.

I don't believe every artist is one campaign away from breaking through.

Some records won't find a big audience. Some campaigns won't work. No ad account can manufacture real fandom, and streams are not fans.

What good marketing can do is give strong work a fair chance of reaching the people it was made for, then help you turn that attention into an audience you own. Email addresses. Ticket sales. Faces in rooms. People who would notice if you stopped.

And underneath the job, the reason I'm in it at all. I was the artist once. The bands were good. And I learnt the hard way that the old industry was a row of gatekeepers deciding who gets a career. The internet was supposed to be the way round them, and for artists willing to think like founders, it still is. That's the future I want a hand in building: talented artists who stop waiting to be discovered and start building businesses of their own, direct to the people who love them.

Marketing, done honestly, is one of the tools for that job. Nothing more, and nothing less.

Anyone promising more than that is selling the dream, not doing the work. And if holding that line costs me the clients who wanted the dream, that's fine. They were never going to get it from me anyway.