One of the most important decisions you'll make as an artist today comes down to getting your music heard. You're constantly choosing between two opposing directions in what you show the world. One side is what the kids love calling “aura”. Also I should say I was on one my favorite podcasts One More Time this week discussing this subject below.

I know I just split the room. Half of you have no idea what I'm talking about, beyond hearing the most annoying 18-year-old you know, the one with the stupid wee busted haircut, say the word too much. The other half is looking at me, wondering why someone who looks like me is talking like this. But I've come around on aura. I actually think it's smart and important, and it's worth getting into.

Aura is a lot like how our government describes pornography. There's no real way to describe it, but you know it when you see it. It's when you see something exceptional, an artist doing something way better than everyone else. It looks more advanced, more of a spectacle than everything around it, and it leaves you mind blown.

Most people can't quite describe it, because they can't fully tell what the artist is doing. That's exactly what we're intrigued by with the artists we're really into. They're operating above our comprehension, so our brain keeps chewing on them, tinkering, trying to decode what they're doing. That's aura. And for the intellectuals out there, it's just spectacle, the same way you've ever heard spectacle described. That's what people are really saying when they see an aura.

For those of you who find the rapper ian's lyrics to be fire, let me put this in terms your undeveloped brains can handle. When you see an aura, it makes you send a 🔥 to your friend, or yell "LETS FUCKING GOOOO!" at your boys.

Slop is the opposite, and it's something we all know when we see it, even as it keeps evolving. It's the low-effort content that every lazy creator is making. We're all more than familiar with the cheap AI images everyone's putting out, the same ones over and over as you scroll all day. It's uneventful because everybody can do it. It doesn't make you think, " Wow, that artist is so good. You'd never send it to a friend or think about it again, because it's not remarkable. They just put the template up, everybody's doing the same thing, so there's nothing to talk about.

Slop is literally the opposite of aura. Aura shocks you. You send it to friends, going, “this is so sick,” and you try to decode it together. Slop makes you do none of that.

In the middle is our friend mid, and I don't think mid is actually poison. Even the greatest artists have dabbled in some mid. In any era of music over the past half-century, you've needed to put out enough content, and no one has a perfect record of nothing but aura. We judge artists against everyone else's work, but also against their own. Even a band with one of the best five album runs of all time, like my favorite band, The 1975, still gets us sitting on Reddit debating which song was the most mid. And that's fine.

Here's the thing about mid. It's not entirely useless. Mid can entertain your diehard fans, or get the genre addicts, the ones hooked on so many of the just fine artists in a genre, on board, while you're still not fully developed. Everybody makes a few mid songs at first. But a lot of people who are really addicted to a genre will get that mood-altering drug that makes them feel a way they'd rather feel from your mid, and you start to gain fans. That's who you stand on top of, so your really great material gets heard later. It's why we don't tell artists to just wait until they've made something amazing to release music. You can grow into aura, because making mid teaches you the lessons that get you better until you create it.

Picture the graph, aura on one side, slop on the other. The middle, where most people are standing, gets labeled mid. There's nothing else to call it.

We'll get into when slop is acceptable to make, but in this era of music promotion, the further you go toward slop on what you put on your main account and endorse, the less effective it's going to be. That's why people who lean on slop put out a ton of it, hoping quantity makes up for the lack of quality. The further you go toward aura, the easier all of this becomes.

The catch is that aura usually takes time, money, skills, imagination, and thought, and musicians don't always have that stuff. A lot of you are too beaten down from your day job or other obligations, or from being real, from listening to lyrics as terrible as ian's and wondering why anyone would ever reward that with a listen. So aura feels hard, because you're not in the place to create it yet. But there are many ways to get there, and those come from your artist development work.

Imagine you could make something that at worst leans a bit toward the aura side, not totally mid, and work your way up to aura once you start getting successful. That's how so many of your favorite artists evolved, and plenty of mine, too. Artists like Kendrick, Justin Bieber, and MGMT all started off way below mid, then went on to make the art many of you love and gained a ton of aura. You are not condemned to a life of slop unless you settle for it.

One of the best routes to aura, or at least the above mid work that gets attention, is your LAMES analysis and positioning. That work matters because it gets you out of slop land. So use your LAMES analysis every time. Take an idea, add your strengths and exploits to it, and move it closer to your aspirations. Make sure your positioning doesn't make you look like a bad version of another artist. Do that, and you're well on your way to aura. Most likely, you're going to make things that aren't mid