So last week on my podcast My .4 Cents which I do with music marketers Dustin Boyer, Andrew Southworth & Matt Bacon I interviewed the disco house artist Goshfather. I walked away from it thinking it was one of the best interviews I’ve ever done with a musician, and since I’ve probably interviewed around 1,000 musicians, that’s saying a lot.

If you aren’t familiar with Goshfather well you should be, he not only drops really insane knowledge on Threads daily, but he is also really good at getting his music heard by the right people on TikTok and Reels. Goshfather has millions of streams and travels the country DJing, and it’s all happened in about two years. But some of the sauce is that he has a fantastic personality that he uses to contextualize his music.

@goshfather

JUSTICE IS SERVED FOR THE TECH HOUSE DEFYING DISCO HOUSE DJS

As you can see he has quite a recognizable look and I made this video (and newsletter) last year about what I learned studying the most viral artists of 2024, and one of the main things I really saw was that recognizability is one of the greatest hacks for success in a short-form video world. It’s a simple look, track suit, distinct hair, sunglasses and an excited body language.

@goshfather

Dude why did Nextdoor sf cook me like this

In the interview I did with him, he made it clear why being so recognizable is a hack that gives the artists who develop their image such an unfair advantage over others.

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We previously discussed artists like Sombr & Raven Lynae being recognizable a few weeks ago. Artists really don’t take being recognizable seriously enough, whether that’s decals on a guitar, a distinct background you often record in, or making a thumbnail-type screen that starts your videos. You lose out on that happening because you never cross the chasm of investigating whether you should know the artist or not.

But when you see a twink like Sombr showing a ton of neck anatomy with that haircut and movement repeatedly, it eventually induces curiosity, making people wonder why they keep seeing you. One of the things I think people forget is that not everyone is addicted to short-form apps and looks occasionally. Or sometimes their feed occasionally takes a bend towards a particular genre of music. You may not be shown to people as often as you think, but when your look is easily recognizable, you stick in the mind, rather than being another forgettable face. =

When you are recognizable and set yourself apart from others, you not only position yourself as different than others, but you give the dumbest members of your audience a way to tell their friends about you. I often think about myself, I have cultivated a look on YouTube where you can say, “It’s that white guy who talks about music marketing, hat, glasses, weird voice, weird, tattoos, band shirt, hat clip mic and blue microphone who talks in front of a blue screen like a vaporwave weatherman.” While it's not the strongest image, compared to my competitors, it goes far.

I know many artists find this practice annoying, and I promise you that you don’t need to wear a mouse hate or get Mike Tyson-like face tats to achieve this. A unique haircut, a style of dress, can go quite far as long as they are repeated with regularity. But when you take the hours it takes to think of a necklace, haircut, background, or visual style that says that it's you, not the others you may be confused with, well, you are hacking what gets people to investigate and hopefully enjoy what they hear and convert more viewers to listeners and then fans.