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Why Most Artists Fail To Grow Fast

Most musicians think their videos underperform because the content isn't good enough or the algorithm hates them. But the real problem is simpler: nobody recognizes you.

When people scroll, you get about a third of a second—one beat of a song—before they decide whether to stop. But if they recognize you from a video they liked before, you get way more time. They'll stick around, give you leniency, probably hear your song again, and eventually convert to a fan.

Watch it for yourself. When you scroll, you'll let the creators you like cook, but some rando you don't recognize is getting a continuous thumb motion like you're giving your phone a massage.

Recognizability is one of the most important factors in how fast you grow. So let me teach you how to fix it using burgers.

The Novelty Burger Problem

I'm a food nerd. You'll find me on any given week eating at whatever city I'm in at the finest establishments. The perks of working in music are what so many of us are here for, and since the pay isn't as good as other fields, you gotta make do with what you got.

Here's the thing about burgers. One thing the world has realized in the last few years is that when you're doing too much, people think it's try-hard. In these trends, there are tons of places that'll put onion rings, two sauces, two cheeses, bacon, some overly seasoned bun, and four burgers inside a burger. This is the type of burger that someone will eat once or twice a year at most. It's novelty, so you can say you tried it, but it's not what you're gonna come back to and build a bond with.

If it were in a burger taste test—which in many ways is what a For You page is, a real-time taste test for social media—these types of burgers will lose. They're especially gonna lose to places like Seventh Street Burger, Five Guys, or what many people regard as the best burger in America, Red Hook Tavern. All of them keep it real simple but do everything well.

The same principle applies to your artist image. Too many elements competing for attention means nothing stands out.

Why People Can't Recognize You

This seems obvious to some of you, but what's not obvious is how bad people are at recognizing other people. Face blindness is a scale. I've dated some girls who could spot a celebrity with a hat and glasses on from 40 yards away. I have literally sat across the bar from people that I've lived with for six months and not recognized them because my face blindness is so bad.

To make matters worse, it is scientifically proven that people have increased trouble recognizing each other when it's a different race. I want to be clear, this is all races. I'm not saying something about systematic racism. What I am saying is we have to accept that people are bad at recognizing each other.

Now add in the fact that people are scrolling on a small screen, often in bad lighting, often while doing something else. The conditions for recognition couldn't be worse.

You may be putting this together, but oftentimes the reason your videos are performing badly is even when you've entertained someone once before and they loved your video or song, if you look like all those other Stitch Fix-wearing, Allbirds-rocking losers I see walking down Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg doing no personal expression as an artist with style, they're not gonna recognize you.

Throughout time, people are always drawn to artists who look a little bit more adventurous, even different. Many people are excited by an artist who is free, unpredictable, and powerfully expressing themselves. When your expression is that you aren't expressing and you're just conforming, it's not memorable. Yet again, not remarkable enough to share with a friend and incite word of mouth.

What Recognizability Actually Does For You

This doesn't mean you need to look like SZA when she was dressed like an insect or get face tattoos like Post Malone. Two to three tiny things that make you recognizable, that you repeat consistently, will do the trick.

Enjoying this? Forward it to a music friend you’d like to be closer to and start a discussion!

Yes, you could have the occasional NPC like Alex Warren or Lewis Capaldi get away with not doing anything at all to their look. I'll be real with you—a lot of the time, those artists don't stick around as easily because they have a detriment to their stickiness, which is that they're not recognizable.

Recognizability doesn't equal hits, but it does up aura and make promoting your music much easier. People can easily dress as you for Halloween. They tell who you are on a billboard they can barely see, and their mind thinks of you, then remembers to listen to your music again, even though they only just caught that billboard off the corner of their eye.

THE 3 TYPES OF BURGERS (METAPHOR)

Let's go back to this burger metaphor. The foundation of the burger—the meat—is what you look like. Some of you are quite recognizable naturally. You may be real fucked up looking, too good to look at, or just shaped differently. All of those work. Some people are born more recognizable than others.

No matter what that is, we gotta accept the hand we've been dealt. There's nothing people, especially musicians, are more delusional about. Some of you are gonna need to talk to some of your friends who are honest with you. I know some of your mommies told you you're very special snowflakes, but some snowflakes look like the others. I've heard from some of you who think you look unique when I couldn't tell your ass from MJ Lenderman, Mk.gee, or Djo.

If You're Naturally Unique: The Red Hook Tavern Approach

Let's say you are really unique looking, like a 10 out of 10. You're a lot like the Red Hook Tavern burger.

The burger at Red Hook Tavern is a very standard sesame bun with some American cheese that's bland as fuck and a white onion that's not even caramelized because they don't wanna do anything that gets in the way of the flavor of how good the meat is inside this burger. It's dry-aged and the perfect blend of fat and lean.

When you look really unique, if we distract from that, you waste one of the best assets you can have. If you get face tattoos and all that, it starts to be a lot, and really doesn't let us accentuate the natural gift you got. If you put feathers and all this other wild shit on, it can be too much to process, distracting from one of the more striking things a person can have.

Keeping it simple is really good. You can do really subtle things to make this work. Most people don't realize there's actually butter on the bun at Red Hook, but it's very subtle. Hidden and distinct things like necklaces or a specific earring you wear, or a very small tint of makeup, can go very far on these types of people and work really well.

If You're Average Looking: The Seventh Street Strategy

Most of you are gonna be more like Seventh Street Burger, where the meat is fine. They toast the bun in a certain way, do this unique aioli, have cheese and lightly cooked onions, and they're dressing it up a bit more than the Red Hook Tavern burger.

This means we gotta take the time and consider how to do this in a classy way that doesn't get to be too much and take away from the main part of the show. We're just dressing it up a bit and accentuating it.

If you do glow in the dark full body makeup, you become like that burger we talked about at the top with all the onion rings. You have too many ingredients, and most people are gonna be like, this is too much. I don't want that. It's a lot.

This means we need to go out and search for

the cheese, the bun, the onions, and the sauce that makes you, you.

Artist Examples

We keep talking about sombr, one of the biggest breakout artists of the year. Here’s a chart of what makes him recognizable

Then we come to Goshfather, a member of our community who's blown up really fast and talked about it in an interview I did with him for my podcast, My Point Four Cents. This is what he said:

You could even do recognizability in other ways, like how I do it—since I have developed this myself—so I would stop thumbs while people scroll my videos.

When you are recognizable, you get more followers. More people think of you. You're seen as having more aura as long as you do it well. Taking the time to develop this really helps things.

The Middle Ground Approach

When I mentioned Five Guys before, I wanna talk about when you don't do this all the way. It does everything in a midway but goes just further than most by putting in the effort.

Like Seventh Street Burger, Five Guys intentionally keeps it cheap and simple. It tries to make the ingredients just okay enough to pass, but really doesn't wanna offend those without adventurous taste buds. The spicy aioli at Seventh Street Burger is for New Yorkers who are eating all different types of ethnic food all day. It knows what it is.

Five Guys is for people in the Midwest and all over the country who can't handle that. It's a classic burger that is well thought out and accomplishes what it's set out to do nearly perfectly without being slop. We've all had all those terrible burgers from other places where you're just eating what you get every day because it's cheap and bad. But Five Guys is a little bit more of a treat.

All three burgers are well thought out and do exactly what they should do. They've figured out a lane, and they're working with what they got. Five Guys doesn't have a lot of money to work with and wasn't dealt the best hand of meat, but they dress it up in a way that gets the job done. As I'm eating these, all three of these are amazing burgers.

How To Actually Pick Your Elements

The problem we have is that you do too much or you just ram a bunch of shit into your look, and you become the novelty burger no one wants every night. If you take the mood board you made and consider the values of your positioning, you could often get to good answers about what you can do to increase recognizability faster and have it also be authentic to you and in line with what you do. You don't feel like an idiot while you're wearing these clothes and be that person that we've all looked at where we're like, they kind of feel like they're faking it.

I'll be real with you here. I don't wear these band shirts outside the house very often, but everyone sees me in them online. I'm comfortable in them, but it's not how I present in my social or professional life, and that's fine. I'm performing here.

Just as you wouldn't wear to bed what you wear in the house, this doesn't need to be a reflection of what you wear every single day of your life.

Specific Things That Work

It can be anything. Necklaces, earrings, a sticker on a guitar, even your background. A group like South Arcade's practice space looks recognizable enough. You recognize the format when you see these videos.

Distinct makeup works really well. I saw a girl on the train the other day with a little white teardrop drawn next to both of her eyes on her dark skin, and she looked amazing. It was real subtle, kind of like the weird trick of the onion in the Red Hook Tavern burger.

A more permanent and pricey commitment can obviously be tattoos. It worked for Ed Sheeran, and I obviously endorsed this since I got very recognizable tattoos, mostly of song lyrics, all over my body. Color patterns, hats, and jackets can also be these.

Honestly, I truly believe most musicians get fatigued thinking about this instead of inspired. You should really try to work out these things and let it excite you. Plus, if you know an aspiring fashion designer, stylist, or creative director who hasn't made their mark, they can love building a portfolio. If you can come up with some ideas of direction, they could help get it to somewhere very cool and get it further down the field.

I think you get the point, but truly, it's hard for me to tell you how important this is till you see for yourself how it accelerates your growth. When you find two to three things that make you a little bit set off from everyone else, we don't need to throw the kitchen sink at it and be that burger with the onion rings. Just keep it simple with two to three things.