f l a t s o u n d /

first off, let me just say that your interest in wanting to support independent art in an organic and meaningful way means the world to me. i apologize in advance if what i write here is a bit longwinded, it’s just i’m very passionate about this and am attempting to reach an audience of people who are also passionate about it. what i’m sharing here is more than just the vague sentiment that you should buy my merch and tell your friends about my music, it’s a framework for how i believe art should be created and consumed. these ideas are very important to me and i want to present them to you in the most straightforward and transparent way that i can manage. so, here i go.

i started flatsound back in 2007 when i began uploading my first songs onto myspace. from the very beginning i was spending hours in front of my computer, looking at profiles of people who seemed like they might like my music and sending them friend requests. my musician friends would look at me like i was crazy, asking why i didn’t just use friend blaster, a then popular but now absolutely ancient myspace exploit that allowed a bot to send friend requests for you. it would send out 300 friend requests, the daily limit for myspace, in a matter of minutes. admittedly, i was sending much less. and yet, there i sat at my computer, sending them one by one every day.

soon their profiles had 8,000 or more friends while mine barely managed one thousand. each day they’d get flooded with notifications of accepted friend requests and new comments thanking them for the add. they were seemingly doing so much better than me, only… i noticed nobody was actually listening to their music. at least not really. it was just an illusion.

i did the same on tumblr. going to blogs, scrolling, reading bios. anytime i wasn’t working on a song i was looking at more blogs. you have to understand, at that point i was struggling so much in my life and felt so isolated from everything. my music was so personal to me. i didn’t just want people to hear it, i wanted the right people to hear it. so when someone did listen - like, actually sat down and connected with what i was saying - it’s hard to even describe. it lit a fire inside of me. it was a level of visibility that i desperately needed then and it meant everything to me. it still does.

so there’s my first suggestion, it’s simply to listen. really listen. close your eyes, listen to the lyrics, be present with it. if you connect with my work to any degree, please do so with the knowledge that i put everything i have into what i do and that i’m truly grateful for every single person who has managed to see a piece of themselves in it. i’m so thankful that my music has found you and that you’re listening to it, however you’re managing to do so. whether it’s on a vinyl record you bought directly from my shop or some random youtube upload of an unreleased song somebody found on my blog. if you’re really listening, i’m happy. on my website, on an old cassette tape, even on seemingly evil platforms like spotify. hey, speaking of spotify…

indie artists never want to say this out loud, or maybe they just don’t want to acknowledge it themselves, but spotify does rule. getting paid for music streams at all is still a relatively new thing for artists. i understand that $0.003 per stream sounds insulting, but before spotify came around i was racking up millions of plays on sites like tumblr and soundcloud and was seeing no money at all. all those people streaming on bandcamp? nothing. those years on myspace? nothing. suddenly an enormously popular platform comes along and is actually willing to divvy up the pot? i don’t care what anyone says, that rules to me.

whether or not it rules to some multiplatinum selling artist who’s already signed their life away to several major labels is completely beyond me. but like, if i’m being totally honest i don’t actually give a fuck what some already millionaire artist has to say about streaming platforms. from my personal experience as a truly independent artist who owns the rights to all of his own work, getting paid for people just listening to my music is an incredible blessing.

that isn’t to say that spotify is without it’s hangups. like with all major platforms, there’s a history of sketchy business and an ever-changing set of rules that songwriters would be wise to play by. these are all things that i’m aware of as an artist and i do my best to try and navigate it all the best i can. but you? all you have to worry about is pressing play.

so here we have my next suggestion. listen where it matters. i have personally always believed that art should be free and accessible to anyone who has an interest in connecting with it. that’s why every album i have ever put out streams for free on my website with no ads or paywalls. these songs are my gift to you and i am so thankful that you want to listen to them at all. that being said, if you’re listening with the intention of helping in even the smallest way, listen on a popular streaming platform.

here’s the truth: my music projects are extremely unknown outside of their niche genre. i could walk around wearing my own merch and a giant sign that says “i’m the guy from flatsound” and by an amazingly large margin nobody would give a shit. and yet… my earnings from spotify alone aided me in taking care of my father during the last years of his life. don’t scoff at this capabilities of this platform, it’s an immensely powerful tool for indie artists. particularly when it comes to…

i’m not just talking about spotify editorial playlists, i mean any and every playlist you are willing to put flatsound on. playlists you make for your friends, your crush, your drive to work. sleep playlists, workout playlists. if you think it’ll fit, then please, add my music to your playlists.

imagine an artist gets one thousand people to listen to their song. that’s great, but it doesn’t mean anything if those people never hear that song again. ideally, an artist wants people to spend time with their work. to really take it in and appreciate the nuances in what they created. unfortunately, this is becoming more difficult to accomplish in a world where the number one thing virtually everybody is after is your attention. they’re all constantly fighting for it from the moment you look at your phone. every app, every thumbnail, every notification. all anybody wants is for you to stop what you’re doing and look at them.

so what are you expected to do? it isn’t your fault that we live in a capitalist attention economy. how do you stay focused enough to connect with the art you want to connect with? an easy way is by simply adding it to a playlist. the song travels with you as you navigate all the experiences life has to offer you. it is now a seamless part of your day.

songs have a miraculous way of getting better and better the more you listen to them. your brain picks up on the patterns in the melodies, eventually you begin forming memories around listening to them so often. even bad songs or songs you began listening to ironically can get stuck in your head for months. artists know this, which is why they’re online sharing snippets of their songs before it’s released. then the official audio. then a lyric video. then an official music video. every time you scroll by one of their posts you’re exposed to the catchiest part of the chorus even if you didn’t want to hear it. by the time the album comes out, you’ll be nice and familiar with the singles whether you like it or not.

as well as this works, i don’t really enjoy doing it. something about that exact formula just feels too inauthentic to me. i'll continue to swallow my pride and do what i can on my end, but ultimately it would mean so much more to me if you were the one in charge of it all. no tricks, no gimmicks, no top ten youtube brain hacks guaranteed to get you to one million monthly listeners in under six months. just a decision on what is and is not included in your life, and i think that decision should belong to you. if you decide that you want to built a relationship with the music, then choosing to make it a part of your day gives you even more of a chance to connect with it on a deeper level.

i know it sounds small, but accumulatively these little things can add up and have a profound affect on me and any other artist that hasn’t signed their music away to a label. which brings me to my next topic.

it is not my intention to needlessly bash on (especially diy) labels who do so much to help small artists. while it’s true that i’ve had some truly negative experiences with smaller labels in the past, it just doesn't take away from all the good done by passionate enthusiasts putting out great quality physical releases in small runs for artists who would otherwise never have put anything out on their own. the existence of these labels is great and they will always be a pillar in diy communities.

but what about larger labels? what about all the emails i get from men who all somehow seem to have worked at tidal offering a large sum of money to own i exist forever? don’t they want to help small artists too? they must, it says it all over their press packages.

the short answer is no. these are mostly investors who are just looking at numbers and sending boilerplate emails under the guise that they actually like your music. they don’t like your music. they like the idea of using it as a financial asset and thereby taking that asset away from you.

the music industry (even on an independent level) is, in large part, a pay to win game. i discovered this years ago when i finally started becoming close with one of my favorite indie labels at the time. i told them one day that i was having problems getting verified on twitter. i had the followers, i had the engagement, i even had accounts pretending to be me online. still, every time i submitted i got turned down. it sucked, because i was already such a private person and i hated the feeling of posting online and seeing comments from accounts that looked just like mine just because someone took my profile picture and changed the L in flatsound to a capital i.

i thought maybe my new label friends could give me some advice when submitting for verification that could help. they told me not to worry about it and that they could have me verified within a week... as long as i sign a contract with them. hahaha, that's right! i too could have peace of mind on the internet and all it would cost me is half of my spotify earnings. what a great deal. thanks, guys.

do you ever wonder how some indie bands with less than a thousand followers are already verified? more importantly, do you think they actually need it? like realistically, do you think people are looking at their profile and wondering if it’s really them? of course this becomes less and less relevant today now that every platform is giving a blue checkmark to anyone willing to pay a subscription fee. this is another illusion, the same one as before. the illusion of relevancy. it isn’t real. it's a facade and it isn't there to actually help artists.

at this point you might be sitting there thinking, "okay, the music industry is fake and labels want money. that's always been true. what the fuck does it have to do with me?"

you hold so much more power than you realize. you, the person reading this. you shape the culture by adding your voice to it. you influence trends and collectively decide what is and isn't funny or cool. corporations fucking wish they had as much impact as the average internet-fluent shitposter. it's why big companies are always making it look like some gen-z intern is running their social media. they don’t just want you, they need you.

social media algorithms work in mysterious ways. people study and find different methods to manipulate them just for that info to be irrelevant the next time the app is updated. but one concept seems to have remained true for many years: the idea that we are all just rolling the dice.

whenever anyone posts online, artist or not, they’re rolling the dice. every new song or update or fleeting joke is a new roll. sometimes it’s just plain unpredictable what will and will not catch on, and oftentimes there’s no correlation at all between how hard you worked on something and how well it performs. why did that post get thousands of views more than all your others just like it? it could have been the time of day, or maybe it was the amount of initial views it got in first few hours that pushed it on to more people. either way, you rolled high, and the snowball effect of the algorithm did the rest.

so there it is, my last suggestion is that you post. if you use social media to any degree and connect with my work, make it the soundtrack to your content. put a flatsound song in your story, your reel, or your youtube video. every time you use an artists song as a sound on platforms like tiktok, you're effectively rolling the dice for them. i’ve had more than a few songs do well on tiktok and it in turn introduced so many new people to flatsound. songs like my heart goes bum bum bum, i exist i exist i exist, you wrote ‘don’t forget’ on your arm, and goodnight dad, i love you have all done their rounds on the platform. and you know what? not a single one of them is because i posted a video including the song. it’s because one of you did.

the goal isn’t to trick people into listening. it isn’t to use an already trending sound just to boost your numbers and promote something else. it isn’t a robot voice asking rhetorical questions and a caption insisting that you wait until the end. just include the song and allow individual people to feel however they do. i believe with everything i have that it will find the right people. it will find people in the most organic and meaningful way that it’s able to. this has been proven to me too many times for me to doubt it now.

put it out there and see what happens. put it into the world and give it the opportunity to make it’s way into someone’s life the same way that it made it’s way into yours. sometimes it manages to appear right in front of someone the moment they need it the most, and that’s something that a hired publicist could never accomplish.

i’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but nothing i’ve written here involves spending any money. everything here is very obvious and straight forward when condensed into bullet points, but i hope you understand the subtleties in what i wrote. it is not what you do, but how you choose to do it. it is the same mystery in life that makes food made with love taste better. i knew that was true back in 2007 when i sat in front of my computer for hours sending out friend requests. it’s still true today, it’s just been muddied by the distractions of what it means to be here now.

thank you for spending this time with me. i appreciate you wanting to know more about my art and how you can help out. the information here, at least i think, can be applicable to many different aspects of life. you don’t necessarily need agents and publicists and labels, especially if your goal is just to connect with people. whatever it is that you do, do it with intent. if your intentions are good, i believe that they can take you somewhere very special.

thank you again.
-mitch