success as a function of time

i often try to remind myself that success is a function of time. the longer you work at something the more full and lush it becomes. i almost just wrote “profitable” which… we’re gonna unpack right now.

for a while whenever i would look at my music project and think i wasn’t making progress, i would look at this sort of meteoric rise i had from the end of 2019 until january of 2021. i kept telling myself: “its gonna keep going up. you have just cracked it and now its just going up from here.”

i am feeling a bit somber. for some time now my “progress” or “success” has been diminishing by dollar amount per month. heres a graph of my distrokid earnings over my career as a musician:

its been definitely decreasing since 2021. at first it was just a little lull met with a big up spike again but for a while now i have felt, at least monetarily, like i’m not going up anymore.

i think im especially afraid / concerned / hurt that you can notice a huge correlational downturn after december of 2023 when i deleted my instagram and twitter. its hard to swallow, but at a certain level im sure that the micro interactions i got from just being in peoples feed helped them pay more attention to me. i was just in the fabric and now i am not.

in a lot of ways its actually pretty impressive that i have still managed to have the maintained success that i have had considering that the only way you will see my stuff these days is through the music platform follow features (which on spotify and soundcloud areeeeeeeeee not always a reliable way to reach people. not necessarily high converting) or my email list which i have only really had rolling for the last six months i reckon.

it is hard to not feel a little 😔 at this. but i have some good news:

• im still making things i like
• im feeling really well and safe and healthy (except that transphobic shit that happened to me the other day but thats for another story)
• i can dj whenever i want
• i have a weekly art party where im meeting such lovely people and deepening my connection with my community

i think… i think the money might not matter. i think the fame might not matter. i think that the numbers went down because they were always inflated by something that drained me. this doesn’t drain me. it fills me. i get to really sort out my thoughts and people get to interact with it if they want, not because they have to.

im really inspired by rss feeds, although i will say im very anti-xml and wish that JSON feed was more popular. i have just started playing around with feedly and my initial impression is really positive but at the end of the day i really just want this baked into my browser. maybe the browser company can figure it out with arc.

until then, ill just keep makin my little posts and sharing them with my friends through email. it will become clear what the move is as time continues forward. and if the worst thing that happens is that i get to clear my brain load with some public journalling… well that just aint a bad thing at all

stay up wil, king mode.

- wilson <3