Releasing music without promoting it

Hey all,

I have a new song, Speaking, coming out March 6th and I have done/am doing/will probably continue to do next to no promotion for it. I want to talk about it today because maybe it'll help you also to just say fuck it and put your music out there anyway even if your capacity to market it is less than stellar for any reason.

I would love to be doing more but wow is time just not on my side with this one. I am in a period in which most of my working time is split between teaching at various college campuses (for my academic folks, my teaching load is sitting somewhere around 1.6 FTE [yeah I know]). The rest of that time is devoted to maintaining my YouTube channel and supporting my fledgling Patreon. This period of intense busyness will conclude soon, but not before Speaking releases on March 6th.

Despite knowing all of this, I'm still choosing to put it out there. It's a great song and I want people to hear it. But perhaps, even more so, I want there to be a record that this song exists. I wrote back in October about how some of my closest friends literally had no idea that I was a songwriter in addition to being a composer.

The only way for me to share with people the songs I write is to... share the songs I write. I have historically been the one person standing in the way of making this happen. It's an experience that I'm certain many of you share.

I love to imagine a world in which every song I release is a newsworthy event that happens perfectly without a hitch. I have to live in the reality that what I'm describing to you will not happen, at least at first. I have to practice getting to that stage and step one of that practice is just getting shit out there.

So I'm going to release Speaking, most likely without the level of promotion I'd like to give the song. Then I'm going to release more music and more music until I get better at the release cycle and a new song by ZW Buckley is the celebrated event that I dream it to be.

I don't get to have that today or on March 6th but with practice, someday. Take the paragraph above this one and replace "Speaking" with whatever song you're working on and "ZW Buckley" with your name.

Let it be a mantra.

Repeat ad nauseam.

Then drop that shit.

Til next time,

ZW