Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication - Steve Jobs

In my fourteen-plus years of experience operating in and around the music business, one of the biggest obstacles to success I have seen is the belief that the more complex something is, the more chance it will have of becoming successful.

There is a natural human desire to try to add more.

Sometimes it can be ignited through a feeling of 'if it's this simple, it can't possibly work' or it can be individuals in a team each wanting to add something of their own into the mix, leading to an overly complicated end idea/product/service.

The idea of subtracting and distilling an idea down into its most essential parts, is much more difficult to put into practice.

This tendency to always want to add more has a habit of creating situations where the sheer complexity causes everyone involved to get overwhelmed.

Focus is diluted.

The impact on financial budgets is that they are invested into so many different places that no one specific area has enough fuel to make an impact.

The result is, unfortunately, an underwhelming one.

Simplicity is powerful. As an example, when myself and my team at High Time launched UK alternative rock band The Hunna, we decided to invest our advertising spend in just one platform (Facebook) and focus our efforts on one single video creative asset which was attached to one single song.

Further, we targeted one specific audience segment and did so using a single strategy designed to capture this audience in a laser-targeted way.

This simple and focused approach allowed us to maximize our investment capital toward generating the biggest possible impact.

The impact was demonstrated through a vast volume of social proof on our single video creative, creating a knock-on effect in reducing our ad costs which allowed us to acquire even more of our target audience.

The result was that we were able to get results way above the level of expectation for a brand new artist - selling 3 x 250 capacity shows in London within a matter of weeks from launching and creating a story we could leverage toward achieving even more momentum in the next phase.

From the beginning to the point that we sold 10,000 tickets in London (in less than two years from starting), we maintained this simple strategy and continued to invest 100% of our advertising budget into Facebook alone.

As I build anticipation towards the reboot of High Time on February 24th, I'm looking forward to demonstrating the power of simplification at the center of our strategy in breaking the first artists we sign into the 'People Metrics' driven ecosystem we are creating.

Missed my first and most important article? here’s the link to it:

The Baker Says

I realized that no-one in the Music Business knows what they're doing: Part 2

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3 months ago · 18 likes · 8 comments · Carl Hitchborn