We were lucky to catch up with Dan Jones recently and have shared our conversation below.

Dan, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Alright, so you had your idea and then what happened? Can you walk us through the story of how you went from just an idea to executing on the idea?

I’m moving back and forth between idea and execution every day. That’s the fun part, and I’m driven to do that for personal development and mental health. I’ve really just scratched the surface of marketing anything. Writing songs and posting art, cartoons, and fliers is ritual, it’s a big part of what gets me up in the morning, and it’s part of healing and growing and feeling alive.

We’re lucky to live in an era where there are sharing platforms for music (Bandcamp, Spotify, Soundcloud) and sharing platforms for art (Instagram, Redbubble, and dozens more I’m still learning about). These are sharing and learning platforms first, for me, and commercial platforms second.

A pretty humble example of this is my Demo of The Month Club on Bandcamp. It’s common for musicians to run subscription services like this. And here’s me doing business-y math: if I share one song a month for the next ten years, that’ll be 120 songs in ten years–hey that seems like decent output, maybe a couple of them will be good. So I started the club on Patreon but found the Bandcamp subscription platform was closer to my daily routine and had the applications to deliver the songs and collect that revenue, offer discounts on merch. I kicked it off a year ago and completed a 12-month cycle.

The Squids (Steve Tulipana on bass, Matt Ronan on drums) are working on two of the tunes in our practice hut now. With our slow-food methodology, they’ll be realized as studio recordings in a couple years, likely, so this is a way to keep stuff out there.

Is it successful? So far, I’ve had two subscribers: Zig and Ed. Others listen, comment. Two of my best friends, and about enough revenue to buy a record every month. Guess what? It makes a 1000% difference to get motivated, write, set up the laptop, set up the mics, and knock it out, when even one or two folks are showing support.

The downside of that is I don’t really launch things. There are industry-specific templates for launching things and you track those strategies in terms of days, weeks, months, and years. I’m stubborn and I’m lazy in some ways and the way to market creativity for me is…more creativity. EVERY DAY.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers?

I wasn’t aware I was in an industry when I started, and I still forget sometimes–my foundations were my mom’s encouragement of creative writing and her love of books, which we shared, mashed up with DIY punk rock, which she hated at first, and judged harshly. I got out of school and launched with a depressed thud, and had a lot of “I can’t” and “I shouldn’t” going on, a lot of perfectionism and shame.

So if there’s one problem I want to solve for my fans and community, it’s the problem of perfectionism and “I can’t.” Role models for me in this mission are the prolific singer-songwriter, bandleader, and visual artist Robert Pollard and the poet William Stafford, who is know for his saying “when I have writer’s block, I just lower my standards.” Another hero is Mike Watt, whose nuts and bolts “econo” approach to the creative life has inspired not just one but two or three generations of independent musicians, label-owners, and artists. My favorite saying of his is something along the lines of “every time you play you’re getting ready for the next time you play.”

So I hope that I bring some teaching value to my small but growing fan base, that I inspire people, that we all share some courage to be authentic. That’s my side hustle. It took me until I was nearly thirty to get out from under the heavy literary expectations that made it really painful for me to write anything or try anything else. I carried trauma, and I’m not your classic rebel type so it just took me a long time. Parties, open mics, starting my first band, this all took a long time. Everything seems to take me a long time–everything but the things I practice daily. I work fast.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

This one’s pretty simple: you keep showing up and making stuff, and in music, you do it with people you love and trust. It can be unvarnished and some folks are better at presentation than others, and still others might be “strategizing content”, but you keep showing up. That’s one reason I run a postcard mailing list and keep the email blasts to a minimum. If I send a couple postcards every day, someone somewhere is probably getting one that day. Revenue seems to grow ever so slowly…maybe at about the same rate groundedness and presentness grow if you’re doing a spiritual practice.

I think folks have a sense creativity is part of my daily life, I’m always trying new things, but there’s a core ethic to get up every day and get better at it, and share. I think my people know I want this for them, too, and at the end of the day it’s not that big of a deal. Health and wellness is a big deal. Family is a big deal. Participating in democracy and working to understand and resist the American autocratic bootlick impulse is a big deal. The Royals rebuilding process is a big deal. If writing songs or designing postcards and t-shirts were a big deal, I’d probably get anxious and stuck.

Can you talk to us about manufacturing? How’d you figure it all out? We’d love to hear the story.

If you were to draw one of those business book diagrams with an upside down triangle and a schematic of values or roles, I’d be at the bottom of the upside down triangle drinking a root beer and drawing in the margin of a legal pad. Kind of a hardworking zone-out, at times. The generosity of skilled engineers and producers who have worked with me at affordable rates, my bandmates who are patient with my terrible chord charts, who see most or all of the revenue from shows go back into the fund for the next album–it’s like we’re all constantly pregnant with multiple babies and multi-tasking our way through it. A weakness for me is probably focusing on the output and not enjoying the community more. You need tunes? I got this. The rest of it doesn’t come to me totally naturally because I’m more of an introvert.

If I go back to how I got started–turning an authentic art impulse into something shareable, rather than a daydream about fame–I have to go all the way back to Eugene, Oregon in the late 90’s when a couple of friends (Rob Jones, who runs Jealous Butcher Records in Portland, and Ed Cole, singer-songwriter and bandleader and killer guitar player and dear pal) recorded me in their garages. I learned there are these things called 4-track recorders, you can record songs at home on cassettes, you can add layers and mix those down and make cassettes for your friends. In rock and roll terms, I was old, at this point, pushing 30! I’m 53 now! Maybe I’ll learn to skateboard this year.

I understood that the punk rock I grew up was done on the cheap, but I didn’t really get that I could do it myself. That you could turn it into a tape or a CD (in those days) and give your record label a name. Daily Records has been my record label name. I’ve made one pretty high-budget record funded by good friends with a label, but the rest I’ve financed myself by the grace of my partner, fans, and my friends who do it because they love music. In particular they love The Squids, or The Golden Motors, or my solo stuff. It’s all a gift.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.danjonesmusic.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/dan_jones_music/
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/djandthesquids
• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-s-joneskcmo/
• Youtube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1JcwqcPQqc
• Other: Print-on-Demand products I’ve designed, on Redbubble: redbubble.com/people/danjonesmusic Demo of The Month Club at Bandcamp: danjones1.bandcamp.com/album/demo-of-the-month-club All of my tunes on one playlist at Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/13HpDmlzeADegq1JOb5otS?si=37a7e1e8a08048fb

Image Credits
Chris Campbell
Dan Jones
Todd Zimmer