The Email List vs the Algorithm

Spotify has 600 million users and can remove your music, bury your profile, or change its entire recommendation system on any given Tuesday — and you’ll receive no warning and have no recourse. Every follower you’ve accumulated on any platform exists at the platform’s pleasure, not yours. You are, in the most literal sense, renting your audience from a landlord who doesn’t particularly care if you stay.

An email list is different. It’s yours. The addresses don’t belong to Google or Meta or a Swedish streaming company. When you send a message, it arrives — not in a feed that deprioritises you because you didn’t pay for promotion, but in a inbox that a real person chose to open. The average email open rate across industries hovers around 20–30%. The average reach of an organic social post is closer to 2–5%. The maths aren’t subtle.

The comparison to Spotify followers is worth sitting with. A Spotify follower is a passive data point. They may have clicked follow two years ago and never thought about you since. You cannot contact them. You cannot tell them about a show, a new record, a Bandcamp Friday. You are entirely dependent on Spotify’s algorithm deciding to surface you in their Release Radar, which it will do inconsistently and without explanation. An email subscriber, by contrast, actively gave you their address. That act of consent is tiny but meaningful — it signals genuine interest rather than a momentary tap of a button.

Starting from zero

The practical barrier feels higher than it is. You don’t need a complicated setup to begin. Services like Mailchimp and Brevo have free tiers that are more than sufficient for most independent musicians. The real work is simply deciding to ask.

At shows, have a sign-up sheet — actual paper, because phones get awkward in noisy rooms and people will genuinely write their address down if you just put the clipboard in front of them. On your website, a simple embedded form is enough. In your social bios, the link to your list should sit alongside or above anything else. When you release something new, mention the list in the same breath you mention the platforms.

The question of what to send matters more than how often you send it. Frequency anxiety is real, but most musicians underestimate how rarely they’ll actually bother their subscribers — and overestimate how often people want perfectly polished newsletters. A short, honest email about what you’re working on, sent every month or two, is worth vastly more than a beautifully designed campaign you send once and then abandon. Amanda Palmer built a career on this kind of direct intimacy. So did Sufjan Stevens, in his early years of writing long, strange, personal dispatches to a small list that grew because people talked about how different those emails felt.

The deeper point

There’s something philosophically important underneath the practical argument. When you build on platforms, you’re optimising for their metrics — streams, followers, engagement rates — which may have nothing to do with building a sustainable relationship with the people who actually care about your work. The algorithm rewards content that performs well right now. An email list rewards consistency and honesty over time. Those are very different games, and they produce very different kinds of careers.

The musicians who seem most resilient to the chaos of the streaming economy — the ones who can announce a tour and sell it out without needing a viral moment — almost always have one thing in common. They built a direct line to their people before they needed it. The list wasn’t a backup plan. It was the foundation.

You can start that foundation today with fifty addresses. You don’t need to wait until you have something impressive to announce.

Resonillator’s suite of creative modules can help you develop the music worth writing home about — explore them at Resonillator.