I don't know if you can see how much it's raining on camera, but...
...it's raining a lot.
In 1988, Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond wrote “The Manual”,
or “How To Have A Number One The Easy Way”.
They’d had a novelty pop song hit the top of the charts earlier that year, and the Manual --
I've had to plastic-wrap my copy, it's a bit rainy --
was a tongue-in-cheek guide to success in the music industry:
how to achieve a number one single with no money and no musical talent.
Almost all of it is out of date now, but there’s one section, right at the start,
that is as relevant today as the day it was written,
and it’s trying to talk the reader out of what they think they want. And it says:
“The majority of Number Ones are achieved early on in the artist's public career
“and before they have been able to establish reputations and build a solid fan base.
“Most artists are never able to recover from having one
“and it becomes the millstone around their necks to which all subsequent releases are compared.
“Either the artist will be destroyed in their attempt
“to prove to the world that there are other facets to their creativity
“or they succumb willingly and spend the rest of their lives
“as a travelling freak show.”
A number one song does not make a career.
In fact, it can kill a career:
if all you’re known for is doing one thing,
all the world will want to see is that one thing.
A single popular video does not make you a YouTube star,
it makes you the person who stands up and repeats that catchphrase
over and over again until everyone’s tired of it.
There are people out there who think,
just one big hit, that’s all they need,
that’s the path to stardom and being set for life.
They were wrong thirty years ago, and they’re wrong now.
If you’re a one-hit wonder,
then it’s not you that’s popular; it’s that one hit.
What you need is a steady build, a back catalogue,
enough time to learn the skills that you need to survive under the spotlight,
to have long-term, sustainable success.
If you’ve been tasked by your boss to Make Something Popular,
or if you’ve had that one hit and now you need the second,
that is a terrible environment to be creative in.
If you sit round, with a committee, and you ask
“What’s funny? What's good? What's popular? What can we make?
“What will people be interested in?”,
then you’re already on the wrong track.
But you know that idea you had when you were in the shower, or in the pub with friends,
or just letting your mind wander on a rainy beach today?
That idea might be good.
Your brain isn’t indexed so you can say “think of something popular”.
Your brain thrives on connections.
And it is way more difficult to make those connections when your job depends on it.
For me, it took me more than a decade of throwing stuff at the internet,
of steadily building up a small following and learning my trade before I found
the Things You Might Not Know format, an idea that really worked,
an idea that got me a large audience and
a chance to actually turn this into something that could support me.
By sheer luck, that happened at the point where I’d been working somewhere long enough
to build up some savings,
so I wouldn’t be completely bankrupt if this new, shiny YouTube idea didn’t work out long-term.
There’s a reason that a lot of people who make stuff for online platforms are either
kids supported by their parents,
or students with a lot of time on their hands,
or folks who have the means to support themselves.
And even if you are one of the lucky ones,
if your project starts bringing in some money,
if you’re lucky enough to have the budget to be able to book a last-minute sleeper train ticket
and travel to a remote, rain-swept Scottish island because it makes a better background for your video,
it could still end at any time.
You could get ill, or your audience could get bored.
Actually, your audience, they will get bored at some point.
There are some folks out there, mostly still teenagers,
with millions of people already following them and money rolling in,
and they think this is going to last forever.
But every band’s second album is difficult,
and every TV show starts to lose ratings over time as newer things come along.
The internet works the same way.
The new stuff doesn’t necessarily have to be better: it just has to be exciting.
People like to have both familiarity and novelty, but there’s got to be both.
Too much familiarity is boring. Too much novelty is scary.
If you don’t strike a balance, if you can’t change with the times,
someone else will be ready and willing to take your audience.
For almost every creator making stuff for the internet,
the work they do is a passion project.
So if you’re starting out, you should know:
it isn’t going to support you for the first few years,
perhaps the first few decades, perhaps ever.
And if you are one of the lucky ones, if you’ve made it,
it very likely won’t support you for life.
I mean, if this is a passion project, you probably won’t care about that.
And as long as you know that, as long as you plan for it, that’s fine.
But you’ll have seen all the creators, in every genre on YouTube, talking about burnout.
Your dream job can still be a nightmare if you don’t have a backup plan.
In 1994, six years after they wrote the Manual,
Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond pulled all their music from sale.
They went to their bank,
and they withdrew most of the money they had left over from sales and royalties,
both from the novelty number one single,
and from all the other hits they’d had since then.
They had one million pounds in cash.
They travelled to this island, Jura, in Scotland,
they went to an abandoned boathouse a couple of miles down the coast,
they burned all of that million pounds cash as art.
Now, I’m not about to do anything like that.
I wouldn’t recommend doing anything like that.
I don't think they would these days, either.
But I am well aware that nothing lasts forever,
If all you're trying to do is repeat your one success,
or if all you’re doing is trying the same thing over and over and over and over again
for years and you're getting nothing back,
then you might as well just be throwing your money in a fire.
So these days, I hope that my ideas work, and I try to accept when they don’t.
And I try out new things.
And sure, my baseline is different to when I was starting out,
the same way it’s different to that of a massive corporation
who might spend millions on one advert,
but the principles are the same.
I keep following all those rules I’ve learned:
I make as many things as possible, and I try to connect with people.
If you’re starting out, success might take a week.
It might take a month. It might take a century.
But every idea you put out there is another roll of the dice,
and you can learn from however those dice fall.
That’s how you get popular on the internet.
That's good enough. Augh! How is there--
How is there rain going down the back of my neck?
All right, I've got to go catch a ferry.
Pack away, catch a ferry.