Chris Hayzel
July 16, 2025
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Fractional brand director/CMO
©2025
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The Art of Sucking at Music
2023
Over the years, as I gained more experienced, I became increasingly more convinced that there was something missing from the traditional brand and marketing frameworks. The techno-optimistic boom of the late 2000's and early 2010's opened the flood gates for startups to innovate for innovations sake and gain traction in the market by simply paying for advertising space. D2C marketing on social media became the norm, and as consumers (still in the honeymoon stage with tech) all we needed was a novel idea, sleek visuals, and a pitch that promised us that this product would change our lives... and the world. The bar for effective brand marketing was the lowest it had ever been, and the art of storytelling and relationship building had been replaced with dashboards and analytics, reducing a company's audience to numbers on a spreadsheet. Don't get me wrong, performance marketing is a powerful tool, and a small brand can absolutely use it to drive revenue. But it won't build relationships with your audience... and it definitely won't build movements.
My instincts told me that if we want our brand and our message to truly resonate with people, we need to think of it as a product in and of itself. One that is inherently valuable to a viewer and asks them for nothing more than their attention. That value can come in different forms — entertainment, education, catharsis, levity. It can be whatever you want it to be, as long as the viewer feels they received something meaningful to them by the end of it. The result would be an audience who's more engaged and invested in your mission, your brand, and your products (if you have them) because simply put... you took the time to invest in your audience.
So to test this theory I decided to launch a personal YouTube series called "The Art of Sucking at Music." The concept was simple — It's okay for you to suck at music. Every artist you see, no matter how good they are, sucks at some aspect of music. And while you might not ever witness that part of their process, it's a lived truth for everyone who builds and maintains any skill. The goal was to encourage learning musicians—all of whom struggle with aspects of self doubt— to be resilient, stop comparing themselves to others, and embrace the learning process. Leaning on my background as a storyteller, content creator, and musician (and mixing in a little humor), I shared some of the lessons I'd learned from 20 years as a professional musician, and invited the audience in to my own learning process so they could watch me suck at something and allow themselves to do the same.
I knew that building a YouTube channel was hard work. I'd spent years as part of the team building Artiphon's YouTube audience, and that was often slow going. So when I pressed publish on the first video I was prepared for it to get gobbled up by the social media monster and disappear into its bowels never to be seen again. And for the first few days that seemed to be the case. But on day 3 the views ticked up to a few hundred... then over a thousand. Comments started coming in of viewers sharing their own struggles with the music journey and I would spend time writing thoughtful encouraging responses. Within a few more days the video was getting tens of thousands of views every day, and there was a lively discussion happening in the comments section, more and more people feeling okay to be vulnerable and encouraging one another — the beginnings of a community that just kept growing. Over the next 3 months I would lean in with 5 more videos and by the end of that period the channel gained over 14k subscribers, garnered over 400k views and maintained an average engagement rate of 15% or higher.
