Rebranding, done right
how to get rid of the stone around your neck, from someone who's done it twice
Feeling forced to make art that you don’t want to do just because your audience seems to like it is draining, and it leads to resentment and contempt towards your audience. I call it the stone around your neck, and during my “career“ as an artist I had two occasions in which I had to get rid of one of these.1
My first stone around my neck was the audience I got with my science channel in 2020. This one wasn’t right for me because I didn’t want to talk about science anymore, and also because men online act more horny and misogynistic than I was willing to tolerate. There’s definitely worst things in life that can happen, so I hope I come across as insightful instead of pointlessly complaining, because I actually did learn a lot of valuable art and life lessons from having to crawl out of this audience.
Going from my science channel to writing thinkpieces for my newsletter took quite a lot of time. It probably would have been a much more straightforward process if I knew which direction I wanted to go towards, but I didn’t so I spent the majority of my time exploring, trying new stuff and seeing what I liked making. This process of exploration took me around 3 years, and I don’t see a way in which I could have rushed it, but maybe if you go through something similar it won’t have to take this long for you.
I tried my hand at commentary youtube, Tiktok, printing apparel, acting, a few other things that I’m probably forgetting about and eventually settled on writing personal essays. It was very awkward to change so many hats in public, it felt like failing in a very visible way over and over again. However, now that I’m on the other side of this process and I have an actual audience that wants to read my things and appreciates my work fully, I can say with confidence that it was 100% worth it.
I think having the skills to do a rebranding are very useful, because even if you don’t have a dramatic breakup with your audience like I did, you probably will have many moments in your career during which you feel stuck, you feel the need to change and you ask yourself how to take your audience with you and gain a new one. Evolving is a natural part of the artist’s career, and what I call “a rebranding” is really just an evolution that happens in public. A rebranding is just the process to align one’s public image with what we feel inside as artists, and I think it’s very important to know how to do it effectively.
Step 1: find the overlap between what your audience wants to watch and the new thing that you want to make.
The rebranding process for an independent artist starts, I think, with dipping one’s toes into new waters. This looks like making art/content that is closer to what you want to make, but still somewhat aligned with the audience you have before the rebranding. I think the gold standard for this is what Chrissy Chlapecka is doing with her music: she built an audience on Tiktok during the pandemic with a personal brand revolving around dressing hyperfeminine and radically loving oneself, and now she’s rebranding (which again really means “evolving as an artist“) as an independent popstar. Her first single I’m so hot has a very distinctively pop sound inspired by the 2000s divas, and themes that are perfectly in line with what she’s known for: she picked the one type of song that had the best chance at succeeding with her existing audience.
Another good example is Joji, who made a lot of silly and offensive little songs when he was still known as Filthy Frank, so he could practice his skills as a musician before abandoning his old persona: he dipped his toes into music by making something that his audience was likely to be on board with. Rayne Fisher-Quann also went from occasional tiktoker to writer and found a lot of (well deserved) success: she decided to talk about the same themes that she was touching in her Tiktoks, aware of her audience of mostly young women, and it worked. And from my own experience, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my zine about growing up “gifted“ sold a lot better than my zine about Catholicism: it’s because I had previously accumulated an audience of nerds who grew up thinking they’re special :)
What essays/books/songs/poems/videos/standup shows would your audience enjoy? Which one of these do you genuinely want to make? What is the overlap of this Venn diagram? That’s your next project!
Step 2: create that thing you want to create, and make it as good as you can. It will definitely take off if it’s really fucking good.
Onto the next important part: why did these people succeed, and other artists didn’t? Why is Chrissy Chlapecka’s new EP “girlie pop“ making excellent numbers, but “Adultolescence“ by Gabbie Hannah or “A little late with Lilly Singh“ became laughing stocks? Success is much more random than we’d like to think, but I still think there’s a crucial difference between artists who make it out of a rebranding and artists who don’t: excellence. Joji and Chrissy are good musicians, Gabbie is not a good poet. That matters.
Excellence is difficult to assess, especially when it’s something that we’ve always dreamed of making. And there are also other factors at play (like the fact that Lilly Singh was given about 1/3 of the budget she reasonably would have needed to make a good show) so I urge my readers to not stress this step too much. In my experience, if you’re trying to become the type of artist you’ve always wanted to become, you already have quite a lot of practice under your belt, and you’ve also probably already developed a good taste for that thing. If you’ve been thinking about making video essays for a while, you probably already have a really good sense of what a good video essay looks like. You don’t know how to get there yet (which is fine, you’ll get there with practice) but you already have taste, so if you make a piece of work that you think is good, it’s probably going to be good. But it has to be good!!
What is that you’d like to see in the world? What’s a song/video/short film/poem/essay/etc that would make you go “oh that’s an interesting new perspective!“? That’s your next project!
Step 3: a part of your audience (and also the algorithm) will not be on board with this rebranding. Ignore it and have strong boundaries, your vision is more precious than a handful of views from people who don’t get it!
Finally, we come to the most crucial part of the rebranding: sticking to your guns. If you have an existing audience and you want to change direction as an artist, you will meet (what feels like) a lot of resistance from aforementioned existing audience. Some of it might even get actively hostile! People can act quite rude and entitled in parasocial relationships, and pressure you into staying where you are (“you’ve changed“, “I liked you better when you weren’t such a [insert here insult]“ etc etc) and feeling like we’ve disappointed a crowd of people is very unpleasant. The nerdy weird men in my audience weren’t particularly pleased when I started talking about feminism and I got condescending and sometimes insulting messages. But frankly, the part of my audience that was openly hostile to the change was probably the easiest to dismiss, and the part I found really challenging was seeing my engagement go down.
It was not fun to share things that to me felt very personal and important, and see the number of followers diminish, and the number of views stagnate. My insecurities about how this new thing will never work were amplified by the messages that the algorithm was giving me. And it felt awful! Changing in the public eye usually comes with a lot of discomfort, but there are a lot of very valuable and important things on the other side of this discomfort. Audiences are not static, and as the people who aren’t on board with the change leave my platform, they make space for new ones who get it. Now that I’m on the other side of this process, I can guarantee that it was very much worth it. If I’m going in a new artistic direction and someone unfollows me, that’s a good thing! I want my work to be loved for the right reason!
Step 4: get in touch with folks who are making the things you want to make
I’m very grateful for those few people who have stayed in my audience since my science communication days, but I knew from the get go that they weren’t nearly enough to sustain a creative career. I had to look for a new audience, among people who have never heard of me. In fact, actively looking for new people who could be interested in my new work was a wonderful way to remind myself that the stone around my neck doesn’t have to be there, and that I don’t have to keep creating one specific type of stuff if I don’t enjoy it anymore.
On every occasion that was within my control, I describe myself as a writer: in my Instagram bio, on my website, when introducing myself to people, etc. By doing this, I met a lot of other writers and became mutuals with some people that I really admire. When I first started doing this I felt like an imposter, because I wasn’t a “real writer“ yet, but the feeling quickly went away as I started to post more and more of my writing and slowly gained a new audience. Connecting with other writers was a fundamental step, because it exposed me to a new potential audience.
This step, the “finding a new audience“ stage, is really similar to the very early stages of a creative career, where you simply have to build a following from scratch, so I think it’s best if I discuss it some other time. The only real difference is that if you’ve already gained an audience once, you probably have gained at least some experience/knowledge/skills from it and this time it won’t be as hard. Evolving as an artist is always scary, and I think it requires us to “go back“ to the initial stage of our career, which is frightening because that’s the stage in which we feel the most directionless and unappreciated, and also we’re broke as fuck. But in my experience, a career always makes a ton more sense looking back upon it than actually living through it, so the fear of change is understandable but most of the time also unjustified!
What are the artists that you like, in the field in which you want to work? Is there any artist in this space that you can collaborate on, and provide value to? Anyone that can guide you or mentor you? What are some of their smaller projects that you could get inspiration from or make your own version of? That’s your next project!
The second stone around my neck is probably more useful to my readers: this happened in the world of photography, which (as you probably already guessed) wasn’t particularly eager to cast me for conceptual art and preferred to slap me half naked in front of a badly lit set. I wrote Ways of Being Seen, an angsty zine about photography and self objectification, to work through my feelings so you can rest assured I am mostly over it.
After I published Ways of Being Seen I swore to myself that I only was going to model for photographers whose art I really liked, and who left me a lot of freedom to be myself on set. I’m looking for photographers who put the weird before the sexy, and I’m aware that most amateur photographers are not going to be interested in my vision. I’m also aware that I do not look like a conventional model in age, weight, face or height, so most professional photographers won’t be interested in working with me. The pool of people I can collaborate with is small, and I need to keep my expectations realistic. But I can still make art that I think is awesome and makes me feel wonderful! A few days ago I had the chance to pose for a small indie photographer in Milan with which I had a ton of fun. I haven’t seen the photos yet (because analog photography takes for fucking ever to develop) but I remember that while I was striking poses and being in creative flow, I thought to myself that I was so glad I put up better boundaries. I think the art I make is much more rewarding, and I trust that my vision will become clear to those who want to appreciate it as long as I stick to it!
Changing as an artist is a necessary discomfort and I’m so glad I went through so much of it <3
I’ll see u soon!
a giant premise is that i’m leaving money out of the picture, for now, because I think making money out of your art is a step that has to come after finding what art you actually want to make. The discussion on money and how to pay bills as an artist is very important and I don’t believe in the starving artist myth, but it’s a whole thing for another day!