Why Nobody Stops Scrolling When You Post Your Music on Reels, Shorts, and TikTok

POV, you recently released the greatest song you've ever made in your entire life. You went out and shot some beautiful, beautiful cinematic visuals that really live in the world of the song. You got your branding on point. You got this whole rollout planned. You go and you post these videos to social media and you get no views. I knew you were going somewhere bad. It was too good to be true, right? It was. Yep. So you end up blaming the algorithm, blaming your mom, blaming your engineer for a bad mix, blaming whatever, you know, questioning even if the song is even good to begin with. But the reality is it might not even really got a fair shot to get discovered for the reason that we're gonna talk about today. Yeah, I mean, we've worked with tons of artists, right? Who maybe have a good song. They might even have a good piece of content, like a good visual, but the shit is getting doom scrolled past. And often what we find is that they're missing a hook. Okay. That first one to three seconds, as you all know, is super important to make sure that people come in and actually stay and watch your video. And so there's a lot of different types of hooks, okay.

But for today's episode, we're gonna focus on what we're calling the text hook, all right? That's the text that you see on screen at the beginning of a video that is meant to reel you in, okay? Sometimes called a title text. Title text on-screen text. You guys have all seen it when you're scrolling on your reels on your TikToks, it's the first words that you read. It's what sets up the whole video. Yeah, it's literally that easy. And they're the easiest to test, okay? You can literally take the same song, same clip, and try 10 different variations of text on screen to determine what actually might be that thing that hooks people into your video, all right? We did an episode with Matt Hanson, one of the biggest indie artists on the planet, honestly. Put a link to it up there. Super like best kept secret of the indie world. Love Matt. This dude's doing global tours, billions of streams, hundreds of millions of views, and he has absolutely mastered the art of the text hook. That's actually what inspired us, I would say, to, you know, do this episode. We always knew they were important, but on in the episode, he says that him and his manager literally spend hours and hours just planning what those little stupid words at the top of all his videos are gonna say. And now he's touring the globe, you know, doing hundreds of millions of streams.

Exactly. And so I mean, it's something that we even really didn't place a lot of importance on ourselves, right? Like we would shoot the podcast, we determine what clips we wanted to make, and then again, right before we hit post, we'd be like, oh, like da-da-da-da-da, And you know, come up with whatever was on you know, text on screen in the moment. If you guys are doing that, you're cooked. You're literally you've already lost, right? Um, again, the fact that he spends hours and hours and hours just laboring over different variations of these text hooks shows you just how important it is. And if you look at any emerging artists, right, like outside of the Taylor Swifts and Olivia Rodrigo's of the world, any emerging artist that pops up on your feed that has a viral video, they have these. They're there. All of them. Okay. That's how important they are. And again, I already hear you guys in our fucking comment section. Well, why would I mess with my perfectly creative music video visual and put this generic Corny Instagram font, TikTok font on my video.

Because it helps you fucking find people to discover your music. Okay. We're our we're in discovery mode right now, okay? The the visual that's perfectly creative and cinematic, and you don't want to touch that, that's fine. That can also be posted, okay? This isn't an or situation. That can live on your main feed. You've got the reels tab, which lives on a separate tab that you can put these types of discovery reels on. And you've got trial reels that don't even show up anywhere on your page, but are still giving you the data to find out what types of text hooks, what types of visuals, which parts of your song are hitting. Exactly. If we can sum up why text hooks work and why they're so important, it's you kind of alluded to it. It's we're giving context to the viewer. Okay. Because as much as you think your song alone or your music video snippet alone should provide all the context, it just doesn't. No, I wrote down a little thing here. So the song catches their ears. Okay. The visual catches their eyes. Sure.

The text hook gives the context and it gives the brain a reason to give a fuck about the other stuff. Literally, yeah, like text hooks are so valuable that a text hook can literally help prep and prime the viewer for two totally different experiences, right? Prime. That's a good word. Yeah, thank you. Nice. Um, so like if you have a love song, okay, a certain text hook might come at it and prep the viewer to feel hurt. A different type of text hook might prep the viewer to feel hopeful, right? About love, okay? So same song, same even visual, but the way that you set up the experience for the viewer is that text hook. It's that context that you're giving them. And again, can your song itself, hopefully with lyrics that are that mean something, and can the visual by shooting some content that actually looks and feels a certain way, can that achieve some of this? Sometimes for sure. But why would we cut ourselves out of this other layer that we know is working for everybody else? The formula that's working is when people scroll, they see the text first.

They got about one to three seconds to read it. Yep. And if you can position your song to be starting at about the moment that people are done reading that text, that is the viewer experience that we are aiming for here. That is the proven method of capturing someone and having them feel the feeling that we're intending them to feel that belongs in our world and makes them want to experience more. Yeah. So, you know, just to talk about Matt a little bit more, because again, he's just mastered this shit. He's a very big vocalist, right? He's got real big just belty vocals. okay. He said this on the episode. It was like, look, I don't start my videos with that because who wants to scroll and immediately hear someone belting at the top of their lungs. Great. So he uses that one to three second rule where the song is building, and then right as you said, as soon as he thinks that the viewer has finished reading whatever the text on screen is, boom. Don't do that. Don't there's one thing I really want everyone to know about text hooks, right? There's a version of them that is pushing the audience to do something, right?

And that's where I think a lot of us normally go, stream this song's out now, Pre-save that. Out Now, man, it's uh, don't. If I am out now is your text hook. You're cooked. It's not it's a text uh with the opposite of a magnet, like a it's a text to push everyone away. Yeah, exactly. And so the the good artists, the ones that have really, really like gotten this shit, are the ones that are pulling the person in to the experience of watching the video and listening to the song. Like implicitly versus explicitly, right? Literally. So the way that we do that is by again capturing a feeling, making the person on the other end feel seen, feel related to, right? Um, we're not using generic shit, okay? We need to get that out of our heads. Yeah, the generic like out now shit is like putting the cart before the horse. Nobody cares that it's out now because you haven't done these other steps to bring people in to care that it's out now. That's what we're doing with text hooks. We're bringing in cold audiences to just start them down the journey of eventually caring, and then you put can do your, you know, your nice music videos the way you want them.

But the reality is we're building as independent artists, we got to discover new people every day. Absolutely. And the way that these platforms work now is they're showing your video to people that don't follow you. Should I do the TikTokification rant that I've done before? I mean, it's pretty much you talk about this every episode, but sure, go ahead. Let's go. In case you guys are- They might have memorized it by this point, but go ahead. In case you guys are living under a rock and haven't watched an episode. Since TikTok came out in around 2019, 2020, COVID, whatever, they developed an algorithm that basically said, we don't care who you're following, we know what you're interested in more than you do, because we have all your data. We know how long you watch these videos, we know everything about your scroll habits. And so when you go to your for you page, which is now the Reels tab on Instagram, and now every social media has a version of this. When you scroll, you're not seeing shit from people that you follow. You're seeing shit based on your interests and based on what you're spending the most time watching and spending the most time engaging with. So we need to become those people that they are spending the most time with and watching the most.

And so not only are we challenged with the fact that these platforms are serving our content to cold audiences, they're also serving it to audiences with the fucking mute button on. All right. Yeah. The stat I think is uh it's an older stat, but I think it still applies. Between 80 and 90% percent of people scrolling social videos have mute on. You have to unmute. I think mute is on by default. You have to click the little speaker in the bottom right, and like 25% percent of those 80 to 90 are by themselves in private still on mute. It's like the text hook is what gives people a reason to click the little speaker and turn your song actually on. Because you might have the greatest song and the greatest video ever, but if they literally can't hear it without pressing the button, none of it matters. Sometimes I don't think artists like put themselves in the consumer's shoes enough, right? Yeah. Because like we we do this, or we try to do this with our own stuff, right? And really understand like the consumer behavior, okay? Put yourself in their shoes.

You're doom scrolling, right? You're on the couch, some TV's on in the background, your shit on your phone's on mute. Taking a poop. Well, you're on the couch, so hopefully you're not taking a poop off. You don't have the toilet in your couch. I haven't gotten to that level yet. Get on my level. Exactly. No wonder the stains were on the couch. Anyway. Okay. So you know, you're you're scrolling and you did exactly what you said, right? Something finally catches your attention with the with the on-screen text hook with the video, that then makes you we've all done it. We've all hit the hit the sound on button. I need to actually hear what's going on in this thing. Exactly. So, like, just if we think that way, if we just can empathize with the the average like experience of someone on social media, their primary focus is not I'm scrolling social media to find new music. That's not where they're doing that. I'm not saying that that's not where it's happening, but that's not the primary purpose. I like telling people behavior. I like telling people to try to next time you doom scroll, like we can actually turn such a pointless, mind-numbingly horrible time-wasting activity into something beneficial.

If you're thinking about your own habits and what you're reacting to as you're doom scrolling, now we can kind of apply that information to ourselves as content creators. For sure. So let's talk about a few of the ways that you know too many artists are getting this wrong. Okay. Oh, there's plenty. There's there's let's just focus on a few though. Number one, I think no hook. We mentioned. Just no text hook at all. Yeah. If you're not doing it, my videos are so cool and artistic that I can just post it. No. Good luck. Yeah. Yeah. So that's that's number one. Number two is like the generic promo side, right? Where it's just people, their mental spam filter immediately goes off. Like, I'm being sold to that I don't know this artist. They're trying to get me the stream their song clearly. Fuck this shit. I'm out. Right. Number three, too broad, okay? There, there is like the niches in the riches, the riches in the niches, whatever the the saying is, right? If you can make your text hook like make someone feel like that was meant only for them. Like, oh my God, how did they know that I just broke up with my boyfriend and still am stalking his Instagram page today, right?

Or whatever, like I think people don't know how many people there are in the world, too. Like there's so many billions of people. Like, you don't have to, you don't be scared to not hit the algorithm because your title text wasn't I made a love song. You know what I mean? Like you could make it something as specific as like play this in the Taco Bell drive-thru at 2 a.m. And you'd be surprised how many people be like, Hey, I was at Taco Bell drive-thru at 2 a.m. today. Well, and that's where the testing comes back into play. You can test this shit. You can get real specific and do like 10. You could try Taco Bell, Wendy's, McDonald's. Maybe you have a bunch of Taco Bell fans. I don't fucking know, and you don't either until you test, right? Experiment. So, you know, that that's where I think some of that comes into play, right? Get specific with the title Text. And then there's a few, like, I think you you handle a lot of our posting, and or at least have obviously historically. So, like, what have you seen on just some of the technical things, right? Like with the actual posting of its of itself.

Automatically, uh, the super long just paragraph plus of text. Again, we have one to three seconds to capture attention, probably less than that. So people should be able to read the entire text hook in that amount of time. I think it can be done in as few as three or four words, but at most, we're talking about a normal length sentence. You know, what I mean, like it shouldn't span more than two rows of text. Yeah, and and I mean, there's obviously you've all seen like super long text on screen work before, but again, we're trying to play, we're trying to play the odds here, right? And the odds. are like the whole point of this post is for you to read the entire one. sure. Try that too. That's just not what we're doing. I mean, try that too. I don't know. sure. Sure. Maybe. Yeah. But try everything. But yeah, so so long typically, again, we talk about like mental spam or mental scroll filter, right? That's just like fuck this. I'm this too much. No, I'm not trying to study right now. They need to be able to get the whole context and be in that mode, prepared to receive that feeling from your song in that first, let's call it one to two seconds.

I'm done with one to three. I'm ready to just call it one second. You got one sec. Can we officially just move to no no you got one we're not there? Two seconds. Okay, two seconds to grab them. So if you can't read that in two seconds, it's too long. It might be one, actually. And slow if you're like a fast reader and you're above average intelligence, we need to slow it down a little bit. Third grade reading level, I think is a good benchmark. Um, and then the other place I was gonna go to is like actual placement of the text. Yeah, you know, you typically see it toward like the top third, because if you think about when you're scrolling, um, they're coming up from the bottom, right? So as you're scrolling it up, that text, if it's toward the top, but not too far to the top, because some of it gets cut off. IPhones have the little notch at the top, just kind of top third, nice and clear, contrasting. Don't put white text on a snowy background, shit like that, obviously. And then not too, you know, in the middle should be the meat of the interesting like part of the video, what's actually going on. And be careful with that bottom third where the profile picture, the beginning of the caption, the likes and comments on the side go.

Just a nice center upper third is where these text hooks should go. Yeah, I mean, literally, there was a past guest of ours. Um, I don't want to, you know, call them out, but uh, they were posting to social media, and too many of their text hooks were like below below like behind the caption, right? Like it was I couldn't read them. And I I'd send a screenshot and I was like, hey, bro, like, you know, in case you didn't know, like, might want to slide it up so that it's it's in frame, essentially, and not obstructed by other things that are within the platform, right? Also, pro tip, just something I've learned from editing videos, like part of your videos get cut off every time you upload to I think all the platforms, like the edges literally aren't even there, even when you go to full screen. Yeah. So I don't know, at least I edit in final cut. I have a thing called like safe zones, where it's like this whole outer edge of the video. I'm not putting anything important in in that outer edge, just to make sure. Another thing I just thought of too is people that do the text hook that disappears in like one second or like five point five seconds, you know what I mean? Uh you can control how long your text hook is on the screen.

You gotta give them enough time to read it. Yeah, I mean, if they can't read the hook, then it might as well just not exist. There's no hook. Like if it's hidden or too fast, like it's not doing anything. So, what we did is essentially we've noticed like 12 particular buckets that we've uh seen 12 jobs that text hooks try to accomplish. Like what journey we're trying to take the viewer down, giving them little names. We would like to share them with you now and maybe give a little example of each of them. Yeah, I mean, we're really nerds about this shit. We love this shit. Like we really the fact that we like we spent so much time like thinking about this, like that Matt episode was like mind blowing for me, right? We're like, we got to do a whole episode. We knew it was important, but it was like, oh shit, like this is actually what makes videos work. Yes, like seriously. Hey, Henry here. Sorry to interrupt this podcast, but there's something I have to address. As many of you know here at one more time, we love doing live music reviews. We love hearing the music from our community and providing helpful feedback that is hopefully helping you further your career. But if there's one piece of advice that we are tired of giving, it's that your master is too quiet.

We shouldn't have to turn up the volume for your song just to have to turn it back down for the next song. That's not good. But Henry, good mastering engineers are so hard to find and so expensive. Enter DistroKid's newest tool called Mixia. I master music myself, and while I don't think AI mastering will ever replace the quality you get from an experienced human mastering engineer, it's pretty damn good. And if you already distribute through DistroKid, you can now master unlimited tracks using Mixia. And if you don't, we have a link right here. You can sign up for DistroKid with 30% off, upload unlimited music yearly for an insanely cheap price. Humans perceive louder as better. It's dumb, but it's true. Use Mixia for a clean master, and you won't sound weak on that playlist. Let's get back to the episode. So getting right into them, the first one relatability. I mean, these are the text hooks that immediately make you feel like, oh, I've always thought that, you know, but I've never like heard anyone say it out loud. Like we could relate to it in a weird way that catches our attention. So an example would be this is for everyone who rereads that text before they hit send. Yeah.

Now all of a sudden we're like, oh shit, I did that the other day. I was like, ah, should I send this? And now I'm relating to the guy. I'm Like he kind of gets me. It's all about making the viewer feel seen, right? And so, you know, second one, curiosity gap. Okay. This is where you're gonna state something that then later on in the video, you're going to deliver on, right? It's like a payoff. It's gonna exactly you're gonna have a payoff in the video that is related to this text hook. So I mean it could be something as simple as like the bridge changes everything. Like keep listening, right? Just wait, wait for the last part of the verse. Yeah. The last line ties it all together. Exactly. So some little foreshadowing of something that they're gonna get later on in the in the video, or in this case in the song. Number three, story and POV. I literally started this episode with POV. Yeah, I don't know who caught that. Yeah, I don't know. You mean hopefully we literally put a text hook if you guys are listening on audio. You missed out. We're gonna edit in a text hook on that. But yeah, the point of these is, you know, you POV driving home from Taco Bell at 2 a.m. just to this is gonna be a Taco Bell heavy episode, I guess.

But you've all seen the POV text hooks um story is everything, you know, POV. They're like the most tried and true, honestly. Yeah. They're probably the, they're the oldest one that I can think of. The most hardened perhaps for sure. Stood the test of time. Yeah, I mean, because it it literally all it's doing is it's mentally putting them in whatever place that you describe. It's just establishes the perspective. Exactly. Number four, the emotional gut punch. Oh. Okay. This is where you're gonna pull on someone's heartstrings, all right? Whether in a sad way, happy way, joyous, scared. can pulling on heartstrings be happy? I don't know, but you're thinking of that as like a negative feeling. Yeah, okay, true. So you're gonna hit some sort of emotion, okay? This is like super feeling heavy type of text hook, okay? So an example might be nobody warns you that healing feels like missing them, okay? So it's like, oh shit. Thought healing was supposed to feel good. That's right. Ouch. You know what I mean? Like, that's the kind of like that's the kind of like reactions you want to get out of people. They can be positive as well. Yeah, like, oh my god, that's the that's the nicest thing I've ever heard.

Oh, that makes you feel so happy about the world. Like, oh, this puppy is reuniting with this war veterans. I don't know. That's a good one. Thank you. Um, next one is the share bait. So you've all seen the text hooks that is like send this to blank. We're just encouraging people right off the bat to click the share button, which gets us out into the algorithm. Matt Hanson, perfect example. If you go on his page, he's found a text hook that works. He's been doing it a lot since then, because it literally hits every time. Send this to the person that you love, or send this to the person you want to marry. Yep. Go find one of Matt Hanson's posts that has that title text and look at how many shares those posts have. It is mind blowing. Well, and look at how many videos he made with that exact same text hook. For sure. No. Because again, doubling down. Y'all, you can make your life harder, but we're trying to make it easier. So if you find something that works, and that goes back again to the testing, you can test this with 10 different ideas of who someone should send it to. Because you don't fucking know who they should send it to.

You might think you know, but maybe give 10 tries. 99% of you don't know what text hook is gonna work for you yet. Like you're not in that camp. Exactly. So you're not that guy, pal. Send this to your best friend, send this to your mom, send this to the love of your life. Like, like whatever. Try 10 different versions of like who might should they send this to? Send this to someone who passed away who you still have their number for. That's a really weird one. But okay, moving right along. I just came up with something. Okay. That's kind of touching. Hey, if that's what gets you through, man. You never heard of people that like call, you know, people that have passed and leave voicemails on it's nice. It's nice. Move on. Okay, number six. I'm sorry. Number six, engagement bait, right? Um, similar to share bait, but the goal of this type of uh of text hook is gonna drive comments, right? Um, so one that I've seen a lot is like, what genre is this, even right? And so then it's like people are like, oh, well, clearly it's gonna be ambiguous. Let me listen. Oh, and then I have a fucking opinion. Let me drop it in in the comment section, right?

There's a lot of different versions of this, but I've seen that one a lot. Yeah, I've seen like, you know, should I do A or B for the cover art or A or B for the chorus? Or do you like beat A or beat C or those maybe are less discovery, to be fair. Um, you might have to have some, but but maybe not at the same time. Again, try it. Bottom line is try this shit, like, try everything. We just don't know. Absolutely. And comments are also driving us further into the algorithm. Speaking of comments, please like, comment, and subscribe to the channel. If you're getting value about text hooks, we're doing episodes about shit that no one thought you should be doing episodes about. We're doing a whole textbook episode. Then you watch it and you're like, god damn, why have I not listened to more text hook episodes? And we look at our data, guys. 75% of you are not subscribed. And I know you found I know more than 25% of you have gotten value out of this. Click the click the little button. Just click it. Just just give it a little. Click it. You mean a lot to us. Appreciate it.

Anyway, moving on to number seven. This is the genre and sound alike anchors. You've all seen these. Yep. If Phoebe Bridgers and Gucci Mane had a baby, this is the music that person would make. Um, you know, if Michael Jackson was born in 2007, um, figure out like the it the word anchor is because we are establishing something that is already familiar to people, right? So we're not just brand new artist, brand new sound. We let people feel comfortable by establishing something that they're familiar with, but then introducing our spin and our twist. I'm gonna go ahead and call you guys out because I've talked to enough of y'all. This one makes you nervous. This one makes you a little bit hesitant. You don't want to compare yourself. The comparison part. You don't want to put any other artists in the mix that might be the funniest thing is asking an artist who they sound like. Yeah. I don't sound like anybody, bro. And I'm sorry. I don't sound like anybody.

Um yes, you do. I'm sorry, respectfully. Please get the fuck over that because this shit works like a goddamn charm. And again, if you're watching our show, you're trying to grow your audience. You're trying to grow your revenue, right? And this is a way to do it, okay? Yeah, I mean, we have a free resource called Nine Ways to Steal Fans from Popular Artists in Your Genre. If you can't name a popular artist in your genre, maybe not like Taylor Swift popular, but you just you have no grasp on what you're even doing. I don't know how you can understand what your world is. That means you don't know who your fans are because you don't know who else they listen to. Are you gonna find your fans you don't know who they are? Yeah. Yeah, so moving on. Number eight, hot take, all right. This is a classic one, it's just trigger warning, right? You're gonna say some shit on screen text hook that's gonna get a lot of people riled up, right? Um, a lot of people riled up in support of whatever hot take that you're saying. And a lot of people riled up, more likely probably to hate on your opinion and disagree with your hot take. Uh, but equally important, equally valuable to the success of the video.

And again, if the video does well, more chances of people listening to your song, liking your song, becoming fans. It's been a tough one for us, man. We talk about all the time. Like we need to have more just bold claims, you know. Yeah, we're pussies. Oh, but I mean, we do these episodes for ourselves sometimes, guys. Like this is like a big thing. Just reminding ourselves how important text hooks are. We need to have hot takes and the hot takes is important. We need to have bold claims. We need to master text hooks. Yes. Number nine is uh nostalgia. Who doesn't? I mean, Hollywood has been capitalizing on this for years, just punching us, and then it's the member berries. Spider-Man 10. It's the member berries from South Park. Um, but it really does work because we all like to remember a time, you know, that was nice. And I don't want to say the best time of our lives, implying that it's behind us. But an example could be like, you know, those boring old summers, you know. Remember those?

Who would have guessed those were the good old days? That was kind of long. You can shorten it up. Or like, you know, I'm bringing back mixtape Lil Wayne. Okay, that's better. That was tight. I don't like the first one that much. I don't think that fit in our two second criteria that we established. Oh my God. You scrolled. I mentally scrolled you, bro. The point is, nostalgia is powerful. And if you can bring people back to a time where they were, I don't want to say like happier, but kind of like, or just the time when they're happy, not happier. Um, you'll get some engagement. They'll like that. Absolutely. Number 10, aspiration and identity, okay. This is again, this is like the mecca of making the viewer feel seen and really getting them to latch on to some aspiration that they might hold, right? So, an example could be this is for anyone building something that nobody believes in yet, okay? That's for the builders, right? Like the people that are grinding without the recognition right now. They're working hard, trying to make this shit happen. No one's seeing them. Like that makes me feel seen.

You know what I mean? This is for blank. I mean, that's just like ultimately. How can you not at least be given a chance? That is just pure finding your tribe. They're gonna at least get through that. And then if that thing that you write doesn't connect with them, that's when they scroll. But if it does, that's when you got them. Yep. Number 11 is the pattern interrupt. We also were uh toying with the idea of like the bait and switch. These are almost gimmicky sometimes, right? This is like a my least favorite, honestly. But works, they can work, and honestly, still worth a shot. This is like, you know, establishing some type of premise and then kind of flipping it on its head, right? You establish an expectation, and you thought it was gonna be like this, but it's actually like this. Yeah. Oh, I'm a magician, houdini with the shit, man. Yep, yep. And then last but not least, number 12, direct command, right? This is you know, this the like send this to your, you know, to the love of your life is kind of a little bit quasi direct command, but it's just for the share bait. Um telling someone to do something This is just,

Yeah, like come back to this when you can't sleep, right? And so again, the person, the idea is that the person viewing that is already maybe like up at 2 a.m. and can't sleep. So they don't need to come back to it. They're like, oh, I'm already there, I'm gonna watch this. Or they see it in the middle of the day, and then that night they're trying to go to sleep and they can't may remember that video, like, what was that song? I'm gonna go for trying to find that song. Yeah, or they just haven't been able to sleep this week. So it again, it resonates with them, you know what I mean? All this is about connecting with the viewer on the other side of this shit, man. Like, that's what we're we're in the attention-seeking business. And the way that you get attention is by making that person like see something that relates to them. You know what I mean? Again, either in a way that like they identify with personally or in a way that they want to fucking argue with, to be honest. I think we actually flipped it in the uh internal episode we did reacting to music marketers' advice. We're not in the attention business anymore. We're in the feeling business. Oh, trying to get you to feel. Feel biz.

I coined that. Next time you see a guru on social media say that, just let them know. Send them Henry's way. He's got something to say. They got it from me. So we pulled a few examples of these buckets working in the wild. These are independent artists. Like that in the wild. These are independent. That's an independent artist in the wild. Natural habitat. Yeah. The algorithm is their natural habitat. These are all independent artists who are just absolutely crushing it, and pretty much all of their text hooks fall into these buckets. So this first one is M Byhold, if you haven't seen her, absolutely dominating this post right here. Definitely fits into the story POV bucket. More on the story side. She doesn't type POV, but starts with high M and just gets into stories about her life. You feel like you're getting to know her. The song is playing in the background. Yeah, and just the first thing that was on screen was about her having to move back in to her parents' house. Immediately.

Everyone knows someone who's done that or they had to do it. Yes. So it's immediately relatable. So a lot of these fit into multiple buckets, by the way. Well, I think they all fit back into relatability, bro. I mean, or a lot, I think. It's like all about like again, making that viewer feel like that shit was for them. Even if it's something they want to argue with, it's like it was still for me because they know I fucking hate that shit. In a roundabout way, relatability is a very yeah job. I don't know. That's what I think. This next one is Sophia James walking back through campus after having just graduated in June. I mean, if that is not some nostalgia for you, just going back through, remembering how I was at college, and boom, the song is playing. We're all like remembering back when we were in college and just feeling good. We're having a good time, and there's a great soundtrack playing. I miss college so much, man. College was a good time. Now I have two children. Go to sleep by 11. Hold on one second. And of course, our boy Nic D, hold on one second immediately, right?

First one second of this post says, hold on one second. This is a direct command. Yep. He's saying, hold on. So like we kind of freeze for a second. How did we do this? Well, there's editing how he got into the house that day. Oh my god. He didn't actually get on the house. So cool though. But it is cool. But like this is what I mean also about like creativity, bro. So simple. Standing on your house. You can Shoot this in like 10 minutes. For sure. With no budget. This is your rental house. He doesn't even own it probably at that point. It's like early in his career. He's Airbnb or something. Might no, it might be just literally a year of long-term rental. You know, building no equity. This is monthly joint right here. I don't know. But yeah, the point is, you know, tells the viewer to do something in the first second. So they kind of pause for a second, gives the video a chance to develop, gives the song a chance to develop. He's doing something goofy, right? Getting on top of a house. Um, and so we're just along for the ride at that point. And we get a chance to hear the song, and if we like it, we're interested. We're clicking his profile, we're going for more.

And so, as you guys know, we are all about making your lives easier because this is just another thing. Like, I can hear some of y'all being like, God damn, like another thing we gotta like become experts in and study and test. short answer yes. Yeah, short answer yes. But to help you all, we came up with 456. How many text 456? What? Text hooks for musicians, okay, that you all can pick pick from, uh, plug and play. Some of them are ones you can literally just straight up copy and paste that might work for any type of artist. Some we have like places where you can kind of insert more about like your song, more about your artist brand, more about your story and kind of your your vibe, right? But it's going to be really life-changing, I think, as far as just like really pumping this shit out and then using a bunch of these to test to figure out like what the hell will work. Yep, I built a very intuitive little web page that is filterable by the 12 buckets that we talked about. If you're aiming for a certain goal, it's filterable by vibe.

And a lot of them, yeah, are fill in the blank, fill in your own context. And a lot of them you can actually hit the copy button. There is a copy button, and then you can paste directly onto your posts as if you couldn't type one sentence. But this is not magic though. This isn't like all of these are gonna make your posts go viral immediately. We might have implied that in the marketing. That's just kind of business. But it is a shortcut and it is jump off points, and it is hopefully gonna get the gears turning. And just even the fact that we made this hopefully indicates to y'all how important we really know that this stuff is for getting your music discovered. I mean, that is that's what we're out here doing. You know, we're we're trying to make careers with our music. That's not happening if we're not getting discovered and people aren't hearing the music. Absolutely. So go to one more time.fm slash four five six hooks. 456 hooks. We're gonna link it in the description of this video, pin it in a comment. Probably right here, right now, visually. Yeah. text hook style. Again, this is a free resource. Wait, you say free?

This is a free 99 resource. Are you not charging anything, Ben? No, because again, like this is just I slaved over this. We're not charging anything. And everyone appreciates that. Um, but yeah, I mean, this is it's so important. It's so important for you guys. So to take action on this, right? Because we're all about like, okay, this is kind of lives in theoretical land. What can we do now to apply this to our own shit? This is the homework This is the homework assessment. This is the 10 hook challenge, okay? So as soon as you get done with this episode, you're gonna pick one song. Okay, could be old, could be new, unreleased, doesn't matter. Pick one song, then you're gonna pick 10 hooks from the 456 list, right? Try not to have them all come from one bucket because we wanna, again, we want to have some variety. Yep, because you might find that your hot takes uh hooks are the ones that like smack, and that's what your audience is wanting from you. It's never it's never the thing you expect. Exactly. So so maybe try, you know, 10 from varying uh buckets, okay? You're gonna post them.

Ideally, you know, post them to main feed if you're comfortable. If you're not, post them to trial reels, post them to your alt accounts on TikTok or whatever. Um, but testing, testing, testing is the fucking uh name of the game in this in this case, okay. Then we're gonna track the metrics and we're gonna track the data to see what actually worked. We're gonna look at likes, comments, views, shares, saves, uh, link clicks, okay. All of these metrics are important for different reasons. Me personally, I love to track link clicks and see which videos take people from watch video to then click the link in your bio, aka ideally going to stream your song, watch your music video, whatever. Because that's the hardest thing to achieve. It's the hardest thing to achieve, and I think that's ultimately that's what everyone I think is trying to do here. Like you're posting content because you want people to go, you know, elsewhere. Of course, there's money to be made on social media, but y'all want your music to be heard, and that's the metric I've found. That and shares, because again, that means someone like shares is good. Shared this shit to somebody else.

And like that, I love that. Shares is good, but if you get someone to like a Spotify, Apple Music, a Bandcamp, your Even page, whatever it is, uh, that's a real warm lead. Like someone genuinely likes your music and they're trying to be able to easily listen to it again soon. Absolutely. So again, free 456 text hooks, one more time.fm slash 456 hooks, uh, pinned in the comment in the description. Get to fucking hooking, my guys. Get to working. Appreciate y'all. Appreciate y'all.