New Gen X Music Side Hustle: 216K Views, 400+ New Followers (Day 45)

Back in August I told you about a new side hustle I was starting.

The main focus wasn't whether it would make money, but rather that I just wanted to have fun. Here's that post if you missed it.

One of the big reasons I'm doing this is that I want to show other Gen Xers it's not too late to start, and that there is so much opportunity out there.

It's still fun and there have been some nice and not so nice surprises along the way.

The platform I almost skipped is now my best one.

And my most-viewed TikTok so far is a Loudness cassette I figured very few music geeks like me would care about.

Day 45 of 60. Every day I film a short about what's in my tape and CD collection. Three quarters of the way in, so I pulled the scoreboard again.

Some of it surprised me. Some of it was a bit of a downer.

Heads up: each platform reports a different window, so this isn't perfectly apples to apples.

A few extras: 502 TikTok profile views, 38,647 three-second views and 3,125 one-minute views on Facebook, and 98.4% of Instagram views came from people who don't follow me yet.

That's over 216,000 views and 400+ new followers across four platforms.

At first, I wasn't planning on doing TikTok.

I tried it on a whim. It's always risky to add more and divide your focus, but I'm really glad I did. It's actually turned out to be my best channel, because it seems to be the one I get the most engagement on at this point.

1.5K comments on short videos about old tapes and CDs. It's interesting.

Instagram is slowly starting to pick up some steam.

I only added it because once a video was ready in Riverside, it was stupid easy to schedule it to TikTok and Instagram too. Why the heck not. It went from 139 followers at day 30 to 182 now, and almost every view comes from people who don't follow me yet.

Slow steam is still steam.

YouTube started out pretty good.

Then it tapered a little bit and hasn't been getting the results. It's flatlined a little bit over the last 30 days. I want to start creating a little bit of longer, more traditional YouTube content besides Shorts. I have some ideas on how to do that.

Hopefully I can fix that, and hopefully it'll pick back up.

The video with the most views on TikTok was unexpected.

It was about an album from a band called Loudness. The cassette was Thunder in the East. At first I was thinking I was only going to get traffic on some of the more well-known albums from back in those days. Interestingly enough, this one got 9.9K views on TikTok so far.

Just goes to show you never know what's going to hit.

The video with the most overall views is Van Halen's Fair Warning. It had the second most views on TikTok, but overall it had the most views of all my videos, at 24,400 on Instagram.

The big names still pull. The weird ones keep you humble.

Consistency beats overthinking.

I committed to showing up daily. Not perfect. Daily. The recent videos are tighter than the early ones, with better hooks, actions in the right place, and more precision.

You get better by doing the work. Waiting until you feel ready doesn't count.

Don't lock yourself into the original platform plan, either.

I wanted to focus on YouTube and Facebook. TikTok was a whim. Instagram was a why-the-heck-not. Right now those two are where the momentum is.

That "fuck it, just start" energy is the same thing I wrote about back in August.

Social platforms are rented land.

I've written about this before in the quiet AI side hustle piece and in Remember Tom / the YouTube migration blueprint. When you publish on social, you rent space. When you build an email list, you own the connection.

My music project's email list is at 13 subscribers. That's still very low, which is not cool, but I’m keeping it real for you. It's the reason email is the focus for the last 15 days.

I'm hoping some of my new offer ideas will help me get more email signups.

I'm going to tweak my offer and run a campaign to promote it. I'm also going to start a reboot of my music radio show (aka podcast), so hopefully that will help with email subscribers. And the longer YouTube videos give people one more reason to stick around.

Same goal for all of it. Move people off rented land and onto something I own.

I trying to monetize right out of the gate on the email side.

One quiet Beehiiv feature most people skip: paid newsletter recommendations. After someone subscribes, you can recommend other newsletters. A lot of those slots are paid. So you can get paid to recommend newsletters in the Beehiiv network while you're still building.

That's a first monetization path even if you don't think you have a product yet.

If you're hunting for side hustle ideas, that's a quiet one. Any creator can do it. Big following or starting from scratch (which just takes longer).

If you want the tool I'm using for that, here's Beehiiv through my affiliate link ($).

And if you want to get a list up fast, I've got a Fast Track that walks you through getting something running in a couple hours: Newsletter Fast-Track Checklist.

That's an affiliate link on Beehiiv, so I get paid if you sign up. I'd point you there either way.

Keep posting daily.

Keep tightening the hooks.

Start the longer YouTube videos.

Push the offer and the radio show toward email.

And don't get down about follower counts when the views are teaching you something else.

If you're a Gen Xer wondering whether it's too late to start something, it isn't.

Day 45. Still pressing on.

Have a good one,

Corey

P.S. Want to follow along for the last 15 days of the series? I post every day on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. Come say hi.