It benefits me to discover who you are as much as it might benefit you to have someone write about your work. That's the idea I built the Can't Colonize the Vibe Artist Submission page around. Getting press can feel elusive for musicians. There's rarely an obvious way to know who wants to hear from you, or what makes someone decide to write about your work, and I've spent years working in communications while making things of my own, so I know that feeling from both sides of it. Press isn't always looking for you. Sometimes it finds you on its own, but usually you have to make yourself known, and I never understood why that had to be so hard.
So I made an obvious door. If you're making music in Philadelphia or the surrounding area, you can tell me who you are, what you're working on, and what you have coming up. No hunting for the right email address, no guessing at the perfect pitch, no waiting and hoping I stumble onto your work eventually. When I launched it, I thought I might get five submissions. Instead, musicians started using it almost immediately, and within the first week, I had more to work through than I'd expected to see in months.
That volume pointed me toward a second problem the form quietly solves. I'm always telling musicians to build email lists because there's value in having a direct relationship with the people who want to keep up with your work, and every artist who submits to CCTV can opt into that same relationship with me. The more people join, the more useful it becomes to everyone in it. Every person on that list is someone I can introduce to the next musician I write about. The audience isn't just following my work anymore. It belongs to the artists I cover just as much as it belongs to me.
And then another door opened that I hadn't planned for at all. Writers started reaching out because they wanted to contribute. Suddenly, I wasn't only looking at a growing list of musicians whose stories I could tell. I was hearing from people who wanted to help tell them. That's made me think differently about what Can't Colonize the Vibe can grow into, and how opening the platform to more people might allow us to document far more of the Philadelphia music scene than I ever could on my own.
Music will always be at the center of Can't Colonize the Vibe. What I want to build around it is an ecosystem, one made up of the people who make this city's music scene possible. I want a network strong enough that when I'm made aware of opportunities, I can share them with the growing list of musicians the submission form has allowed me to build. And as I strive to open more doors, I want that ecosystem to stretch beyond musicians too, toward the photographers, videographers, graphic designers, and other creatives who help make this scene possible. What I'm really building toward is a space where these artists can engage with each other, where the people on that list aren't just names I'm keeping track of but a community that can find and support itself. And I want it to work across disciplines and genres too, introducing people to artists making work they never knew existed.
For now, I'm starting with an open door, and I'm curious how many more doors it leads to. If you're making music in Philadelphia or nearby, visit the Artist Submission page and put your work on my radar.