Robby Morris, Secretly Group

💭 Thoughts on the Blood Brothers, elongating and deepening consumption, and amplifying what’s already powerful about the art itself.

Robby Morris is a music industry professional who has worked at a variety of independent labels. Currently he’s the VP of Creative Marketing at Secretly Group (Dead Oceans, Jagjaguwar, Secretly Canadian) where he oversees content and creative direction, partnerships, events and marketing strategy. He previously worked in A&R at Matador Records, radio promo at Beggars Group and publishing at Domino. He grew up in the Bay Area but has lived most of his life in NYC.

🎯 Current focus

Those of us working in music and media keep hearing that success requires making everything shorter, flatter and more digestible. Engagement metrics push us toward content that grabs attention but rarely holds it. We’re pushed to present art, music, photography with the same rules that a brand is using to sell a product.

Fortunately, there’s been a lot of great writing and thinking advocating against and resisting this, and there’s some hopeful signs that things are swinging in the other direction.

But since we’re very much living through this right now, I’m focused on finding “roundness” in those flat surfaces; ways to elongate and deepen consumption on the platforms that we have.

As an example, I love how Sam Youklis utilizes Instagram video to showcase moments of stillness and humanity. At first glance they might appear as standard travel photography that we might mindlessly scroll through. Instead, he flips over to video - the ‘favored’ format - to capture these moments that actually ask us to pause, to linger and pay a bit more attention. It’s a slight bend of the platform's usual pace and a more rewarding engagement within a space typically resistant to it.

🎶 Blood Brothers Reunion Shows

I recently caught the Blood Brothers reunion tour. Between the ages of about 14 and 17, they were without a doubt my favorite band. I probably saw them 15 times and rinsed all their records. They were a gateway to a post-hardcore genre and scene, and they had a fascinating trajectory as they came to be vanguards of a specific sound (and look!), then got tangled up in a weird miasma of major labels. A fun time to be a fan.

However, when I saw their last reunion run in 2014, it just didn’t hit the same way. The magic felt lost. Maybe I was dismissive of the whole nostalgia thing. Or maybe I’d told myself I’d moved on.

So, I went to the last show with similar expectations but instead found it absolutely exhilarating. The band was as incredible as I’d seen them the first time around and this was totally evident in their performance and how insane the crowd was.

It was nice to connect with music in this way again. It also reminded me that taste doesn’t evolve linearly or need to follow a specific path. It doesn't need to grow, but instead maybe it rotates, or spirals outward.

🏃‍♂️ Houston Marathon

I’m running the Houston Marathon on January 19th, which will be my 10th marathon. This training cycle hasn’t been the smoothest, replete with injuries and the residual effects of the holiday season, so I’m seeing if I can approach this one differently. In the past, I’d been fixated on optimizing every run, constantly chasing faster speeds, analyzing all the data and putting a lot of pressure on the process. What I’ve always loved about running is its measurable markers of success: hard work resulting in quantifiable outcomes. But that’s not always the case. Life gets in the way, your body gets older and crankier, or you can just have a bad day.

So for this race, I’ve been dialing down the rigor, keeping things a bit messier, trying to lighten the obsession, putting a little more faith in my experience and going into it embracing the imperfection and the unknown. Wish me luck!

🧠 Retraining your attention span

My favorite way to consume content these days is slowly! There’s just too many new albums, newsletters to read, videos to watch, podcasts to listen to, and that scroll that just keeps going! I’m looking to retrain my attention span.

🧊 Unfinished Furniture Cubes

I have the cubes from UnfinishedFurnitureOfWilmington.com all over my apartment. Someone once described them as Donald Judd-esque, which might be pushing it, but these are the light upgrade to your Ikea Kallax. Plus there's something delightful about ordering furniture from a URL that reads like it's from 2002.

🗣️ Word of mouth

One thing I can't live without, and why? Word of mouth. Coming off of year end season and going into awards nominations, there’s been lots of "bests" to pore through, a lot of it saying mostly the same things. But I’m finding that the things that I’m often sticking with come from conversations with friends, or things I just can’t stop hearing chatter about. Today a colleague put me onto a long list of records from last year that I’m not sure appeared in any major lists or publications.

I'm someone who suffers from FOBO (fear of better options), which leads to a lot of time wasted looking at reviews, lists, maps, etc. But I keep learning that the best discoveries come from friends you trust (and sometimes the ones you don't!).

📣 Amplifying what’s already powerful about the art itself

I’ve spent a lot of time working on clever or unconventional ways to market music, and I’ve been part of some awesome—and a lot of goofy—moments. One thing I’ve learned, and often return to, is that no matter how flashy the campaign, how silly the stunt, or how compelling the story, the best way to make music connect is kinda obvious: it’s got to be good.

'Good' is certainly subjective, but it becomes very easy to talk about a record when an artist is making songs that people want to return to over and over. You can't trick people into caring about something; they've got to actually want to care.

This might feel like a glib response, especially as the walls are closing in on the industry and just how difficult it is for musicians to get by, but I’m standing by it! The campaigns that get it right aren’t just clever; they amplify what’s already powerful about the art itself.

Follow Robby on Instagram & Linkedin and learn more about SG here.

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