Sorley is one of the breakout artists of the U.K. underground scene in the last few years.

In January 2021, Sorley challenged himself to make 30 tracks in 30 days. To hold himself accountable, he uploaded what he made every evening to Soundcloud. He then documented the experience on his Instagram, sharing the highs and lows of the creative process.

Here's how he rolled it out on social media.

The Announcement

On January 3rd, 2021 Sorley announced a brand new challenge for himself on Instagram, declaring he wanted to push his creative boundaries and grow as an artist. More importantly, he wanted to build habits and discipline.

“New year, new challenge.

Starting from tomorrow, I have set myself a goal to make a track a day for the next 30 days. To keep myself accountable, I’ll be uploading whatever I make to my SoundCloud every night.

I want to do this to challenge myself, push my creative boundaries, experiment and grow as an artist.”

The track names and artwork

To upload 30 tracks to Soundcloud, you also need 30 track names and 30 pieces of artwork.

You can see the development of the artwork in the image below.

In the first week, Sorley started with seven different colours on a vinyl template. By week three, we're being to see the development of all the artwork matching up with the name of the song. Week four and the creative juices are definitely flowing.

All of the images were created on Canva.

How Sorley shared to Instagram

Sorley posts a picture of himself, hiding the artwork from his feed. The key to this post is the photo is 4x5 in dimension, matching the image of all the artwork.

Unique personal content always wins. Sorley worked this out a few years ago by looking at Hot Since 82 and Patrick Topping's social content. It is the individual lifestyle posts that build engagement and ultimately build the audience.

As for the other posts, Sorley created a carousel with audio clips of the tracks over the artwork every Sunday. This post summarised the week of music, helping drive traffic to his Soundcloud, where he was uploading the tracks every evening.

By sharing the clips and getting feedback from his friends and audience, Sorley finished tracks that he was not that keen on because of their reactions. Music is subjective. Click Publish.

Listen to all 30 tracks on Sorley's Soundcloud.

Sorley's Instagram Strategy - "Create a personal diary"

To get all the information for this article, I spoke to Loui on Zoom.

One quote that stood out was how he uses his Instagram as a personal diary. All of these landmarks mentioned in this newsletter are a measure of growth and progress. Our generation can use Instagram this way to show where we were and what we were doing on certain days.

Here is the YouTube video Sorley created answering all of the questions from his fans at the end of the challenge.

To build habits in the studio and on social media, maybe you need to set yourself a challenge.

See you next week.

Andrew at Socially Sound 🔊