Thank you

More than five hundred of you subscribed to my Youtube channel in the last two weeks.

Damn.

I want to actually sit with that instead of skating past it. Five hundred is a real number of real people, and I've played rooms with fewer.

The official music video for BEST OF ALL TIME went up on August 21. It's the biggest performance piece we've made: bold fashion, wardrobe changes, choreography, all of it built to feel closer to a live show than to a story. 

We made it to move people. Then you watched it, and five hundred of you did the thing that actually costs something, which is deciding you want to see the next one.

WHAT A SUBSCRIBE ACTUALLY IS

I don't know how each of you found this video. Somebody sent you a link, or it autoplayed, or we put it in front of you, because that's part of how this works now.  And I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

But nobody can buy the half second that comes after. That's the part where a person decides they want to see the next one. Five hundred of you made that call on your own, and that half second is the only piece of this that means anything to me.

It's why I'm writing this instead of posting a graphic with a number on it.

WHAT I ACTUALLY MAKE OVER THERE

My Youtube channel isn't a place where we dump videos and leave.

It's where the performance lives. It's where my videos premiere, where the Behind The Scenes clips happen, where you get to see what a song looks like after it leaves the studio – as it gets a wardrobe and a camera and twenty people pointed at it. 

If you only ever hear my records on streaming, you're getting half of it. The half I can carry in a suitcase.

And I say that as somebody who spent years being told her music was a niche.

THE ONE THING YOUTUBE CAN'T DO

Here's the honest part.

For everything I have on that Youtube channel, a system that I don't control facilitates. Youtube decides who sees the next video. Youtube decides whether the people who subscribed even find out I posted. I've watched it change its mind about artists I love and nobody could explain why.

So I keep a list.

And the Shab Squad on my website is the one place where I can tell you something and know it actually reaches you. 

New music before anybody else. Behind the scenes. Presale tickets. Things I say straight to you instead of through a platform. 

It's free, there's no commitment -- and I don't send noise, because I'm the one writing it and I don't have time to send noise.

If you subscribed in the last two weeks, that's the next thing I'd ask you to do. Not because Youtube is going anywhere. Because I'd rather not need its permission to talk to you.

WHERE THE NUMBERS ACTUALLY MATTER

I've never cared about follower counts as a scoreboard. I've been in this industry long enough to know exactly how easy those are to manufacture and exactly how little they mean.

Five hundred people who want to see the next thing is worth more to me than a number I could have bought. That's not me being humble. It's just math.

Thank you. I mean it.

Xoxo SHAB