Ben Blackett Lesh started his music journey when he released his first album Unbound in late 2018. This was around the time when he also opened his very first Twitter account to share his music with the world. In general, Ben has always been good at curating relevant and engaging content to share on social media — it is something he likes doing and many people have stated they enjoyed what Ben shared over the years. But when it came to his own content, Ben was flummoxed. What he found on Twitter was a bunch of people just like himself were shouting into the wind and hoping for success.

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In May 2019 Ben decided to try something new. He came across several threads dedicated to sharing your own art with the world and really enjoyed learning about and exploring all the various artist communities on Twitter — of which there are many, each with a rich and diverse set of artists and creators to meet and learn about. Ben was hooked and realized he wanted to do something similar. So, he started a weekly Artist Spotlight series, where he chose one artist to highlight at the top of a weekly #artshare thread. This became a huge success and really solidified Ben’s desire to not only promote art in general but to facilitate and encourage a community around the creative arts on Twitter. Over the lifetime of these Spotlights — 89 in total — Ben interacted with a lot of new people all over the creative spectrum from photography, books, crafts, YouTubers, Esty shop owners, musicians, and many more. Eventually, the work to sustain these became more than Ben could handle, and he regrettably stopped doing them, but the desire to be part of and nurture a growing artist community that crossed boundaries was set for him.

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In October 2019 Ben teamed up with some friends and refocused his energies back into the music world by launching a Playlist Support Thread. It ran every weekend and featured anywhere from 5 to 30 playlists, each of which tagged as many artists as possible on those playlists. Ben started building his own playlists and solicited hand-picked curators to create brand new custom playlists under the Blackett Music banner. It took a few months, but eventually, these weekend threads were pulling in 1–3 million impressions a month, generating 20 to 40 thousand comments and retweets, and most importantly creating thousands of link clicks for the playlists themselves.

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Then 2020 hit and everything changed. His day job went virtual and his workload massively intensified, forcing Ben to drop or rethink much of the playlist promotion he was doing. Being a Software Developer, he decided to create a website to manage some of the day-to-day work involved in the weekend playlists. Ben wrote tools to let musicians manage their own content and shifted the Twitter promotion to use as much automation as possible. In September 2020, He created the Blackett Promotion accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter as bot accounts designed specifically to share the ever-growing catalog of content being entered. Within 9 months, @BlackettPromo on Twitter had reached 10k followers and by 15 months it reached 20k. His main @BlackettMusic Twitter account is currently at 45k and continues to grow at over 2000 new followers a month.
 

By the end of 2020, he knew he had started something amazing. The need for Community Based Free Promotion was breaking all kinds of records, from new website signups to raw numbers of followers, to overall engagement. Ben began hearing more and more stories from people using his services about how they suddenly started gaining momentum after signing up, about musicians being discovered and picked up by Twitch streamers or Radio stations via his social media promotions, about feeling a greater sense of community and togetherness, and how they felt much freer to share and explore each other’s art and creativity than ever before.

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On January 1st 2021, Ben and his wife decided to become business partners and merged all of their various business ventures under one roof called TeamLesh LLC. Blackett Music is now owned by both of them and they began investing much more time and money into it than ever before

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Story originally published in BizBoost Magazine Issue #5