Kusog nga gihinumdom explained

For most of our song catalogue, we have been known for our English songs. But our latest release "Kusog nga gihinumdom" was something that was uncharacteristic for our regular listeners. To which there are those who can't understand our native tongue. Not meaning to alienate them, it was my intention to actually write this blog so that I can reinforce the message of the song. Using the English vocabulary (being the universal language) this time so that I can reach out to a wider audience. However, I can't do a straight translation of the song, as sometimes a word for word translation won't fit properly to the original meaning of the song. So, what I'll do instead is to explore what each part of the song means. By breaking them down part by part.

So let's break down the lyrics of the songs shall we?

Kusog nga gihinumdom

1st Stanza:

Gihinumdom nako ang akong kagahapon

Ang akong panglantaw nga sobra ka dag-um

Ingon ka, salig lang ko sa imo

Ihatag akong kasing-kasing para lang sa imo

Chorus:

Ginoo, tabangi ko sa akong kinabuhi

Tabangi ko nga sa kalisud dili mu buhi

Ang imong gugma akong paglaum

Ikaw akong kusog nga gihinumdom

2nd Stanza:

Sa mga panahon nga nalimtan taka

Imong kong gi pukaw para mu mata

Ang akong pagsalig dili dapat mag-bago

Himuon kini mas hugot pa kaysa kaniadto

Bridge:

Ang akong kinabuhi 

Ihatag para sa imo

Para sa imo lang

Ug wala nay lain pa

Wala nay lain pa...

Chorus:

Ginoo, tabangi ko sa akong kinabuhi

Tabangi ko nga sa kalisud dili mu buhi

Ang imong gugma akong paglaum

Ikaw akong kusog nga gihinumdom

Coda:

Ikaw akong kusog nga gihinumdom

1st Stanza

In the first stanza, I spoke about my gloomy past. When everything felt so hopeless. Those times before I truly embraced and accepted Jesus Christ in my life. I believe we all have these stories where we feel so hopeless. And we have no one to cling to because we thought that we only have ourselves to rely on. And by our own strength, skill, and knowledge, we believe that possessing them is enough to get us through the day. Then when the tough times comes, and we could no longer trust our self to survive, we begin to lose hope. Sometimes finding no more reason to keep on living. But then, when we come to know Jesus' love for us, and when we put our complete trust and faith in him, a change of perspective begins. Especially when we surrender and give all our heart to him. This is what the first stanza is talking about. From being hopeless and then to know Jesus, who asked us to put our faith in him. And then responding to his call by giving all our heart to him. Completing the process of metanoia.

Chorus:

The chorus is basically a prayer, a plea, asking God for help. In desperation, in the toughest times when chaos and uncertainty come our way. We ask God to help us not to let go and give up on life. And that when all hope is lost, we cling only to him and put our complete trust and faith in him that we'll eventually get through our problems and tribulations. And in full surrender, we declare to God that his love is our only hope. And remember him as the only one true source of our strength.   

The 1st Stanza and the Chorus is a reminder of our first encounter with Jesus. How our life had changed for the better, only because we have come to accept him in our life, as our Lord and Savior. And this encounter has strengthened our resolve as a renewed Christian. With a relationship with our Lord and savior that is new, fresh, and still on a stage where we are so filled by his love and his presence in our life. But then we got too complacent. Failing to nurture that relationship...

2nd Stanza

Then we got too complacent with our relationship with God. We got too comfortable to the point that we begin to neglect and forget about him. And then we begin to encounter challenges and hardships. And due to our complacency (or lack of Faith), we begin to think that God had forsaken us. Blaming him for the misfortunes that we begin to encounter. But if we truly have a very strong Faith in him. We put all these in stride and just accept that these challenges and hardships are just God's way of waking us up from our slumber. Sometimes when we get too comfortable with our life. We need to be jolted so that we would be awaken from our false sense of comfort. God has blessed us so much, yet we turned ungrateful and neglected him. God is just nudging us. To help us remember the most important thing in this life, which is our relationship with him. And that we should not allow these "challenges" to shake our faith in him. Or to allow ourselves to lose our Faith in him. But instead, to make our Faith stronger than before. Because these "hardships" that we encounter and learning to accept them, is a testament of how much we love God in return. That in spite of these, our love for him remains unchanged, but in fact should even make it stronger than ever before.  That in times of chaos, we could discern and remain steadfast in our Faith in him. I believe when we achieve that type of maturity in our Faith, then we would be invulnerable to whatever life throws our way.

Coda:

Which then leads us to the coda of the song. Which is a passionate declaration that we will offer and surrender our life to God. And only to God alone. This line culminates the overall experience of our journey with our Christian Faith. And appreciating the journey of our Faith is the overall end goal of our relationship with God. Because there will always be peaks and valleys. 

So, by putting all these together, the song basically demonstrates the life cycle of a real Christian. A real Christian is someone who is capable of accepting his imperfections. And that through these imperfections, the will to seek out God more and the motivation to nurture and sustain a relationship with him truly is the only goal in our life. This is my hope and prayer when I wrote this song. To get the message across that what matters in this life is Christ alone. Not the fake shallow happiness brought about by the material things that this world could give us. And even when the situation comes when we begin to doubt God. May we be able to see beyond the smokescreen and learn to discern by truly possessing a faith that is solidified by our love for God. God does not test our Faith just for the sake of testing it, but rather it is up to us to reaffirm our Faith in God. Whatever circumstance may we be in.    

It is my hope and prayer that this song has blessed you and will continue to bless someone as it travels far and wide. Never forget, God loves you regardless of who you are.     

We've finally hit the One Million streams mark on Spotify!

The graphic shows how our streams grew since we released our songs in 2021

We've finally hit one million streams on our overall song catalogue on Spotify! And it took us close to two years to hit those numbers. Though not pretty impressive for popular artists, but for a small independent artist like us, it already means so much. It's another milestone to our long running saga of keeping our songs alive through all these years. So how did we do it? Here are 5 tips on what we did to reach those numbers. Read on to find out...

Some of the playlists where our songs got added to

1.) Playlisting is the KEY!

When we started our digital music journey, we were pretty much lost on how to do the promotions and how to share our songs to more people so that they would be heard. We were pretty much happy to see our friends streaming our songs. But we have to admit, they can't stream it everyday. And not all can really help you in spreading your songs to their respective circles. So as we watched our listeners dwindle down, we decided to study about the best practices in making sure our songs on Spotify would grow. And one of the best practices that we found out was to get our songs on more playlists. So with that in mind, we just kept on sending them to playlist curators who are willing to place them on their playlists. However, in our initial run, we never knew about this thing called algorithms and how it works with Spotify. So we got into a bit of trouble. Which leads us to...

Some of the Algorithm based playlists that our songs were playlisted on

2.) Keep your algorithms HEALTHY!

Spotify uses their unique listener data reading technology to identify listener habits and tastes. Once they are able to mine enough listener data, they are going to put one and two together. Meaning, they will be sending your songs to new listeners with the same listening habits as the listeners of your songs. But unfortunately for us, we didn't know about this stuff. So we got added to playlists that are so different from our genre, to the extent that it messed up our algorithms. When listeners skip your songs, that counts as a negative to your algorithms. So when your songs are being fed to the wrong listeners, tendency will be is that they will skip your songs. Thus making Spotify's AI technology to stop feeding your songs to those listeners. Preventing growth on your part and be discovered by new listeners. Once we realized that what we did was wrong, we started to correct it. By taking our songs out of those playlists and making sure to send it to the right genre. But, besides sending our songs to various playlist curators for their consideration, we decided to be more proactive and became playlist curators ourselves. Which leads us to the next tip...

Playlists that we curated

3.) Curate your own PLAYLISTS!

What's more fun than creating your playlists of songs that influenced you or the songs that are in the same genre as yours? Or simply, songs that you enjoy listening to. Being a Spotify user gives you access to millions of songs readily available to be added to your own playlists. So there's no better way to listen to your songs than to listen to it along with the same genre that it belongs to. From independent to big named artists, everything can easily be found on Spotify. With your own playlists, you'd have better control on which song to add and be listened to along with your songs. And, it's also more fun to do playlist exchange with your friends with regards to what songs you are listening to. Just like the old days when we record mixtapes on our casette tapes or CD-Rs and share them with our friends. This is more economical and a more faster way to enjoy listening to music with your friends. No need to spend on a physical product and do the recording. All you need is a playlist and you are good to go. This is also especially helpful with friends who are also independent artists themselves. Which leads us to...

4.) Network and join communities of INDEPENDENT ARTISTS!

You have to admit, you are not the best musician out there. You could always learn a thing or two from your fellow independent artists. And trading songs with them to critique or to simply just support each other by listening to each others' songs helps build those Spotify Algorithms too. And the more network you build, the bigger your algorithms grow. Because as your algorithms is growing, Spotify will only match your song's "listeners also like" section to similar sized artists such as you. Their AI tech will not put you on a bigger artists' Spotify profile, because the volume of listeners listening to their songs would most likely be listening to other popular artists too. So even if some of their listeners would listen to your songs, their listener data will be drowned out by other listeners of the same popular artists and whatever other artists that they are listening to. It's kind of confusing really. But to explain it simply, it's just like a pyramid where artists are lumped together with their respective sizes. But the most important thing is to get your profile to appear on another artists' profile. Thus, giving you more chances to be discovered by their listeners too.  

5.) Promote, promote, promote, ... but don't get SCAMMED!

Yes, there are many ways of promoting your songs on social media and on the internet besides in your live gigs. And there are some "marketeers" and "promoters" who offer their services to you to get your song playlisted on various playlists. Some of them are legitimate ones, while the other aren't. The legitimate ones usually cannot guarantee you a fix number of listeners and streams. Because simply put, who can guarantee you a fix number of listeners who would take a liking to your song? So when there are "marketeers" that can guarantee you a fix number of listeners/streams, then that is a red flag. Because those numbers can easily be manipulated by using bots. And with the fees that they are charging you, you really cannot get your money's worth because you would be playlisted in playlists that are of mixed genre. And when that happens, it messes up your algorithms (refer to number 2 again). You know how much Spotify pays per stream, and how much those "marketeers" charge per stream as promised. So it's a double loss for you. However, if you do have the budget, then spend on Spotify's Marquee instead. It's an in-app ad that pops up for the users to see and hear a sampling of your song (refer to the video for full details). Another way to promote your songs without breaking the bank is by using the Spotify Discovery Mode. It's an algorithm based promotional campaign where Spotify sends your songs to specific users based on your listeners data. You don't need to pay anything for this but Spotify just takes a certain percentage from the stream revenue that is due to you from them. I've had some success with this program as I've managed to gain more than 100,000 streams since I activated our Discovery Mode program.     

I'm proud to say that we made the one million streams mark without spending a single cent on bots. We also missed out on being playlisted on bigger "Official" Spotify playlists that guarantees a huge number of listeners. We only got playlisted twice on Spotify's Official New Music Friday playlist. And songs there only stay for a week before the playlists gets refreshed again. We just put the work in to ensure that we get our songs out to be heard by more listeners in whatever way we could with the limited resources that we have. In totality I could say that I probably had successfully playlisted our songs to close to 100 playlists. But as per our Spotify for Artists data, our songs were playlisted in more than 1,200 playlists. There's no way that we were able to reach out to 1,200 playlist curators. That right there is the work of all those algorithms. And that's the one true ally for independent artists like us. So don't just drop your songs on Spotify and leave it there undiscovered. You have to make sure that it is being engaged to regularly so that it would reach its intended listeners. 

One BONUS TIP:

This one is kind of underrated, but studying your Spotify for Artists data is a huge help. I check my stats every day to analyze and study how my songs are doing on Spotify. And I use those data to plot and implement what my next moves are. The work that we put in basically begins and ends with that app. Not to mention that there are articles that you could read which gives you some basic tips that Spotify is trying to teach us to be successful in our Digital Music journey. 

In closing, let me share why, despite how hard it is to find our listeners with millions of songs in Spotify that is readily available to listen to, we are still doing this. It's simply because my motivation to continue writing songs is not rooted on the financial rewards. If so, I wouldn't be writing songs. My motivation is something deeper. Of course, I welcome the million streams. But even if my songs would only reach and touch just one soul and draw them nearer to seek God, then that is already enough for me. I've been at this with Wilbert Raagas Tan and Thrina Dimaano Escaño since 2006, and we have our own fair share of faith stories to tell. Did we become popular? No. Did we touch some souls along the way to seek and get to know more about God? I would like to believe so. And that's the sole reason why we're still here after all these years.

I'm also blessed to not rely on this as my means to my living (I'm not really a musician to begin with, I'm just a lyricist). And navigating this Digital Music stuff had also become a personal mission of mine. To learn from this and share whatever I learned as a means of giving back to the artists that truly deserves this. And you could be a part of that too. You just don't know, that with all the Taylor Swifts, WKND, Ariana Grande, Sam Smith, KPOP and all the other big named artists you put in your playlists, simply adding songs by independent artists on your playlists could go a long long way. It helps their algorithms and gives them a huge opportunity to be discovered.

The road to one million all began with playlisting and algorithms. You may have heard our songs, or you may haven't. But somewhere out there, someone will take a liking to our songs. And we've seen how the Spotify algorithms helped us.

It's not easy to be an independent artist. But there's a way to make this Digital Music Streaming work to our favor. So don't give up just yet. There's an audience out there waiting to hear your song. You just need to find them.