Jack Conte on Batching, Instinct, and Making 100 Music Videos a Year

The Guy Who Released 100 Music Videos a Year (While Running a Tech Company)

Jack Conte occupies a strange position in modern music. He is the CEO of Patreon, a platform that has paid out over 11 billion dollars to creators. He is also one half of Pomplamoose, a founding force behind Scary Pockets, and a working musician who has published somewhere close to a thousand recorded arrangements. On a recent episode of Playback Sessions with Spencer Handley, he sat down at Patreon headquarters and talked openly about how he actually gets it all done, what he learned from a thousand studio sessions, and why he thinks the next few years are the most important stretch artists have faced in decades.

What makes the conversation useful for guitar players is not the CEO stuff. It is the process stuff. Jack has systematized creative output in a way that most musicians never attempt, and the lessons translate directly to practice, writing, and recording.

Batched Production: The Single Biggest Unlock

Jack was blunt about his schedule. He does not have unlimited time. He runs a company that eats most of his week. So how did Pomplamoose and Scary Pockets combine to release roughly 100 music videos a year for seven straight years?

"Fly down to LA on a Friday night. Pomplamoose would meet on Saturday, record four songs. Scary Pockets would meet Sunday, record four songs. I'd fly back and then do Patreon the rest of the month."

Eight songs in one weekend. A team edits and assembles. The bands release one video per week, per channel. From the outside it looks like relentless daily output. From the inside it is two days of work a month.

This is worth sitting with, because most musicians do the opposite. We work on one song, agonize over it, finish it (maybe), and then start the next one. Jack calls that a treadmill, and he is right. It feels like constant motion with very little accumulation.

How to Apply Batching to Your Own Playing

• Batch your recording days. Instead of tracking a part every time inspiration hits, set aside one full day and track four ideas back to back. Your gear is already dialed in, your ears are already warm, and you are not resetting your setup five separate times.
• Batch your writing. Jack mentioned he has written 70 songs and is recording them four at a time. Separate the writing brain from the recording brain. They are different modes and switching between them constantly costs you energy.
• Batch your practice categories. Spend a session purely on rhythm and feel. Spend another purely on fretboard mapping. Context switching within a single practice hour is one of the quietest ways players waste time.
• Let the release schedule be separate from the work schedule. You do not need to post the day you record. Build a small buffer and you buy yourself consistency without pressure.

The Skill That Took a Thousand Reps

Spencer pointed out something he witnessed firsthand when he played on one of those sessions: Jack's ability to arrange and orchestrate on the fly, pulling parts out of a room of six musicians and finishing a track in under 90 minutes.

Jack's response was refreshingly unglamorous.

"No, and part of the reason I think I'm good at it is because I sucked at it for so long."

Between Pomplamoose (around 400 to 450 songs) and Scary Pockets (roughly 500), he estimates close to 1,000 repetitions of the exact same challenge: a room, a clock, and a song that has to exist by dinner. That is the whole answer. It is not talent. It is volume under constraint.

For guitarists, this is a direct argument for putting yourself in situations where you have to produce something under a deadline. Jam sessions. Open mics. Weekly recording challenges. Playing with people who are better than you. The reps compound in a way that isolated bedroom practice never quite does.

The Two Rules Jack Uses in Every Session

When pressed for what he actually learned across those thousand sessions, Jack landed on two principles that are surprisingly actionable.

1. Chase the Flinch, Not Your Gut

Everyone says trust your gut. Jack pushed back on that framing and offered something more specific.

"It's like did I just feel something? Am I excited about that? If somebody does something and you're like, 'Ooh,' it's like stop everything. Do that. Let's work around that. There's something core there. And you can feel that in literally one second."

This is a real technique. In a writing session, the moment you get an involuntary reaction to a chord voicing, a rhythmic hiccup, or a bend that lands weird in a good way, that is the signal. Do not note it and move on. Stop, isolate it, and build the arrangement around it. Jack's reasoning is that we all have roughly the same shape of brain, so if it hit you, it probably hit someone else too.

2. Put Something on the Table and Let the Room React

Jack does not walk in with a finished vision. He walks in with a starting condition.

"I can literally be like, 'Hey, let's do a four-on-the-floor thing at 120. Spence, what you got?' And the drummer just goes. And now you have to do something."

Two or three of those exchanges and something usable surfaces. The lesson: a vague prompt plus good musicians beats a detailed plan plus a passive room. If you lead sessions or write with other players, your job is often just to set constraints and create pressure, not to have the answer.

How to Say No Without Killing the Room

Not every idea is good, and Jack talked about how he handles that. Early on it was hard. Now it is simple.

Sometimes it is as direct as "try something else, what else you got?" More often, he describes a feeling rather than critiquing a person.

"I'll say to the room, 'I'm just not feeling excited when we get to the chorus.' And usually people are like, 'Yeah, I'm not feeling excited either.'"

He gave a great example from a recent session. The band built a huge 16-bar intro, dropped down to shaker and kick for the first verse to spotlight the vocal, then brought it back up. When the second verse arrived, instinct said drop again. They tracked it that way, listened back, and Jack said out loud that the party had stopped. Everyone agreed instantly. They kept the energy up through verse two.

The takeaway for anyone who plays with others: describe the feeling, not the fault. Nobody defends a feeling. Everybody defends themselves.

Systems for Scattered Brains

Jack was open about not being naturally organized. His workaround is a capture system: a phone shortcut that lets him dump anything into a list, including feelings, not just tasks. "Nervous about X." "Get back to so-and-so." Three times a week he processes the entire list and turns every input into an action item.

Guitar players can steal this wholesale. Keep a running capture list for musical ideas: a lick you stumbled onto, a tune you want to transcribe, a technique that felt shaky, a mix note on a rough demo. Then process it on a schedule instead of trusting memory. Jack's phrase for the alternative is worth remembering: "if I tried to hold all that in my brain, I would be in hell."

Confidence in the Studio, Confidence Everywhere Else

One of the most personal parts of the conversation was Jack comparing how he felt in a recording studio versus how he felt running a company. In the studio, he knew what he wanted. He could follow a childish impulse and land somewhere good. In the company, for years, he was paralyzed by the idea that there was a correct answer he had not found yet.

"It's letting go of the fact that there is a right answer that I need to figure out, and instead leaning into my own opinion of what I want to do. I feel like I broke out of jail."

Plenty of guitarists have the inverse problem. They are confident in conversation and paralyzed the moment a red light comes on. The fix is the same either way: stop asking what is correct and start asking what you want. Then get enough reps that the answer arrives faster.

On AI, Silent Films, and Having Something to Say

Jack did not sugarcoat how he feels about generative AI trained on artists' work without consent or compensation. He used the word depression. He described it as resetting the scoreboard to zero after 13 years of progress.

But he also refused to treat it as a simple good or evil question. He walked through the 1927 transition from silent films to talkies, when roughly 50,000 theater musicians lost their jobs and the musicians union ran ads depicting robots grinding instruments into cans of "canned music." Thirty years later, the Beatles used the recording studio as an instrument and made records that could not exist live.

His conclusion, and it is a challenging one:

"I don't think it replaces creative people because it can't know what you want to say. It will replace people who don't have anything to say."

That is the sharpest practical takeaway in the entire interview. The defensible thing is not technique alone and it is not tone alone. It is point of view. Develop a voice that is specific enough that no model can guess it, and then use whatever tools help you deliver it.

What to Take Into Your Next Practice Session

• Batch your work. Group similar tasks and stop resetting your brain a dozen times a week.
• Chase the one-second reaction. When something makes you go "ooh," build around it immediately.
• Get reps under real constraints. A thousand sessions beats a thousand hours of noodling.
• Speak in feelings when you give feedback in a band.
• Capture everything externally. Do not trust your memory with your ideas.
• Ask what you want, not what is correct.
• Work on having something to say. That is the part nothing can automate.

If you want structured reps, real feedback, and a path from noodling to actually finishing music, book a free skills assessment with Sonora and we will map out where you are and what to work on next.