I exported every Instagram conversation I'd had in three years. The file was bigger than I expected. 774 separate threads. Conversations I'd completely forgotten existed.
I tour as DJ Don Low, and I've been managing my own career for the better part of a decade. No agent, no manager, no team. Just me, an inbox, and the slow accumulation of people you meet when you spend years inside a music scene.
The export came from a moment of frustration. I'd been chasing a promoter for a slot at a festival, and I knew we'd talked before — knew we'd talked recently, even — but I couldn't find the thread. Instagram's search returned nothing. Scrolling through hundreds of conversations didn't help. The exchange existed somewhere in my own messages, locked behind an interface designed for casual chat, not for tracking professional relationships.
So I downloaded everything. And then I built a tool to make sense of what I found.
This is what 774 conversations told me.
The 591 number
Out of 774 threads, 591 were what I'd call qualified contacts: real people in or around the music industry — promoters, label managers, booking agents, fellow DJs, journalists, photographers, venue owners, sound engineers. The rest were spam, fans, family, and a handful of conversations I genuinely could not place.
That ratio surprised me. I'd assumed half my DMs were noise. The reality was closer to three-quarters signal.
This matters because every solo artist underestimates the size of their actual network. We think of our network as the people we'd send a Christmas message to. The real network is wider — it includes everyone who's ever been useful, everyone who could be useful, and everyone who's already shown they're open to a conversation.
For me, 591 people. Built through years of festivals, club nights, late afternoons in coffee shops in Berlin and Madrid, and a thousand "let's link up" moments that I'd half-followed-up on.
The 104 number
This is the number that genuinely shocked me.
When I parsed the export and ran it through a deduplication pass, 104 of those 591 contacts were people I had effectively lost. People I'd had real conversations with — booking conversations, collaboration discussions, "I'll come see you at your next gig" exchanges — and then dropped. Not because the relationships had ended, but because Instagram had buried them.
DM threads don't surface the way email does. There's no folder, no label, no smart inbox. A conversation from two years ago with a promoter who runs a five-thousand-capacity festival sits at the same level of access as a meme someone sent you yesterday. If you don't reply within 48 hours, the thread sinks down the scroll, and unless something prompts you to look for it, you'll never see it again.
104 conversations means 104 specific, named opportunities I had functionally forgotten. Promoters who'd asked me to send a mix and I'd sent it but never followed up. Other DJs who'd said "let's do an EP together" and meant it. Festival bookers I'd met once at a panel who'd said the door was open.
Some of those 104 were dead — too long, too cold, the moment had passed. But probably half of them were still warm. They just needed a reason to come back.
What three years of conversations actually look like
I want to give you the texture of what I found, because the abstract numbers don't quite capture it.
Inside the 591 qualified contacts, the breakdown skewed heavily toward fellow artists — the producers and DJs you swap demos with, who form the daily traffic of any scene. Promoters and bookers were the next layer. Then label and A&R contacts. Then the surrounding infrastructure of a working career — photographers, journalists, venue staff, agency assistants, the people who quietly make tours run.
The conversations themselves clustered into a few archetypes:
The introduction thread. Someone reached out, we exchanged a few messages, and then nothing. Average length: a handful of messages. Most of these go nowhere. A small fraction — the ones with the right timing — turn into something real years later.
The active negotiation. Booking conversations, collaboration discussions, contract back-and-forths. These have real progression and clear outcomes — usually a few dozen messages over a few weeks.
The maintenance check-in. People I'd worked with before, dropping in to say hi, share a track, hint at something coming up. Sporadic, but high-value. Often the precursor to actual work.
The orphan. A conversation that started promisingly and then stopped, mid-thread, for no clear reason. These were the ones that haunted me. Some of them were deals that died because nobody followed up — including me.
What I learned about my own career
When you can actually see your network laid out in front of you, you notice things you couldn't notice before.
The first thing I noticed: my best opportunities don't come from the people I think they come from. They come from weak ties — people I'd talked to once or twice, often years ago. The promoters who liked one of my tracks in 2022 mattered more than the ten people I message regularly. This isn't original to me — Mark Granovetter wrote the seminal paper on weak ties in 1973 — but seeing it in my own data was different from reading it in a sociology textbook.
The second thing I noticed: timing matters more than I'd realized. Looking at the conversations that actually led to bookings, almost all of them involved a follow-up at exactly the right moment. Not too soon, which looks pushy. Not too late, which loses the thread. Roughly five to eight days after the initial exchange, with a specific reason — a new track, a new mix, a piece of news. The DJs I'd watched succeed weren't louder than me. They were better at this rhythm.
The third thing: I was dramatically under-utilizing the network I already had. I'd been chasing new contacts when 591 existing ones were sitting in my inbox, half-active, ready to be re-engaged.
The system that actually works
After parsing my own DMs, I started building a system around them. The principle is simple: if you have to remember it, you'll lose it. The system has to do the remembering for you.
The basic structure:
A single source of truth — Notion, in my case, but the platform matters less than the discipline of having one — where every meaningful contact lives. Name, role, last interaction, last topic, next action. Searchable. Sortable. Filterable.
A regular ritual to surface the orphans. Once a week I look at conversations that have gone quiet for more than a month and decide which ones to reignite. Not all of them — that would be exhausting and creepy. Maybe five or ten. Each with a specific, non-needy reason to reach out.
A way to track active threads without obsessively checking Instagram. The booking conversations, the demo follow-ups, the "we said we'd do a show together" exchanges — these need to live somewhere outside the social-app interface that wasn't designed for this.
This is the system Backline automates. It takes your Instagram DM export and produces a Notion CRM, structured by contact, with conversation summaries, last-interaction dates, and the orphan threads pre-flagged. I built it because I needed it. Other DJs started asking for it once they saw what was inside.
What I'd tell my younger self
If I could talk to myself five years ago, when I was starting out and still believing that the right manager would find me, I'd say two things.
One: your network is bigger than you think it is, and it's mostly invisible to you. Find a way to see it. Even if you don't use a tool, do the export. Look at the volume. Notice what you've forgotten.
Two: the work of being a self-managed artist is mostly the work of remembering. Remembering who said what, who promised what, who you owe a reply to. The artists who do this well aren't more talented or more connected. They're more organized.
Three years and 774 conversations later, that's the real lesson. The career isn't built in the loud moments. It's built in the unglamorous accumulation of follow-ups, the slow reactivation of weak ties, and the discipline of treating your inbox like the asset it actually is.
Most of us are sitting on a goldmine of relationships and don't know it.
If you want to do this analysis on your own DMs, Backline parses your Instagram export and turns it into a structured Notion CRM. Privacy-first: your zip never leaves your browser. It took me three months to build the version that worked. You can run it on your own archive in about ten minutes.