The Return of the Group-me

"Operation Release Conner's Music"

There is nothing in the world like the innocence of the beginning.

This seems to be true for everything in life.

In 2019, I signed a record deal, fresh out of the senior hallway of my high school. On a sunny Nashville day in June, I put my name on a thick stack of papers, confirming the reality of one of my biggest life goals coming true. Ever since I was 10 years old, I can remember having dreams at night where I had signed a record deal, only to wake up with a sadness that it was just that—a dream. However, this time, inside a boardroom off Demumbrium Avenue, at the age of 18, it was finally not a dream to wake up from.

After signing my record deal, I got into my truck around noon, with the kind of joy that you only know a few times in life. I rolled down the windows and turned up the radio as loud as I could. I drove my 2015 Chevy south down Interstate 65, straight to a Honda dealership. That afternoon, I bought a small motorcycle—my first purchase as a "Big Machine recording artist."

The world was perfect that day. High school was over, I’d never have to do homework again, summer was in full swing with all of my best friends two months away from leaving for freshman year of college, and I now had a record deal. With my name on that page, I was sure it wouldn’t be long until I was selling out shows and hearing my song on the radio.

However, as we all know now, my journey hasn't exactly looked like the image in my I painted in my head on the way to get that motorcycle. As "God Moments" says, “You try to make a plan, but He makes the path.”

For starters, little did I know the world was less than a year away from shutting down. 2019 led into 2020, and soon after, the whole music industry was brought to a complete standstill. That whole year of 2020 passed. I still had a record deal, but no longer did I know what that meant. With nothing to do but sit and wait, I wrote hundreds of songs on Zoom that year. 2020 led into 2021, and pretty much all looked the same—no plans for music anywhere in sight.

As I write this, it’s funny to look back and remember how that time felt so much longer than just a couple of years. I’m slowly learning that the younger you are, the more time feels that way, I guess.

But I kept writing every day. Putting my head down, trying to get better, hoping that the next song could be good enough to capture my record label's attention and put it out into the world. Standing in the way of me and seemingly every one of my dreams was this big red light, where it seemed no plans were coming anytime soon to press "go" on chasing down the dream of my life.

Impatient, as any 20-year-old has ever been, and ready to do anything just to put out my first songs, I knew there had to be more to do than just writing songs no one would hear.

This is where my best buddy, Jake Kinney, comes into the picture.

Jake was just a senior in high school at the time, down in Albany, GA. With a friendship formed around a passion for music, we’d talk on the phone all the time, sharing in frustration that everything stood still.

“We’ve got to be able to do something!” he’d say, as we brainstormed for hours.

I would send him my demos, each song seemingly getting better, and we’d go back and forth on how we thought we could make it happen. By this time, we already had a lot of the songs we would end up putting out: Somewhere in a Small Town, Why I Can’t Leave, Take It Slow, Learn From It, Tennessee.

Somewhere in our hours to thinking, finally, in all of our naivety, we came up with a plan.

We called it: PROJECT GROUPME.

Here was our plan...

Part 1: I was going to start going live on TikTok every night. I would post videos of my demos and covers, and then after posting, I would get on live that night and play songs for an hour or two.

Part 2: Jake was going to start a group chat on the app GroupMe called “Operation Release Conner Smith’s Music” and I would begin driving everyone on my lives to join the group.

As we started our plan, and I began going live, we started to see the same fans showing up every night. I remember at the beginning, 10 people in the live stream felt like a lot. Then, a couple of months later, Jake and I would get so excited when 50 people were in there with us. One night, we even got the live stream up to 80 people at one time. We couldn’t believe it. Slowly but surely, it seemed every night on TikTok, it grew, and every time, it was the same names coming back to join us.

Hannah Mitchem, Ben Day, Andrew Bronner, Kristy Norris—these are just a few of the names I still remember from those days.

Every night on the lives, in between songs, I began driving people to join this GroupMe Jake had started. In the group, we started putting demos on private links on SoundCloud, giving them updates on the progress of things, and sharing everything with them first. Over time, with no songs out and zero shows played, Jake and I had built this GroupMe up to 500 people. We were so excited. It felt like we had this army of people hoping alongside us with the same anticipation to see music finally come out.

Then, what we began to do was every time any person from my record label would post on Instagram, Jake would send the post into this GroupMe and ask people to comment. Hundreds of people began to comment on their posts, “Release Conner’s music, please!”

It was like an underground club.

The label took notice. Emails started going around the label. People inside the office all started asking questions, everyone was confused. “Where is all of this excitement for Conner’s music coming from?”

But the answer was simple: It was coming from people who felt like they were a part of the story.

It was so exciting for Jake and me. We felt like we had done something special and created this community of people who really cared. And we did it by caring for them. It was one of the most fun times of my whole career so far—building something out of nothing with one of my best friends Jake.

However, as things began to take off, that GroupMe was traded for the busyness of a hundred other things that I now had to do as a touring artist. Three years later, if you go to that GroupMe now, you’ll mostly find a bunch of notifications from people who have left the chat. It’s been a long time since it was active, and in a lot of ways, it’s been a long time since I felt the excitement of what that time felt like—the underground hustle, the community of people in it together, the inspiration to do something completely different from the norm.

Over the years, Jake and I—who two years ago became my tour manager, and earlier this year became my full-time manager—have talked about it all the time. "Man, how could we make it all feel like that GroupMe again?"

This music industry does everything it can to distract you. It wants you to think everything else is the most important thing, leaving you little time to focus on what is the only thing that truly matters: the fans. Through all of that distraction, I finally just became fed up with it, and Jake and I looked for a way to get back to the heart of it all. To find any way to return to the innocence of that “GroupMe”—the innocence of being 18 and 20 with just a mind for wild ideas. How could we get back to the place where we’re all in this together with the fans?

And that is what this is. This is my attempt at making it all about community again.

Through journals, stories, questions, group chats, podcasts, and live streams, this is Jake and me—now 22 and 24—saying, "Screw all the fancy stats and going viral. Let's walk the other direction and build this dream, one fan at a time."

So welcome to the new GroupMe - The Storytellers club.

Invite your friends, share your stories, ask us questions, tell us what you think about the songs. We truly want to build this with y’all, and one day no matter where the journey goes, we can say we did it together.

“You can go faster alone, but farther together.”

I love you guys. Starting this is the most excited I’ve been in a long time!

-Conner