The export came back as a single zip file. I clicked download, watched it land on my desktop, and stared at it for about ten minutes before doing anything else.
Three years of Instagram conversations. Every message I’d sent, every message I’d received, every voice memo, every shared track link, every “let’s link up” exchange that had ever happened in the inbox of DJ Don Low. Compressed into a zip with a name like a serial number.
I knew what was inside it, more or less. But knowing it was there and knowing what to do with it were two different problems. For a few weeks, the file just sat on my desktop. I was certain there were missed opportunities buried in there. I was equally certain that I had no idea how to find them.
If you’ve recently exported your own Instagram data and you’re staring at the zip file with the same feeling, this is what I learned about how to start. The short version: don’t try to read everything. Build a system that surfaces what matters.
The first instinct — and why it’s wrong
The first thing most people do, including me, is try to read everything in chronological order. This is the natural impulse: I have all my conversations, I’ll just go through them.
This fails for two reasons.
The first is volume. Three years of DMs is hundreds of thousands of messages, distributed across hundreds of threads. Even at fast skim speed — five seconds per thread to glance at the last message — that’s an hour or two of pure scanning, with diminishing returns the further you go.
The second is signal-to-noise. Most threads don’t matter. Most threads were never going to lead to anything. Spam, fans, family, one-off exchanges that ended where they started. If you read everything, you’re spending 90% of your attention on the 10% of conversations that have any career implications, and you’ll be exhausted before you reach them.
The right approach isn’t to read everything. It’s to filter aggressively, then read selectively.
The four-tier filter
When I finally sat down to actually do this, I divided everything into four tiers based on a quick set of signals.
Tier 1: High-value, recent. Conversations from the last six months with people in the music industry — promoters, labels, agents, fellow artists. Active or recently active. These are your immediate priority. They’re the ones where a missed reply is most likely to cost you something concrete.
Tier 2: High-value, dormant. Conversations with industry people that have gone quiet for more than six months but had real engagement at some point. These are the orphans. These are the ones that surprised me the most when I went through them.
Tier 3: Maintenance. Active relationships with people you talk to regularly. You don’t need to do anything with these — they’re already healthy. But knowing they’re healthy lets you stop worrying about them.
Tier 4: Noise. Spam, fans, family, dead threads. Ignore. Or delete, if you’re feeling Marie Kondo about it.
Going through 774 threads with this filter took me about an hour. Tier 1 had 47 conversations. Tier 2 had 104 — the orphan list, the one that genuinely shocked me. Tier 3 had 57. Tier 4 was everything else.
Tier 2 is where the action is. Tier 1 is where you’re already paying attention. Tier 3 takes care of itself. Tier 4 doesn’t matter. So Tier 2 is the real prize of an export.
What I did with Tier 1
For the high-value recent conversations, I went through each one and asked three questions:
- Is there a reply I owe?
- Is there a commitment I made that I haven’t followed through on?
- Is there a piece of news from my side worth sharing?
If yes to any of these, I either replied immediately or scheduled a specific time to do it. If no, I marked the thread as healthy and moved on.
This took about twenty minutes for forty-seven conversations. Two of them had genuine missed replies. One had a commitment I’d forgotten — I’d promised someone a remix six weeks earlier and hadn’t started it. None of these would have been catastrophic individually. Together they represented a quiet drag on my momentum that I hadn’t even noticed.
What I did with Tier 2 — the orphan list
This was the hard work, and the most rewarding.
For each of the 104 dormant conversations with real career value, I wrote a single line of context: who they were, what we’d talked about, and whether there was any reason to think the relationship was still warm.
Some patterns emerged.
About a third of them had ended in a moment of clear closure — a “thanks, we’ll be in touch” type message that had naturally faded. Reaching back out to these would have been awkward and forced. Skip.
About a third had ended in a moment of mutual stall — both of us had let the conversation drop without resolution. Reaching back out to these was a coin flip: warm if I had a real reason, cold if I didn’t.
The last third had ended with a clear unresolved thread. Someone had asked me something and I hadn’t replied. Or I’d asked them something and they’d replied with an opening I hadn’t picked up. These were the high-leverage targets.
For each of those, I drafted a re-engagement message. Not a generic check-in. A message tied to the specific unresolved thread, plus a piece of news from my end — usually a recent release or a tour announcement. Something that gave them a reason to engage now without making them feel guilty about the gap.
I sent about twenty of these over the course of two weeks, spaced out so I wasn’t bombarding the inbox of any single network cluster. Eleven replied. Three of those replies turned into bookings within a few months. One turned into a release on a label I’d been trying to get on for two years.
Reactivating dormant contacts is, mathematically, the highest-leverage thing a self-managed artist can do. The relationships are pre-built. The trust exists. You’re not cold-pitching; you’re picking up a thread that just needs someone to pick it up.
The maintenance system
After the initial pass, the question becomes: how do you keep this from happening again? Three years from now, will you be sitting in front of another export file with another 100+ orphans?
The system that works for me is roughly this:
A weekly review. Once a week, I look at my CRM (mine is in Notion) and sort by “last contact date.” Anyone in the active or warm tier who hasn’t been touched in three weeks gets a note: do something this week, or move them to long-tail.
A specific time for re-engagement. Tuesday mornings, before any other work, I pick two or three long-tail contacts and write them a real message. Not bulk. Not template. Each one specifically tied to that person and timed for a reason.
A capture habit. Whenever I have a real conversation with someone new — at a festival, in DMs, after a show — they go into the CRM the same week. The system only works if it stays current.
This routine takes maybe an hour a week. The cost of not doing it is, eventually, another orphan list.
A side benefit I didn’t expect: many of those reactivated relationships also reminded me of milestones I’d quietly forgotten — first releases on certain platforms, stream count thresholds I’d passed without marking, gigs that had marked turning points in my career. For the ones that genuinely mattered, I ended up ordering printed milestone frames from Awards For Creators — a small ritual to mark the moments that the export had quietly resurfaced. Not the point of the system, but a nice second-order effect of looking at three years of your career laid out in one view.
What to do this week
If you’re sitting on a fresh Instagram export and don’t know where to start, the practical advice:
- Don’t read everything. Filter into the four tiers above before you read anything carefully.
- Triage Tier 1 first. Twenty minutes of work that pays back immediately.
- Spend real time on Tier 2. This is where the leverage is. Expect it to take a few hours over a couple of weeks.
- Ignore Tier 3 and Tier 4. Don’t let them consume your attention.
- Build the maintenance ritual before you need it. The point of doing this is so you never have to do it again at this scale.
The export sitting on your desktop is, statistically, full of opportunity. But it’s opportunity in raw form — unsorted, unstructured, easy to be overwhelmed by. The work isn’t to read it. The work is to organize it well enough that the value comes to you instead of you having to dig for it.
Once it’s organized, it changes how you think about every relationship in your inbox. The DMs stop being a place to lose things. They start being a place to find them.
Backline handles the four-tier sort automatically — it surfaces your orphan list (Tier 2) the moment you upload your export, so the hard work is done before you’ve even started. Privacy-first: the file is processed over an encrypted connection — only message text is read, never sold, shared, or used to train anything, and visible only to you (a browser-only mode is available if you want zero upload). Built specifically for this problem.