The Online Avalanche
The Internet is Becoming Too Much for Musicians
It’s always been a point of pride for me to do our social media/internet stuff. As a rule, artists either post bland show announcements or just spam their pages with those hey-look-at-me-i’m-awesome photos of them in front of a large audience. And hey, there’s room for those things, but there is absolutely no originality or personality to any of them. You get to know an artist and you discover an interesting, uniquely fun person, and you go to their FB page and it’s all “BRIGHTON! We are playing tonight! Come to the show!”
Contrast:
IN my not-very-humble opinion, THAT’s how you do it. The foot one was literally just a dare in the van, we’re bored on the 6th hour to Cleveland, someone makes a joke about selling foot photos, and then someone ramps it up by saying we should do it as a band, then someone dares me to put that on Twitter, and kaboom. *french chef’s kiss* Magnifique!
But here’s the problem, folks, and the reason why this is all likely to start coming to a crashing halt, or at least seriously decline.
Let’s review, in 2024, what the “internet management” for a band looks like. In order to run a band’s online stuff, you now are expected to:
do facebook posts,
make sure there’s a fb event for every show, which there often isn’t even when promoters are making $100
making sure you are a co-host on all facebook events so that your fans can see them
run promotional ads on facebook, geotarget all posts and ads so that Piotr in Warsaw doesn’t wonder why you are asking him to come to your show in Tacoma, Washington. Try to ignore the weirdness involved in paying for your own ads when you’re also paying a promoter.
do Instagram, which requires you to learn the constantly changing stories/posts/reels/editing stuff and to come up with images to put up there, all because the billionaire lich-lord techbros who run the world learned they could make more money when we doomscroll images and videos rather than text
do instagram ads, with all the geo-targeting and promotional stuff above
make twitter posts, edgy, relatable, etc, see above
digital royalty management, making sure that when people cover your songs or play your songs in various locations you get paid (via complicated uploading/verification processes).
Possibly the worst one: graphic design for shows and events where the images must be custom sized to each fucking platform, so you actually have to make three different images for each goddamned fucking thing you have, aaargh, why, why, why, why…
and NOW, tiktok, the lich-lords’ most recent addition to the pile of shit, which requires an entirely different kind of content (video), and where a person essentially has to have split brain on tour, one part of their brain dedicated to actually being in the world and another part of their brain advance-monitoring their experiences for upcoming tiktok-able content. Totally normal mental state to be in, nothing unhealthy there. Thank god King Louie has been doing this for us.
And this is in addition to all regular band stuff: booking shows online, booking accom online, booking travel online, etc.
Notice what’s missing from all of this?
Oh yeah, not staring at a screen and instead making music!
It’s too much, man. It is now totally rational for musicians to say “oh yeah, I’d love to do the socials stuff but I have no time for that!” Because they don’t. And I’m old enough to remember when it didn’t exist, maybe back in 2010 you made the occasional FB post and invited your fans to the events with a single click, the end.
Anyone want to take some of this over for a little money? That is, until AI takes over and does everything for us, including writing songs about barfing from too much cider? HMU, LMK.
I was a social media manager for a chain of bars here in Ann Arbor for awhile. It’s a ton of work, but I’d love to do it for you guys because it’s different when you care about the thing you are promoting. This is me throwing my hat in the ring—I’m interested!
Man oh man, does this sound familiar. It's the same rigamarole in publishing – even if you're lucky enough to sign with a publisher who has a marketing department, a lot of that falls to the author as they're the one with a social media following. My publisher does not have a marketing department, which is why two years have elapsed between finishing Vol.1 and starting Vol.2. But boy have I Engaged Online, and have the burnout to prove it! It seems like the same deal for most artists online, with a few medium-specific variations, but the same overall trend of juggling a full-time social media management job with attempts to be creative. Feels like spitting into the wind most of the time. I really hope you can find someone to help shoulder the burden!