Build Your Brand, Feed the Machine
On social media, the metrics that measure nothing, and what arts funding got wrong
For roughly a decade, the music industry's answer to the existential question of how independent artists survive in a streaming economy was: social media. Build a following. Post consistently. Go viral if at all possible, ideally between Tuesday and Thursday when the algorithm is allegedly most receptive. The advice was dispensed by marketing consultants, arts funding bodies, music industry peak organisations, and well-meaning managers with the confidence of people describing a strategy that had worked for someone, somewhere, once.
The strategy was, at best, a lottery with a very small prize pool. At worst — and the evidence increasingly suggests the worst is the more accurate framing — it was a decade-long transfer of value from artists to platforms, dressed up as opportunity and enforced, with remarkable effectiveness, by the funding infrastructure that was supposed to support the sector.
Something is shifting. Not quickly enough, and not without considerable rear-guard defence from the institutions that built their assessment frameworks around digital metrics. But the reckoning is here, and it is worth understanding precisely what went wrong, because the same logic that produced social media as arts marketing strategy is still embedded in the systems that determine who gets funded and who does not.
Start with the numbers, because the numbers are useful.
Facebook's organic reach for business pages — including artist pages — has declined to approximately 0.07% of followers per post.(1) On a page with a thousand followers, this means roughly seven people see any given piece of content without paid promotion. Instagram operates on similar logic, deprioritising organic reach in favour of paid advertising placement. TikTok offers higher organic reach but on a platform whose algorithm is sufficiently volatile that visibility one week provides no reliable indicator of visibility the next, and whose ownership structure has created regulatory uncertainty in multiple markets.
Against this backdrop, consider the streaming economics. Research published in 2023 found that 90% of artists generating over 100,000 Spotify streams annually earned less than $5,000 from those streams.(2) The median streaming royalty on the platform's pro-rata model is a fraction of a cent per play, and the model is structured to reward artists with the largest global audience — which means, in practice, to reward the artists who least need the subsidy. An artist with a passionate local following of several thousand people, playing to full rooms and selling merchandise and records, may generate streaming numbers that look modest against the algorithmic benchmarks used to assess 'reach' while actually having a more economically sustainable and culturally significant practice than many artists with ten times the follower count.
The point is not that these platforms have no value. It is that the value they provide to artists is substantially smaller, and substantially less reliable, than the industry spent a decade insisting it was — and that the costs were systematically ignored.
A 2023 study by the Australian Psychological Society found that 67% of musicians reported heightened anxiety and self-esteem issues directly linked to maintaining a social media presence.(3) This is not a fringe finding. It sits alongside a substantial body of international research on the relationship between platform engagement, algorithmic feedback mechanisms, and psychological harm across user populations. The platforms were designed, with the assistance of behavioural psychologists, to maximise engagement through variable reward mechanisms — the same principles that make poker machines effective. The fact that artists were not just users of these systems but were required to perform on them, with their professional viability understood to depend on algorithmic approval, compounded the harm.
The broader cultural reckoning with this is now visible in the data. 57% of Gen Z reported taking a social media detox in 2023, rising to 63% in 2024.(4) Oxford University Press named 'brain rot' its 2024 Word of the Year, capturing something that the research had been documenting for years: the cognitive and psychological cost of compulsive platform engagement. Digital minimalism is emerging as a self-conscious cultural movement among the people who grew up most thoroughly inside these systems and understand their mechanics most intimately. When the generation that built its social life on these platforms begins consciously retreating from them, it is not a trend. It is testimony.
Daniel Ek's €600 million investment in Helsing, a military AI company, produced its own version of this testimony from the music side.(5) Artists including Deerhoof pulled their catalogues from Spotify in response, with a statement describing the platform as 'an already widely hated data-mining scam masquerading as a music company.' The language is blunt, but the underlying argument is not hysterical: a platform whose founder is investing its profits in autonomous weapons technology is a platform whose business interests have become legible in ways that complicate the 'we're just connecting artists and fans' positioning.
Graphics attribution: Leaf & Core
Australia's decision in 2024 to legislate against social media access for under-sixteens — the first such legislation in the world, passed with 77% public support — marks something beyond a policy intervention. It marks a cultural acknowledgement that the framing of these platforms as neutral infrastructure for connection was always a category error. They are commercial products, designed to capture and monetise attention, and the question of whose interests they serve deserves a more honest answer than the industry has generally been willing to provide.
None of this would be quite so damaging to independent artists if the institutions designed to support them had not, over the same period, embedded social media metrics into their assessment frameworks as a primary indicator of artistic viability.
The logic was understandable, in the way that many bad ideas are understandable in retrospect. Funding bodies needed measurable indicators of reach and engagement. Social media provided numbers. The numbers looked objective. The fact that the numbers measured something other than what they appeared to measure — that follower counts could be purchased, that engagement could be manufactured, that the platforms' own incentive structures meant that the artists most rewarded by algorithmic visibility were not necessarily the artists with the most significant practice — was not, for a long time, part of the official conversation.
The consequences were predictable and are now documented. Independent artists in experimental, niche, or locally-specific genres — the artists whose work is most likely to represent genuine cultural innovation and least likely to translate into algorithmic traction — were systematically disadvantaged in funding assessments. Older artists, artists from regional areas, artists from communities without established social media literacy infrastructure, artists who chose not to perform their labour and their vulnerability for platform engagement were penalised for the choice. Artists who were good at social media were rewarded, regardless of whether their artistic practice merited the reward. The system selected for a skill that had nothing to do with making art and called it evidence of professional capacity.
The Canada Council for the Arts has moved to address this directly, introducing funding streams that evaluate community impact, artistic risk, and cultural innovation rather than audience size.(6) It is not a complete solution — the question of how you measure cultural significance without resorting to proxies of some kind is genuinely difficult — but it represents a willingness to ask whether the current proxies are measuring what we actually care about. The answer is clearly no. Artistic innovation, risk-taking, and genuine community embeddedness are rarely reflected in social media numbers. They are often inversely reflected in them.
The practical questions are not impossible. How does this artist contribute to their local scene? Have they built relationships with underserved communities, developed new live formats, supported other artists in ways that don't show up in a metrics dashboard? Has their work taken artistic risks, challenged conventions, developed over time in ways that indicate a genuine practice rather than a content strategy? Do they have a vision that extends beyond the next platform cycle? These are assessable questions. They require assessors who are actually familiar with the sector — who go to gigs, who read the reviews, who know the ecosystem — rather than assessors who can run a spreadsheet. This costs more than running a spreadsheet. It is what proper sector support looks like.
The question of what replaces social media as an arts marketing strategy is less complicated than it is sometimes made to appear, because the answer is largely what existed before social media and continued to exist alongside it for artists who never abandoned it: genuine community engagement, local relationships, live music, independent radio, direct artist-to-fan communication through channels that the artist owns and that do not extract a rent in the form of algorithmic compliance.
Bandcamp has demonstrated, at meaningful scale, that direct purchase relationships between artists and fans are commercially viable — the platform has generated over a billion dollars in direct artist revenue since its founding.(7) The model is not complicated: fans pay artists directly for music and merchandise, the platform takes a modest percentage, and the relationship is between the person who made the thing and the person who wants it, without an advertising ecosystem in the middle extracting the majority of the value. This is not a radical concept. It is how most economic relationships worked before the attention economy decided that the product should be the person.
The cooperative model extends this logic to the streaming infrastructure itself. When the people whose work generates the value also own the distribution system, the incentive structure changes. Algorithmic decisions are answerable to the artists who are affected by them. Revenue distribution is a governance question, not a product decision made by a company whose interests are not aligned with the artists it hosts. Success is measured by genuine fan support rather than by metrics designed to sell advertising. None of this eliminates the difficulty of building a sustainable artistic career. It changes whose interests the infrastructure is designed to serve.
The social media era is not over. The platforms are still large, still influential, still capable of delivering genuine visibility to artists who manage to navigate their systems effectively. But the consensus that they represented the primary and necessary infrastructure for independent arts marketing — that consensus is broken, and it has been broken by the people who were supposed to benefit from it most. When artists are pulling their catalogues in protest, when the generation that grew up on these platforms is consciously retreating from them, when the Australian government is legislating against their access for young people, and when the mental health data is as consistent as it is — that is not a sign that the strategy needs refinement. It is a sign that the strategy was wrong.
The interesting question now is whether the institutions that enforced that strategy — the funding bodies, the peak organisations, the industry advisors who built their credibility on digital marketing expertise — are willing to move as fast as the culture they are supposed to support. The answer, historically, is no. Institutions move slower than the sectors they serve. But the gap between what the evidence shows and what the assessment frameworks still reward is now wide enough to be embarrassing, and embarrassment, in the right institutional cultures, is a form of pressure.
The artists who will build the next version of the independent music sector are mostly not the ones with the largest follower counts. They are the ones who kept building genuine relationships with real people in real places, kept making work that mattered to specific communities, and declined to spend the last decade performing for algorithms that, as it turns out, were not performing for them.
That should have been the advice from the beginning. Better late than never is a low bar for sector support. But here we are, and the direction, at least, is becoming clearer.
References and inspirations
1. On organic reach decline across major platforms, see HubSpot State of Marketing Report 2024 and Social Media Examiner Industry Report 2024. The 0.07% figure for Facebook organic reach is drawn from multiple sources tracking the decline since Facebook's 2018 algorithm changes prioritising 'meaningful social interactions' — which in practice meant deprioritising business and creator pages in favour of paid content.
2. Streaming royalty data from the Trichordist 'Streaming Price Bible' (2023) and Music Business Worldwide analysis of Spotify royalty distributions. The 90% figure for artists earning under $5,000 from 100,000+ streams is consistent across multiple independent analyses of the pro-rata royalty model.
3. Australian Psychological Society, survey data on musician mental health and social media, 2023. The findings are consistent with international research on performance-based social media engagement and psychological harm, including work by Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt on platform effects across user populations.
4. Gen Z social media detox statistics from GWI (Global Web Index) 2023–2024 research. Oxford University Press Word of the Year announcement, November 2024. The digital minimalism movement is documented in Cal Newport's work and in ongoing sociological research on voluntary technology reduction.
5. Daniel Ek's Helsing investment was reported across music industry press in 2022–2023, with the Deerhoof catalogue removal and statement documented in Pitchfork and The Guardian. The investment amount of €600 million represents a significant personal commitment from Spotify's founder and CEO.
6. Canada Council for the Arts funding framework revisions, documented in their Strategic Plan 2021–2026 and subsequent program guidelines. The shift toward community impact and artistic innovation metrics has been noted in comparative arts funding policy literature.
7. Bandcamp cumulative artist revenue figures are published by the platform and have been independently reported in music industry press. The billion-dollar threshold was reached in 2022. Epic Games' acquisition and subsequent sale of Bandcamp, and the platform's ongoing operational model, have complicated its status as a straightforward success story — but the direct purchase model's viability is demonstrated by the revenue figure regardless.