February 17, 2015 Perception or Progress?
In an internet-centric world where everything is laid on the table for all to see, perception is something that we very much like to control as musicians, and something that we’ve found a lot of different ways to manipulate to our advantages. In an effort to make things easier on ourselves, we’ve been led down so many dead-end alleys that it’s incredible that we continue to fall for them. I count myself in this.
The first one for my generation of artists was Myspace. Countless hours were spent growing networks only to see them crumble into nothingness as the pendulum swung away from that paradigm. Even worse for those who paid money for designers to make their personalised profiles look the business.
So we all swarmed to Facebook, good old trusty Facebook, where EVERYONE was, and indeed still is. Ask yourself, how many times have you heard (or even used) the line “Check us out on Facebook!” between songs in a band’s set, or as a first step to entice new fans? It all seemed fantastic, again networks grew and grew, and then the algorithms came into play. Now you have to pay to get anywhere near the type of exposure your own page would get you before.
Whilst the vast majority (if not all) of us are still making do with our increasingly crippled Facebook pages, we’ve also moved on to Twitter, and made sure to build our networks there too. I read an article today (source) that revealed that Twitter are testing out new algorithms to potentially add or hide posts from accounts people follow.
Perception comes into play when you become increasingly aware that you really have to build up networks of thousands on these platforms if you’re to be taken seriously, so much so that we’ve become slaves to these platforms, feeding them our content and practically begging people to visit us on them. Wouldn’t our time be better spent building our own? I’m not talking about creating a new social network here, I’m talking about mailing lists. Whatever platform you use, you can be sure that you are not the one who owns the connection to your fans. That’s a very dangerous thing, and it’s a lesson we all should have learned by now.
Sometimes things really do come full circle; mailing lists were used before any of these social networks, and technology has advanced to the point where they’re more useful now than they ever were. Think about it, you have to pay to be seen on Facebook, but if you send a mailout to someone’s email address, they’ll get it in their inbox, generally on their smartphone wherever they are. All of them. There are some great companies out there that cater for your needs if you don’t want the chore of handling it manually (my personal favourite is Campaign Monitor), and they include some fantastic customisable templates for you to play with.
In short, I can’t emphasise it enough. Whatever social network you prefer, and no matter how good you think it is for you now, there will come a point when if you become dependent on it, the owners will cash in. Own your own networks and you are the one who cashes in.
Reader Comments (2)
I came to this realization finally a few months ago. There is so much demand for attention on these networks, it's no longer worth the time in most cases. I began investing more time in radioairplay.com, where I can see who hears my music, engage with them directly, and request their email address directly, if they haven't already sent it to me.
The principle actually applies to all businesses, not just artists: if you invest time, energy, and money in building a network that is important to your success, then you need to own that network. Networks are a form of asset.
You wouldn't pay to build and maintain a house that someone else owns, in exchange for the right to live in it but only if the owner feels like letting you live there - and the owner can change his mind any time, with no warning. So why would you invest and build a network that you don't actually own and can be taken from you (or rendered worthless) at any time, at someone else's whim?
When we designed our platform (it's new, just opening to artists this week), we took that very seriously. Professional artists are businesses as well as artists, and they need to make smart investments of their time, energy, and money. Investing in something you don't own and can "lose" at someone else's whim is a terrible business move. On RepX, not only do artists own their network (as in "it's yours, take it with you and use it how you want"), we also make it easy for them to use that network with integrated email tools... so you get the benefits of the network platform as well as individual ownership.
If you're using FB or Twitter (and you almost certainly are), you should start thinking about ways to convert those networks into YOUR network.