Using X As An Artist
Artists have been using X to try and connect with potential listeners, fans, other artists, and songwriters for years. The idea seems simple. Build a massive list of connections, they’ll love your music, and you live happily ever after.
Unfortunately, there’s a problem. At least one.
Audience.
Table of Contents
X, Audiences and Accounts
X does not split your audience, except through tags. Most artists have at least 3 audiences when they post.
- Friends, Family & Work Colleagues (Yes I know, technically 3 audiences, but I’m trying to simplify this!)
- Other Artists
- Listeners
Using X as an artist you have to give yourself the best chance of speaking to these audiences effectively, you would be best advised to have 2 accounts on X (at least!):
- A Personal Account
- An Artist Account
The Scatter-Gun Approach To Promotion
This approach is often used for Brand Awareness advertising. In the past, this was often used by record labels with big budgets to waste. It is hard to qualify because the effectiveness of such promotion is hard to track reliably.
Targeting your audience can be decided very approximately, by the selection of the place you promote. For example on a billboard at a busy intersection, an Ad in a newspaper, an Ad in a heavy metal magazine, or a Billboard opposite the concert venue during the performance of a known band in the same genre as you.
The effective ROI (Return On Investment) is typically low and hard to predict.
Laser Focused Promotion
The more focused your audience targeting, and the easier it is to trace, the more you will benefit from that promotion. Try to reach specific audiences. Using digital means to reach them lets you be really specific and you can measure performance pretty exactly (although in thw world of paid ads, Ad Blocker technology constantly tries to make this much harder).
The Problem(s)
Using X as an artist, the artists try to quickly build large(-ish) follower lists with almost no thought to the kind of list they are building or the nature of the people who are on that list. This almost always results in very, very poor engagement, with incredibly low response rates. The symptoms are easy to spot.
They build their list doing the same things a lot of their fellow artists do. They post regularly with a few likes and comments from a few regulars. Some of those might be other artists who they have a formal, informal, or tacit agreement for mutual support. Meanwhile, engagement doesn’t really seem to grow. When they release a song the results are disappointing. Not only do they fail to generate any buzz, they don’t get anywhere near enough comments and likes considering the number of followers they have. Worse, they get very, very poor numbers of plays, or downloads.
Worse, without ever really questioning their overall approach, or their tactics, they more or less repeat. Every once and so often a new technique or trend catches their eye, and they try it, with largely similar results.
I see many artists on X, caught in an endless cycle of hope and disappointment. Some lay it out on X, repeating a cycle of complaints, moans, disappointment, and blame.
There’s a whole list of problems right there.
Follow For Follow (F4F)
If you are using X as an artist and planning to grow your fanbase, F4F is a REALLY BAD IDEA.
Let me repeat that more directly:
Don’t go anywhere near F4F
It’s a great way to kill your music.
Alternatives To Using X As An Artist
Using X as an artist might seem a useful place to reach out to a new bunch of people to add to your audience. Hopefully, an audience that might be interested in your music, and a place to grow your fan base. To do that effectively you need a clear purpose, you need to be cautious and build your audience correctly.
The reason that you need such a division is so that listeners (potential fans) don’t hear your experiments, they don’t hear mistakes. They don’t hear other artists taking your song apart. They don’t see you discussing marketing or frustration at the slow progress.
Dedicated Music Community
There are a great many artists on X, but don’t be tempted to treat it like a music community. It is a social networking site. The interests and needs of other artists are not the same as the needs and interests of listeners and potential fans.
Other artists and musicians relate to music differently from general listeners and fans. For example, they already know a lot about being in a band, performing on stage, etc. There is less of a sense of wonderment or magic. They truly understand the amount of hard work involved. They might like a song, but often they are taking it apart in their mind, poking it and prodding it to see how it works, and what they can learn from it. They do that with songs they don’t like too. They can be listeners, fans even, but that is only a small part of it. The magic for them is, in part, by knowing how it works.
Music Forums, Facebook Groups
Don’t treat X like a private music community. It isn’t. Again, no one said you would find everything you need on one platform. Each social network is different. Each has it’s advantages and disadvantages.
X – useful for reaching an audience of listeners, though it isn’t straight forwards because of the number of artists using it as an easy platform to build a list of followers. It is a Follow For Follow (F4F) paradise. Avoid such use like the plague. It might seem easy to meet artists, but it is not a place to get critique or chat about the business of music. Sure, you can do that there but it is the opposite from recommended. If you use it for meeting artists you cannot use it to reach listeners. You know you have it wrong if you have a large list of followers and very low engagement around your music.
Facebook – Useful for reaching music listeners, though often from a slightly older demographic. You can use closed club environments such as Facebook Groups. Although you can again talk to artists, even within these groups, the groups themselves are pretty terrible. They don’t have categories, they don’t have threaded discussions. This makes Facebook a nightmare to find old posts. You have to do it by manual trawling. Any older than 24 hours and you really have your work cut out to find it.
LinkedIn – Good for reaching other people working in the music industry and trying to network with them. Not very good for reaching a listener audience or for threaded discussion.
Music Maker Forums – Ideal for use for networking with musicians, in the early stages of experimenting with ideas. Forums are excellent communities for artists to network, and to get critique. Forums have threaded discussions making them excellent for networking with other musicians, and for being learning and knowledge exchange platforms. Not biased at all *whistles* but our music forums are exactly what musicians should be looking for for networking, learning and critique… as well as a bit of fun with other musicians.
Music Fan Forums – These were useful at one point but there are few really active ones remaining. These were useful for reaching listeners.
YouTube Communities – Excellent for keeping engaged with and developing the relationship with existing fans. YouTube is the top platform for music discovery and an excellent platform for keeping in touch with listeners. While you might use videos for learning songs etc, don’t use YouTube for networking conversations or critique. Of course you can upload videos as unlisted and then get critique on Music Maker Forums
Quality Of Listeners
High Quality Listeners
A high quality of prospect fan would be someone who matches your ideal fan profile. There may be many details that make up that fan profile. For example:
- 18-25
- Female
- Fan of Artist-Name
- Member of fan club for Artist-Name
- Engages regularly in their community
- Regularly downloads and streams music
- Shares posts of Artist-Name on her social streams etc.
Someone who met this profile is far more likely to become a fan of you when your music is similar to “Artist-Name”.
Your full fan profile might list several similar artist names and a lot of criteria.
There are a bunch of ways to target your ideal potential audience, but that is outside the scope of this article.
Poor Quality Listeners
An example of poor quality listeners would be an audience built using F4F. Such an audience would be:
- Unengaged
- Almost impossible to engage in a meaningful way with your music
- Damaging to your reputation
Curated Online Presence
Some artists (mistakenly) argue about giving fans a view of who they really are, about not dividing themselves or hiding stuff away. Such artists fundamentally misunderstand “opening up” to let fans see vulnerability etc. It’s a bogus self-delusion.
We all edit ourselves. Everyone, not just artists. From the clothes we wear, the way we talk, and the way we move… we rarely show ourselves, warts and all. At least to everybody. We tend to reserve that for those who know us better.
By all means, give people glimpses behind the curtain, but accept what we present is stage-managed. We select what others see. That is critical for artists. The point is not just to show our vulnerability etc. It is choosing when to show it, showing how much we are vulnerable, and what we are vulnerable about.
If you want to show a truly unfiltered view, live-stream your life, 24/7. Show when you behave like an ass when you humiliate yourself when you are horrible to people as well as all the exciting glamorous stuff. If you are not doing that, then you get the point of editing… you just kid yourself on that you are “more authentic”. Maybe you think that equates to more worthy?
The more you opt for putting it all out there, the closer you are to being a reality TV star, and the less credible an artist you become.
Dedicated Artist Account
With a dedicated artist account, you can keep your messaging tuned into the actual audience for your music. You know, people who might actually be interested in your music and you, the artist. You can keep the listeners happy. They actually want to hear you talk about your music!
Listeners are not like your family. They are not like other artists (unless they actually are another artist!). They enjoy music on a different level. It’s how music makes them feel, how appealing the image of the artist is. Interest is partly sustained by the magical, mystical element. The wonderment. The connection. They want to believe that for you, Music is natural and effortless. Easy yet deeply meaningful. The last thing they need is to have that rug ripped out from underneath them. They lack the vision other musicians have. So when you present a half-finished work, an idea, even if you tell them it is a work in progress. They treat everything as finished work.
Keeping The Magic
As mentioned earlier, you can show your humanity, your frustrations, etc, but choose what you show for good reason. Be authentic in what you show, ie they are not manufactured, but they are selected or not selected for the showreel. Let fans peek behind the curtain, don’t pull the curtain down, or at least if you do, let it only be the first curtain that is pulled down, not the only curtain.
Think also of impact. Imagine a horror film that starts with you seeing the sets being built and the actors arriving in tee shirts and jeans, to go through the wardrobe and makeup. Chances are you will find it harder to suspend disbelief, harder for you to connect with the characters, harder for you to get caught up, harder for you to feel fear… because all you see is a costume and makeup.
As an artist, you ask people to believe in your stage persona, even if that stage persona IS your real personality… the audience needs to believe. That way they actually make a stronger connection to your music. Just like suspending disbelief (even when we rationally know it to be a film set with actors in costumes and makeup) helps with the enjoyment of a movie, believing in an artist helps you enjoy the show, the album, and the video.
Personal Account
When using X as an artist it is worth noting that friends and family are unlikely to be your natural audience. Your grandmother is not likely to be a death metal fan. They are, however, likely to be fans of you personally.
The point is that if it wasn’t you playing your music, most of your friends and family wouldn’t tune in to it. It wouldn’t make it to their personal playlists. Their motivation to follow you and interact with your posts is entirely different from your typical fan. For a start, with every release, a fan looks forward to hearing your new song. They will listen to it over and over again and they will share it with other people who seem remotely interested.
On the other hand, your family starts off full of good intentions. Even if they are initially impressed, if they are not lit up every time you release a new song, the relentless posting of your music will get old.
Taking the perspective of an actual fan of your music, if you have a one account suits all uses approach, your music fans would soon get fed up with your family posting about family stuff.
Apart from anything else, with such distinct audiences, with each post, you annoy one lot or the other. They start tuning you out, ignoring you… they become disengaged.
Not only that, the X algorithm spots that your X audience is disengaging and they show less of your posts to others connected to your account and to the friends of friends. Pretty quickly you have effectively shadow-banned yourself and only a small group of regulars will respond to your posts.
Do yourself a favor. Use your personal account for communicating with friends and family about events in your day to day life.
Why We All Need A Taddah!
There are other reasons that we need a taddah moment. As an artist, we need to make an impact. A big splash gets noticed, so we hold back and release in a coordinated way. Being noticed is fundamental. If you drip out new ideas, they barely get noticed. Think of it like a child you see every day. You barely notice the growth. Every once and so often you might become aware of the change of the scale of change, but usually, it has much less impact. However, if you don’t see a child for 6 months or a year, the change has a lot more impact. You notice the change.
It’s not about time. It’s about the amount of change.
If you change a bit, by bit, by bit in the public eye, they barely notice the growth. However, save the changes up, making the alterations behind the curtain, then hit the stage with a “Taddah!”, and they can’t help but notice.
Final Thoughts
Using X as an artist is a tricky proposal. First you need to get in your head, that it is the quality of the listener that gives you the maximum chance of building a fanbase. If you are simply driven by numbers, then you are building a vanity audience. Such a vanity audience is a delusion because they largely don’t care about you.
With scatter-gun audience targeting, you need to reach a huge number of people just to get a tiny number who are interested.
In truth you do not need to build a large following. The base number means very little. You need to build a large number of high-quality listeners. Large numbers of poor-quality listeners are a useless distraction.
Focus on talking to a tightly focused audience. Dissuade anyone from following you who doesn’t actively like your music.
On X, actively try to find your real audience. Reject short-term vanity numbers. Such boast fests are a waste of your time and money and only gets you viewed and treated like a spammer.
Good luck with promoting your music. Remember, come and talk to us on Songstuff and we can see how we can help you.
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