Don’t use paid ads, part 3
Continuing our talk on the peaking of social media and business promotion, I thought I’d highlight some interesting macro trends today, as food for thought, along with some creative marketing alternatives.
Let’s look at where the TikTokification of social media is taking all of these big social media platforms. Social media is less and less about following your favorite creators, nowadays. Instead, it’s quickly moving towards an all-knowing algorithmic feed that is totally creator agnostic.
Pretty soon, we won’t be following anyone on social media, because it won’t be necessary: the algorithm will have completely replaced you curating your own feed.
Why bother taking the time to remember whom you’re a fan of, when you can just rely on an app that already knows exactly what you want to see, before you do? It’s the ultimate in quick, easy, shallow convenience.
Most people using TikTok today never get off of the “For You” tab. Most people using Spotify today never explore past the most basic, surface-level playlists, curated for them by the platform. These are not the kind of music fans that likely ever be the kinds of true fans who will choose to support your work directly.
And that’s OK! There’s many other marketing strategies that we can use to find and connect with our true fans as musical artists, and there’s a long history of high-quality marketing work done in this area that you can use for inspiration.
Pirelli Tires gets creative
Try looking into the long-running ad campaign that Annie Leibowitz made for Pirelli Tires back in 2000 with dancers from the Mark Morris Dance Group. It’s one example of the intersection of art and business that feels much more art than it does business, which is especially refreshing as it was funded by such a large corporation. Here’s a sampling of the art from that campaign:
Annie Liebowitz’s artistic ad campaign for Pirelli Tires.
While you might not find every large corporation sees value in something like this, there’s no doubt that pictures done in such an artistic manner stand out boldly amongst the sea of all-too-familiar and overly vanilla corporate marketing efforts. As a smaller artist, you can take a similar, more creative-forward approach to your marketing, and expect it to stand out as well.
Here’s some other creative marketing ideas.
Creative marketing inspiration from independent artists
The songwriter and author Patti Smith has been using Substack for several years now, and she uses it as an ongoing behind the scenes creative journal that doubles as a marketing platform for both her books and her musical work.
For several years, the Scottish indie musician King Creosote ran an analog postal letter service sending handmade zines out to only his most dedicated fans that found his website on their own, and signed up. So, this kind of direct-to-fan, more genuine marketing curation doesn’t have to be digital in nature at all. Analog letters, while not very scalable, are a great way to maintain a genuine connection with your biggest fans.
You might think carefully about the analog marketing revival: vinyl sales have also been increasing in number steadily every year over the last two decades.
The tour CD is another creative marketing idea. It doesn’t have to actually be a CD-try a cassette tape! A tour CD is a hyper-limited recording of just a few songs, given away only on one specific tour and not available anywhere else. It’s a great opportunity to make use out those random, informally recorded songs sitting on your hard drive that didn’t quite make the cut for your paid studio sessions, but you’re still fond of.
A tour CD works great when it’s low-quality, informal demos of your work, and it doesn’t have to be long; even just 2-4 songs on a handmade CD or cassette works. These are going out to only your most die-hard fans that are happy to hear anything you do, even if it’s rough, so there’s no need to spend a bunch of time or money polishing these up. A tour CD is a fantastic way to say thank you to the people who made the time to come out and see you on tour.
Whatever you choose to do, marketing-wise, make sure it’s genuine, interesting, and unique to you. Staying off of social media can be a great way to achieve this, and it’s a two for one, because social media platforms don’t really care about the work of artists anyway.
What social media platforms care about
Remember: social media platforms (like Spotify) do not care about your work as an individual artist, especially if you’re an independent artist.
They only care about what is most popular and most mainstream, what keeps the most people using their platforms as often as possible, and the content they can get creators to give to them for free or cheap. That’s not a very fun game to play, if you’re the one who’s doing the creating.
It’s not all doom and gloom though! There’s two flip sides to this coin.
Focus on creativity and value over volume
Content algorithms, while becoming creator agnostic, are also becoming much better at surfacing high-quality indie content from smaller creators at the same time.
You don’t need a million followers or a million likes on a post for your stuff to get out there, as was the case in the past. You don’t need to be posting 5 times a day either.
How do I know this is the case? It’s the value proposition behind what TikTok is, right now. Big brands and mass market corporations fail miserably at TikTok marketing, because that platform isn’t about them. It’s about random indies and individuals doing their own thing. If you’re an indie posting very high quality stuff, it might make sense to at least give TikTok a try and see if you like it.
Of course, there’s a flip side to using TikTok, too, as illustrated in this excellent short video by Youtube’s Ryan George:
TikTok, internet videos, and small artists.
The TikTok ban of 2024 is another example of the constant change that’s inherent in the marketing field, especially when it comes to social media. Social media moves fast, and the constant changes can be confusing and exhausting. If that annoys you (as it does many artists who’ve really got better things to do), you’ve always got marketing options outside of social media entirely.
Moving away from social media marketing
The social media marketing game isn’t a game you have to play at all.
That’s because I don’t think most people really want this drab beige algorithmic future our big tech platforms have been trying to sell us. How many of the limitless options Netflix presents you with are things you actually want to see?
Most people don’t actually want the artwork in their lives to look like algorithmically made, mass-produced IKEA blah. They value their own unique tastes, and the unique creative taste and skills of other humans-as well they should!
I think the future is smaller and more focused online communities, because now we’ve all seen the downsides of corporate-curated, limitless (yet low quality) connections between humans.
The original hypothesis behind social media was wrong: the highest number of connections between the largest number of people does not make the world a better place. More focused connections between smaller groups of people, made at higher quality, just might.
So, get thinking on how you can build a small, genuine, and focused fanbase around your artwork. Here’s some more ideas:
Email lists.
In-person local community events.
Curated podcasts, both audio and video.
Local press and local television channels.
YouTube channels.
Handwritten letters, cards, or zines.
Creative journals i.e. personal blogs or a platform approach like Substack.
In-person workshops or classes.
I’d pick just one two out of this list to start off with, do a really great job with them, and see how it goes.
Focusing on one-to-one, personal connections with your marketing
I think that real connections made between smaller groups of real people will always make for a much more colorful way to live, and a much more genuine way to do business. The more the faceless algorithms dominate, the more clear that becomes to more people, and back again the pendulum swings.
There’s always going to be groups of people who want to curate their own real, direct connections with others, without dumb algorithms in the middle messing it all up.
I personally think an email list can be a great tool for doing that kind of thing; it’s a great multi-modal form of marketing that, when done right, is the digital equivalent of sending someone a nice handwritten postcard.
But, there’s lots of different ways you can do this, from podcasts to YouTube to personal blogs to Substack, and many others. Focus on showing the behind-the-scenes stuff, unique to you, that can’t be commodified. Show your unique artistic process, and discuss the unique inspirations that inform your creative work.
No matter what tool you use to get your stuff out there, make sure that what you put out is always authentic, creative, and uniquely you.
