How Social Media is Destroying Creativity

I've been going back and forth with the idea that social media is super important as a musician, creative, artist, etc. but what if you find yourself spending so much time on trying to get your followers up on Instagram and still don't crack the magic code?

I honestly would prefer to spend the majority of my time practicing, writing music, arranging music, booking gigs and working on my craft than having to worry what is "acceptable" to post. OR if something is going to go viral. 

A lot of venues, labels and people who represent artists nowadays find that having a huge following on Instagram, Facebook, Spotify and other social media platforms is way more important than what the music actually sounds like. Or as they like to call it having a "visual brand". 

What happened to the days when social media didn't exist? Artists were still struggling but now someone who is a hobbyist, not a professional musician, gets signed to a label because they have 14k followers on Instagram. Yet they don't perform anywhere and when they do perform, they have 10 people in the audience because guess what? Their followers are musicians. 

It'll be interesting to see the dynamic when social media comes to an end, because we all know that this wont last. Something better will come along in the future that we will need to figure out how to work to our advantage. Maybe there will be a robot that is your personal assistant and analyzes the best people for you to work with based on your every day life? Who knows! But all I know is that we need to get out of this mindset that social media is the most important thing for someones career to be successful. 

There are so many hardworking mofos out there that deserve a shot. And I'm not just saying this for myself, but I see all these talented musicians in NYC who work their butts off and still they aren't signed to a label or have a team behind them because they don't have a certain "look". GTFO. It's the label and teams responsibility to work on getting the branding out when they take them on, not before. We work on getting the music out into the world and performing as much as we can, the branding should come afterwords. Obviously, we shouldn't look like slobs when we perform or if we post a pic of ourselves we should have a vibe but other than that, the marketing and branding needs to be something we work on together. Especially since most of us musicians don't know how to do this! 

Do you have a story you'd like to share about this? 

Please send an email to me and I'll share as many stories I can so we can get this point across. 

I've been trying to figure out this social media realm by following Gary Vee (who has many success stories based on his book "Crush it") and also Rick Barker (who has a webinar for musicians regularly on the updates for social media marketing).

Here's a video to watch to get you thinking a bit more about this: