If a tree falls in the woods and isn’t posted on Facebook, does it make a sound?

I’ve made the decision to stop promoting my music on Social Media… or more specifically, commercial, for-profit, ad-driven social media. This is kind of an experiment - I’m going to try operating without it, and hope that someone may still listen to my music. To be honest I was never a great social media marketeer anyway, so there’s less at stake than it might seem. But if I’m going to engage in the rather entitled act of making music and sharing it with others, I’d rather do it in a way that doesn’t take advantage of listeners.

You might wonder what I mean about “taking advantage of listeners” when all I’m doing is posting about my music on social media. And I don’t know - I might be over-reaching here, but I have come to feel very strongly that social media marketing relies upon a situation that is disadvantageous for the reader/listener, preying upon their powerlessness in the face of adddictive tech.

We know that smartphones and social media are highly engineered to be addictive; they hijack our attention against our better judgement, towards the goal of astronomical profits for multinational corporations. The combination of aggressive algorithmic profiling, deliberately addictive UIs, and the 24/7 compulsive access of the smartphone has lead to record levels of anxiety and savage political polarisation. It’s decimated our attention spans and replaced genuine connection with a toxic wasteland of pseudo-communication.

In anecdotal conversations with others, I generally find little challenge to the above. Yes, there are nice things that happen on social media, but I feel we’re all slowly coming to recognise a net loss. Recent books like Jenny Odell’s wonderful “How to Do Nothing” and Cal Newport’s incisive “Digital Minimalism” have opened our eyes to the damage. But it’s entrenched - we’re all on it, we have come to depend upon it as social infrastructure. Get off and you get left out. Likewise, it’s become the foundation of music marketing. It’s basically a given that if you make music and you want other people to hear it, you’d better be putting it up. And if you want to be enjoying any sort of commercial success, you need to be feeding a constant stream of engaging content onto it daily (making sure there’s plenty of juicy images and words that will attract the favour of the algorithms). I’ve never thought ill of musicians doing this - we are just operating within the framework that has been created for us, and meeting our fans where they are (i.e. mindlessly glued to a screen). 

But here’s the picture I’ve started to see: when we promote our music on social media, we are piggy-packing on a reprehensible business model. Big tech engineers an unhealthy addiction, and we rely on that addiction to get fans and engagement. When we promote on social media, we encourage and expect our listeners to be mindlessly scrolling their phones, to run a gauntlet of targeted advertising, misinformation, and data profiling in order to hear about our upcoming single. In the early days of social media, we were all very excited about the $0 marketing campaign, but there has always been a cost.

When I imagine my cleverly engaging social media post coming up in front of a parent in a playground, and I imagine their eyes glued to the phone as their toddler begs them to watch as they conquer the fort for the first time, I feel no sense of success.

When I think about someone who has driven two hours to the beach just to escape a world wracked by anxiety and fear, sitting on a rock in front of the vast beautiful ocean, still unable to resist the urge to reach into their pocket and pull out their phone, I’m not proud of my Facebook post being part of the vortex they are drawn into.

And when I think of young people, depressed and anxious, tethered to a device, I am not that excited about my Instagram post appearing to them sandwiched between a colourful infographic about how climate change will destroy us all and a selfie of their friend who looks better and therefore is better than them, I would really just rather not post.

Let me acknowledge for a moment that I am in a privileged position saying all this. In her incredible book “How to do Nothing” Jenny Odell wisely reminds us that simply quitting facebook is not the answer. For many, it’s not that easy - it may be our only lifeline to family or essential support groups. There are musicians who rely on income from their music which depends on maintaining a presence on social media. I am privileged with wealth, social status, and some level of financial stability. I have a day job to support my income, so even if this experiment kills my musical career, I will not starve. I am lucky to have a wife and two healthy children who give my life richness and meaning everyday, no screens required. I’ve been making music for a long time with very few systemic barriers in my way (as a straight white cisgender male in the music industry), so I have some cultural currency I can lean on that exists outside the social media world. So I am luxuriously fortunate that this disconnection is even an option for me.

So I’ve thought long and hard on the question of whether it is ethical to take an exit route which is not an option of others who don’t share my privilege. Should we jump ship if the lifeboat can’t accommodate everyone? There’s a lot of grey here, but I’ve decided that getting out is still the best option. Something is very broken, and Facebook will not fix it for us. Twitter will not fix it. Tik Tok will not fix it. These platforms will continue to manipulate us for profit to the very extent of what they are able and allowed to do. It’s up to those of us who have the freedom to resist to establish other paths. Maybe we go and get more lifeboats. 

It’s also worth considering the fact that engaging in social media is itself a rather privileged act, available only to those with sufficiently up-to-date devices, internet access, and free time. So the argument to stay on socials in solidarity with those less fortunate feels to me murky at best. 

So what am I going to do instead? Well, the main benefits of social media for me when sharing my music have been the ability to share stories and information easily with a large audience, the ability to interact with people personally, and the world-building capacity of these highly visual platforms. I think I can cover most of this with a website and a mailing list.

There are other benefits which I am happy to give up. Such as the lottery-like filtering that ensures that impressions to any given user at any given time are completely indeterminate, driven by clandestine algorithms designed to trigger the same behavioural patterns that keep people wasting away in front of slot machines. I would rather communicate to 20 people who’ve consciously chosen to hear from me and will definitely see the message at a time and place that they’ve chosen to read such messages, than sprinkle thousands of possible “impressions” onto the screens of distracted and probably mostly uninterested users.

I am happy to give up analytics. Besides it being none of my business where you’re from and how you were referred, less time spent grasping at statistical straws and more time spent honing my craft feels right to me. I may be naive, but I think using analytics to improve your cut-through provides rapidly diminishing returns for any organisation smaller than a department store. I don’t need the emotional overheads of puzzling over why a user only spent 17 seconds watching my video; surely my time and energy are better spent elsewhere.

It’s nice that social media is free/cheap, but it feels like a a false economy to me. I am ready and willing to pay for services that distribute my music in an ethical way. If my privilege has any role here, it should be to allow me to pick up the bill for my own campaign, rather than having my audience pay for it unwittingly in minutes of their precious attention and megabytes of valuable personal data.

So we’ll see where this goes! I will try this for a year at least. Even if this just makes me think a little harder about what I want to say to whom about my music, and actually follow through with that instead of flicking random junk onto Instagram because I’m supposed to appear “active”, then I think it will be a success of some kind. If you’re interested in following along on the journey, please sign up to the mailing list!