Pursuing Social Affirmation

It’s interesting to consider how we define success in dance music these days. For many casual onlookers it tends to be measured through social media platforms—how much reach an artist has, their number of YouTube views, or even their ranking on the DJ Mag poll. To me this is akin to judging a company based on its share price without examining the real fundamentals of the business.

Social media can be an addictive outlet at times for artists, and I admit I’m guilty of this myself. I’ll send out a tweet and watch the numbers of retweets rising like a scoreboard, like playing a computer game. But the truth is that none of these social platforms actually measure whether a music fan is truly engaged and listening to the music, and many of these numbers can be fairly easily manipulated, just like stock prices. Those of us who recently watched the rather public Instagram purge of fake followers can surely relate to this.

What you can’t so easily manipulate, however, is real demand for music sales and real demand for ticket sales. Those traditional elements of the music business are still at the core of what is valuable. I would include statistics such as Spotify streams and merchandise sales, but not how many Facebook likes or Twitter followers an artist has. It’s the music that is the fundamental product after all, not a viral video or a funny Snapchat.

Social media statistics are certainly useful (particularly the amount of engagement an artist has, rather than their absolute reach), but they are more a measure of celebrity appeal than musical success. On my own travels I have encountered many inexperienced promoters who got caught up in the hype of an artist’s social media campaign and somehow neglected to remember that it’s the music that is still the core product.