Smoke and Mirrors

When pushing your music out to the masses, you are bound to get some feedback online. Your mum tells you that you are a superstar, your dad says “Top job champ” and your best friend tells you they just heard the best thing since sliced bread…

You get excited because you chanced your way to the pinned section of your mates popular facebook group and then… The superiority complex starts…

You start believing you are famous and acting as such. Forgetting old morals, goals and values, doing what it takes to get the next bit of love from anyone because Mum, Dad and your Friends are done hearing your music and can only tell you so many times how much they love it before things get weird.

You then notice social media interactions are dropping because this is the only gauge of “success” we all seem to follow these days and you start getting worried that all your hard work is going to nothing.

You want to be on top of the charts again so bad that you start creating fake profiles on a website just to buy your own track over and over again to beef up its chance and then chart day comes around… BAM… It’s on top… HOLY F&$K! You are lunchbox famous again! Better get boasting… Mum, Dad and friends get amongst the comments and you are again validated for long enough to start the cycle again.

For years I have researched ways of chart rigging because of the countless rumors surrounding how it changes the modern-day music industry! It claims to happen so often in major networks and although is totally frowned upon, is a method seemingly used by labels, managers and promoters everywhere to push music into the face of listeners. This being the smoke and mirror effect. I mean, after all, charts control the content that gets airplay and airplay generally results in sales right? Those sales most of the time go to the label and you get a drip of the money back to survive long enough for the next song. This being if you are under a terrible contract WHICH YOU SHOULDN’T (IMO)! It’s 2020!!

Question though…. Does this make you successful in the music industry or, does this simply just make you popular in your own lunchbox?

Popularity and success in the music industry are two WIDELY different scopes. On one hand, popularity seems to bring you a lot of love from people. On the other, success gets you regular gig’s, money in the bank and your bills paid.

It’s the same as when a Facebook page goes out and buys likes to increase the view that they are popular drawing more people in. It sometimes works but the tradeoff is you don’t get as much exposure to real people because Facebook Algorithm shares your work to select profiles and if half of them are fake likes, you get half the engagement you would have if you grew organically.

Buying your way to a higher place seems to give you the illusion that you are popular but ultimately you are paying your own money to give this illusion amongst your local cohort and more often than not, you don’t climb organically in the wider music realm.

On our network, we often have artists setting up fake accounts in an attempt to buy positions around the Atomic Countdown and when this happens, you see that the second they stop doing this, there is literally zero engagement in their music because their audience isn’t as big as perceived. Or secretly, people are afraid to tell you that you aren’t as good as you think you are. (Not to mention, we generally ban accounts that do this now because it’s a dick move on all the hard-working organic artists!)

A great artist once told me, you shouldn’t push your work to people you know because they will always say they like it. You need to get it to the people that you don’t know and get their thoughts on it along the way. This way if you impress a new audience, you grow organically fostering a group of actual fans that will happily part with their money to increase your success. Popularity will come after this in the form of an increased audience and listenership and then suddenly, corporations take interest in what you are doing and you can practically carve out your music career.

The other thing you need to understand is criticism isn’t always an attack on you. It is an opportunity to reflect on what you are doing and develop a better product in the process. Your music is a product and secretly, we all want to make enough money from our passion to not have to work another day. This unfortunately means you need to churn out some music that suits what the listener wants to hear, not just what you believe is wanted. Take advice, listen to the people around you and grow.

Stop buying likes, forget setting up fake accounts. All of this doesn’t make you successful. People see through the bullshit quickly and get over you even quicker. Work on generating an audience that is organic and grow it! On top of all of this, set your own bars and goals and stick to them! It is the ticket to success in the music industry. 

After all though, you are only as successful as the successes you set out to achieve…

Shade Out!