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Social media is dead. It’s time for musicians and orchestras to own their online audience

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"As platforms move away from a follower-based model to an interest-driven distribution system that takes away the connection to our fans, it's time for us to take back control."

By David Taylor

 

The emergence of social media used to be a good thing for anyone in the arts. The opportunity to connect with audiences across the world, build a following,and share art with new people. It allowed them to build a community and directly talk to their audience. But this was in an era where social media platforms behaved very differently. It used to be that if your post was virtually guaranteed to be shown to your audience. All platforms have moved to an algorithm where the follower count is irrelevant and now focus purely on an interest-driven system, showing content from strangers it thinks a user is interested in and not from who they follow. We have discovered these followers are not truly ours… they belong to the platform. It turns out, we don’t own our audience online, and the social media world we knew is dead. 

Patreon CEO (and musician!) Jack Conte recently described both the change and its impact on the Decoder podcast. The whole thing is a great listen, but here’s the highlight.

“The shift is really one main thing: the move away from follower-based paradigms and true subscriptions into an interest-driven distribution system. There are so many problems with that, so many problems…there’s a bunch of problems on the creator side as well, because when you move away from a follower paradigm, you ruin the creator’s deterministic line of reach to their fans. If a creator can’t reach their fans, then not only can a creator not build a true community around their work, but they also can’t build a business around their work. The biggest shift in the creator economy, that I think has been the most impactful for creators and for Patreon as a business, is this shift of the internet away from follower-based paradigms and into interest-based paradigms. It’s very similar to Google Zero . It’s the same concept. It’s when the platforms stop sending traffic to the people who have spent a decade-plus building their followings, building their communities, using those platforms as their top of funnel. It starts to become very clear to everybody that these people were never ourIt starts to become very clear to everybody that these people were never our users, they were never our community members, they were never our fans. They were Facebook’s users. And Facebook has made that loud and clear to creators, to the media industry, and to publishers.”

Whether you’re a musician or work in arts administration, you will have seen this yourself. Posting the same type of content but getting lower and lower views. Seeing arts organisations with huge followings receiving single-figure likes. We’re just not able to reach our audience in the same way we used to. But the thing is, we also know this because all of the platforms have been telling us to our face. For the last 2 years, Instagram’s CEO has been repeatedly telling us about this change. In posts on Threads and livestream videos, he keeps reiterating that followers and likes are not a metric of success and that they do not drive engagement. Meaning that your content is not going to be shown to your audience unless it is something the algorithm deems interesting. Below is Adam saying this in 2024 and you can also find him talking about this here in April 2026.

It is now painfully clear. Social media platforms are now only going to show content it thinks users will like based on how it has already performed and the type of content it is. Adam and Instagram are not alone. They have all copied TikTok with a never-ending stream of content that the user has never consciously chosen to see (the slight exception to this is long-form YouTube where search, choice, and subscriptions are still a big factor). Practically, they are taking away your audience and followers. 

There are two big problems with this for anyone creative. The first is that to beThere are two big problems with this for anyone creative. The first is that to be successful online now, you can’t create what you want; you have to create what the algorithm wants. Copying formulaic content, chasing trends, being like everyone else, clipping content into shorts, being forced into formats you don’t like. And now this isn’t just competing with everyone else doing this high- engagement but low-depth content, but it’s competing with a mountain of optimised AI slop as well. 

¨The second, as Jack Conte put it, is that this has ruined “the creator’s deterministic line of reach to their fans”. We, as musicians and arts organisations, are not going to receive traffic from platforms in the way we used to, and there is a time when this could be zero. It turns out, “they were never our fans. They were Facebook’s users”. For anyone in the creative industries, it is vital to build an audience and grow a community. If you are not the owner of the platform you use to speak with your audience, you do not own your audience.

The frustrating part of all this is that the only place to really reach people or grow an audience is still social media. It is and will continue to be an important part of those initial connections. But it cannot be the only answer now. We need to move these initial connections to somewhere we control. 

The good news is that whether you are a musician just starting out or a 100- year-old arts organisation with millions of dollars, there are plenty of options. So, here’s a a speed run of a few of them. 

Patreon used to be just a membership platform, but it has now pivoted to being a community and media platform. It allows for text posts, videos, images, audio, podcasts, live streams, newsletters, and even community chats. When you post, it goes directly to fans' feeds and inboxes without being blocked by an algorithm. And now Patreon offers a free tier to fans, so you can truly recreate the experience of a social media platform without potentially putting people off with a paywall. Then you can offer membership tiers for your fans to support your work. If you want an alternative to Patreon, Ko-Fi offers very similar features but without native video, with the option of offering physical products and services and a lower commission fee.

David Taylor, author of this article

In case you’ve missed it, newsletters are having a moment with a huge resurgence in popularity, especially when it is a hybrid newsletter and blog. We’ve seen this with the increase in popularity of platforms like Substack. TheyWe’ve seen this with the increase in popularity of platforms like Substack. They allow direct access to your audience’s inbox, and if they are a hybrid allow for a post on the internet as well that readers can share or discover. There’s the option of free and membership content for all of these. If you’re looking to just get to someone’s inbox without a membership tier, it’s worth looking at kit.com as they have an amazing free tier with up to 10,000 subscribers. You can also check out Beehiiv, but I’d avoid the traditional Mailchimp now unless you want to pay a lot.

Then, if you want to offer a hybrid model with blogs, maybe even offer memberships, there are Substack and ghost.org. Substack comes all in the same format, takes little setting up, has a feed of everyone a user follows, and is a name a lot of people know. However, they have had a number of controversies, including that, as a platform, they continue to allow and make money from far- right and Nazi ideology on the site. If you’re an arts organisation worried about brand safety, it’s definitely something to consider. Ghost.org offers the same functionality, but you have your own standalone site that isn’t part of a wider platform like Substack. This allows you to customise it further to be more like your own website, have true ownership, and offer set monthly fees instead of a percentage commission. The flip side is you’re not part of a wider feed. FYI, both my blog and newsletter are all run on ghost.org.

There is also now a move from creators and organisations to private community channels like Discord and even Slack for their audience. Here they are 100% in control of their community, allowing them to update their audience and communicate with them directly, but also to allow their community to directly engage and chat with each other. Behind the scenes, topic discussion, and audience feedback and input work incredibly well here.

Reaching new people, making connections, and building an audience were all what made social media great. But they aren’t actually a feature of social media. They’re actually inherent features of the internet. Social media has now moved away from these. When we consume social media, we are giving up our choice to select and control what we see, and ultimately make it very difficult to connect to and support the creators behind it. For us as the creators, it’s time for us to reassert our control. The social media we knew is dead, and we need to control the connection to our audience.

 

© with friendly permission by David Taylor 

David Taylor
Arts Entrepreneur, Consultant, Speaker, Author

One of the leading entrepreneurs and thought leaders in the world of classical music, David Taylor has built his career on a dynamic and energetic approach to driving innovation in the arts. This energy saw him named on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe list and described as an "arts innovator" by the BBC.

Passionate about enabling the next generation of innovators, David is a Lecturer in Artist Development at the Royal Academy of Music. He continues to drive the global conversation on the industry's future as the host of the Classical:NEXT podcast and author of The Future of Classical Music book series.

Driven by a desire to help those in the arts flourish in the modern world, David is a highly sought-after consultant and coach. His portfolio includes work with high-profile clients such as the New World Symphony (USA), The Philharmonia, St Louis Symphony Orchestra, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, and the Leeds International Piano Competition.

David's reputation as a speaker and commentator sees him regularly invited to industry events worldwide, including Classical:NEXT, the Association of California Symphony Orchestras, the League of American Orchestras, the Association of British Orchestras, and the World Federation of International Music Competitions. In 2022, he was selected for the LinkedIn Creator Accelerator Programme UK, identifying him as a leading voice in the arts.

His experience comes from creating the Yorkshire Young Sinfonia (YYS) in 2015. He grew the organisation to reach an audience of over 7.5 million people in just 4 years, a journey chronicled in the BBC Radio 4 documentary Birth of an Orchestra. Under David's leadership, YYS became the first youth orchestra in the world to be 100% digital, using iPads instead of sheet music.

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