Artists as consumers: how we can inspire change

I have been thinking for some time now how we can motivate artists and fans to move away their social media interactions from Instagram to more empowering platforms like ATProto and Bluesky. After the first outcry, most people stayed on Instagram, because that is where al the music promotion still happens. On Bluesky or Mastodon it feels a bit like you are shouting in the dark, and that doesn't always make it very motivating to invest in those channels.

Recently there was a new outcry about that other monopolist company that keeps us artists handcuffed: Spotify's CEO Daniel Ek made an even bigger investment in a German AI warfare company. As artists we felt angry that earnings of Spotify, the most important player to grow our audience, are invested in war technology. Deerhoof announced that they would withdraw their catalogue from Spotify and I was probably one of many artists who felt powerless. I could decide to also leave Spotify (and Instagram!), but as a smaller, growing artist this is commercial self-sabotage. It is like being a serf in a feudal system: you know you are exploited by unethical monopolist players, but dissolving the business relation will probably mean that your whole business is over.

Then I saw an interesting reel (the irony!) by Pamela Mendez, where she explained how she stuck to Spotify as a music listener for a very long time and recently changed her streaming subscription to Tidal. She stated how she was attached to all the saved tracks, artists and carefully curated playlists she had built on Spotify over the years, but how easy it was to transfer all those data to another streaming provider with the tool Tune My Music.

I felt a bit caught out: this was exactly my problem. I always liked Spotify as a user. I think I started using it more than 15 years ago and I loved the user experience. Although I didn't like the more recent homepage design, I still think it is a great product. However, they built a broken business model around it: it is monopolist and unfair to (smaller) artists. But after Pamela’s comments I realised: it is difficult to cut ties with Spotify as an artist, but it not that difficult at all to cancel my Spotify subscription as a music consumer. I am both creating music and listening to other people’s music. As a music ‘customer’ I have more power than as a small music ‘supplier’. I have almost nothing to lose if I switch to another streaming provider than Spotify to listen to music, and if many music consumers abandon Spotify, it will hurt their business and they might be forced to change their business model (or lose power in the market or even go out of business). As an artist I also have a bit of influence on my peers, and maybe my fans, to inspire them to follow my example: I canceled my Spotify subscription and told everyone how easy it was to transfer data to another provider. That is why I also made a reel about it.

Of course, in the light of the big problem called ‘capitalism’, it is an act with close to zero impact, but still NOT with zero impact, and I feel a bit less powerless towards this giant issue, and together with my peers we can all feel a bit less powerless and get a little bit further away from zero impact. It is comparable with how I stopped eating meat and try to avoid flying. It is a small act, but you start to notice that more and more people around you do this and in the long run the impacts grows, be it very very slowly…

When I realised that I have more power as a consumer than as an artist, I understood that this also applies to social media and to the much needed switch away from Instagram. I don’t only use Instagram to promote my music to (potential) fans, I am also there as a consumer, to connect to my peers artists: to find out where they play shows and when they release music. But on Instagram I have absolutely no power over the algorithm and I actually miss a lot of info about bands that I like, because Meta doesn’t let it show up in my feed. It is this learned helplessness that we need to overcome, by switching to an open protocol, like ATProto that Bluesky is building. There we can shape and curate our own feeds, build real community amoung peers artists and have a less addictive information flow about the music and artists that we find interesting. We first need to change our habits as a social media consumer. I will stay on Instagram to publish and to promote my music for a while, because the world is not ready yet to abolish this content creation serfdom. But as a social media consumer I want to move to a tool where I have ownership about the information that I read and where I have freedom of expression on how I want to communicate as an artist. On Bluesky I don’t have to shape my content to the whims of the new Instagram/Tiktok algorithm trends (I hate talking with my face upfront in the camera and fast video cuts). I can choose my language and my aesthetics and I can freely insert links to concert tickets or releases. I can choose if I rather want to make text focused content for Bluesky or photo focused content for Flashes (different app views to look at the same content on the ATProto protocol) and the people who follow me, can do the same. We can create feeds of our local scene, of show dates, about everything that we can imagine.

Let us first create an online community that we like ourselves, to connect to our fellow musicians, and when it becomes more interesting to be on Bluesky than on Instagram, let’s tell our fans, and eventually they will come over.

When artists change as consumers, they can inspire a much bigger change. Let’s take the first steps and move away from listening to music on Spotify, and let’s start posting about our music on Bluesky or Flashes, so that at least our fellow musicians know where we are up to.