Facebook Has Failed Artists and Music Fans Alike
…And what I hope to do about it
I remember the day I was working at Universal Music UK when Facebook informed us that we now had to pay to reach the fan bases we had spent years, countless hours, and endless budget building up. The mood in the room quickly soured, and we were pretty close to throwing the Facebook staff out of our boardroom window…
We helped you grow your user base! We gave you free marketing!
We spent loads of money creating amazingly rich and engaging content to keep your users coming back for more!’
Your users love music and want to stay in touch with the artists they love!
Turns out we forgot Facebook was a business. One that needed to prove to Wall Street that they could turn all of those users into bottom line profit. The music industry made a tragic mistake in trusting that Facebook activity would always be free. It was our fault, and we’re still paying for it.
It’s no secret that Facebook no longer displays all of your posts to all of your fans. In fact it has been estimated that organic reach (the number of your followers reached without paying to boost a post) is now as low as 2.27%. And this is getting lower each and every year as the competition for space in newsfeeds gets hotter and hotter.
Those page ‘likes’ you are so proud of? They have quickly become unreachable fans — unless of course you have the budget to boost your posts (which not all bands, labels, or managers can afford to do for every single post). Why do I have to pay to reach MY fans? They’re mine! No, they’re Facebook’s. And Facebook have publicly stated that they are not going to help artists reach all of their fans organically, even though fans are dying to see this content in their newsfeed.
Even worse is the fact that the more ‘likes’ your pages get, the worse your organic reach becomes. It’s not a great incentive for a band to continue to grow its following on Facebook. But because Facebook is where the majority of music fans are found, we are left with little choice but to continue to centre our digital marketing efforts on the platform. Ultimately, the more ‘likes’ you drive to your page, the more you value your efforts on Facebook, and the more obliged you become to want to pay to reach your fans through the platform. This is what I call the crack pipe effect — the artist can’t walk away from the strong following they’ve grown, and yet due to a dwindling organic reach, are forced to boost their posts to reach the ‘likes’ of fans they themselves have grown.
And things are getting worse rather than better. Last year some changes were made to the newsfeed, re-prioritising your real friends above the pages you like. Whilst this makes sense from a users perspective, it’s a tough pill to swallow for artists who have spent years building up a following on the platform.
Even when you do well enough to get your organic reach and appear in one of your fans newsfeeds, you are up against cat videos, food porn, memes, and selfies. For an artist that’s not considered time for their creative output. It’s throw away content lost in a feed that moves faster than ever before. Facebook is not a music only platform, and it’s not a music first platform — it’s a content engine that doesn’t care how much your fans like your artist. For marketing departments, the pressure to create compelling content and pay for it to be seen is more than ever before.
I get it, and I’m not blaming Facebook. Our newsfeed is simply a victim of Facebook’s success. More than 30 billion pieces of content are shared across Facebook each and every MONTH. Facebook can’t show us everything, and it makes perfect sense that the platform would become a pay to play environment. But it doesn’t hurt to understand and take a deeper look at how this is hurting both artists and fans alike.
SHAKE & TREMBLE
There isn’t much in the way of engagement benchmark stats for the music industry on Facebook specifically, so I decided to run some analysis myself. Luckily, you can see the engagement level for any Facebook page by clicking on the ‘likes’ of a particular page — check out Alt-J’s here for example. The ‘people talking about this’ metric is basically the number of people who have interacted with a Facebook page in some way — liked, commented, shared etc. So engagement is simply ‘people talking about this’ divided by the pages total likes. Simple, easy, and publicly available.
I decided to look at Facebook pages for those artists in the top 10 album charts across the US, UK, and Australia. I figured that artists who are charting will be the most active on Facebook, are more likely to have money to spend on posts, and should ultimately have the highest engagement rates as a result.
This is by no means a robust sample, but at least provides some insight into the reach and engagement experienced by a selection of different artists with different sized followings. (Note: Ryan Lewis and Macklemore were separated, and soundtracks were excluded). Here are the numbers ranked by % engagement:
You can see that the average engagement is a lowly 3.83% with page engagement ranging from 0.17% from Kelly Clarkson (atrocious!), to 21.59% from Joey & Rory (Joey unfortunately passed away earlier this month). Furthermore, 18 of the 23 pages (78%) that I looked at had less than 5% engagement. That’s a lot of fans missing out on news about the artists they love (327,023,635 to be precise!).
BORN UNDER SATURN
You’d think artists would be winning on Facebook. They have fans literally dying for their content. Let me give you a very real example of this. I LOVE the band Django Django (and consider their self titled debut album a masterpiece). I like them on FB. I was dying to hear new music as the release of their second album ‘Born Under Saturn’ approached last year. Out of the blue I heard a premier play of the lead single on the radio (I very rarely listen to the radio, but just happened to get a ride to work with my brother that morning). I couldn’t believe I had missed the news that this song was out — I checked their FB page as soon as I got into work and saw that they had a new post several hours ago announcing the new single. I’d already been on Facebook that morning. THIS WAS NOT IN MY FEED. I love Django Django. I follow them on Facebook. I’m dying for new music. But I’m not getting their updates, because they are not paying to boost them.
Come to think of it, I can’t remember EVER seeing one of their posts in my feed. You could argue I’m not seeing any Django Django posts because I’ve never before interacted with their posts, and Facebook’s algorithm is working it’s magic. But how am I supposed to interact with a post when I’ve never before been given the opportunity to? Django Django loses, I lose, and as a result — ultimately Facebook loses.
MUZEROOM IS BORN
Multiply this problem across the 200 or so artists that I like on Facebook — how much music news and content am I missing out on? Answer — the majority of content that artists cannot afford to pay to boost.
Imagine if your Facebook feed only contained news and content relating to your favourite artists. That’s the world we think artists and music fans deserve.
With MuzeRoom we will take the hard work out of staying in touch with the artists you love. By connecting with your Last.fm, Spotify, or Facebook, we’ll understand your musical tastes. We’ll then scour the web and return music news, new releases, and music videos — but only for the artists you truly care about.
We are focused on pulling this all into one convenient destination, ensuring fans forever stay in touch with the music that they are most passionate about. It should be easy, and it should be all about the music.
Lookout for our launch later in April, and register your interest to stay abreast of our journey (yes ironically we have a Facebook page!) — http://www.muzeroom.com
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Thanks for reading — I’m Ronan Mason. Follow me and my journey to innovate in the music space, and reach out and say hello:
