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.