Electronic music's social media dilemma
Socials have completely transformed dance music. Now what?
Hello!
Welcome back – it was with a soul full of dread I inform you that this newsletter is all about social media. It’s a well-worn topic with countless tedious takes, but one that I felt needed to be explored. It’s not too dramatic to say that electronic music has been affected by social media probably more than any other genre (maybe sea shanties a close second?) The ‘visualisation’ of DJing – not exclusive to social media but a perfect storm of the emergence of live-streaming platforms and EDM’s mainstage pivot – has radically transformed how electronic music culture is perceived.
I wanted to dive a bit deeper into this topic, and who better to speak to than Tom Leek, Managing Director of 360 marketing company NYX Agency. We actually tried to do this in June but given Tom’s busy summers in Ibiza, it was only after ADE we managed to sit down and chat. He was very gracious with his time, so I hope you enjoy what ended up being a deep dive into the impact of socials on artists, fans and culture as a whole.
Declan x
Electronic music has a social media problem
Social media is awful. We all know it, we all think it, we all talk about it, and we all use it. In electronic music, socials have completely transformed the perception of what clubbing and DJ culture is about. Along with the emergence of streaming platforms like Boiler Room, Mixmag Lab, DJ Mag HQ et al and the impact of EDM’s need for mainstage theatrics, social media turned DJing into a visual phenomenon, a series of moments, chopped up and presented as an exciting, fast-paced and FOMO-laced lifestyle. And while the PJ pics and confetti canon clips might be largely exclusive to the one percent at the top of the food chain, their branding and marketing strategies trickle down to the next generation of DJs, who are investing in videographers as soon as they buy their first controller. The (mainstream) expectation of what a DJ is and does is shaped by how it’s presented, and as how it’s presented has radically shifted over the past 10 years, so too has that expectation.
On the flipside, the middle class of electronic music has been gutted by the streaming economy, where only scale is rewarded. That scale can come at the expense of creative freedom and originality, as we’ve discussed before. And scale can only occur when there’s an audience. And your audience lives on socials. This exhausting cycle has led to countless op-eds, panels and talks about the damage social media is doing – and this goes way beyond electronic music – where artists are worn down by a bottomless pit of content they hate making but feel they have no choice but to engage with.
While this is a very broad-stroke assessment of a complex situation, I wanted to get more into the weeds on what this actually means day-to-day for artists and promoters, how DJs and producers really feel behind the scenes and screens, and how could this race to the bottom be sustainable?
Tom Leek is the Managing Director of NYX, a 360 marketing agency for electronic music that focuses on an organic and authentic approach to socials and strategy. Tom along with Creative Director Felipe Reis, has quietly built an impressive roster of clients including Danny Tenaglia, Nicole Moudaber, The Martinez Brothers, Amelie Lens and Anfisa Letyago, choosing not to seek out new business and letting word of mouth attract clients. They also work directly with events, labels and festivals.
I’ve known Tom for a few years, and every time we spoke I always felt like he was one of the smartest people in the socials game. I wanted to speak to him specifically as he’d always been honest about the challenges while remaining optimistic about the future. We went in deep on a range of topics including content creation, authenticity and of course, the all-seeing algorithm.
I went into this with a very cynical approach to socials generally but I came out seeing things from the other side – while they are endlessly problematic, they’re not going away and if you tweak your approach, there’s something resembling authenticity and even fun buried behind the tedium. Ish. Enjoy!
As usual, let us know your thoughts in the comments and via email.
FF: Can you explain a bit about what NYX is?
Tom Leek: “NYX is a 360-degree marketing company. We help build pathways for artists, brands, events, whatever it is, to communicate with their fans. These days it’s predominantly social media. We also do things like data capture, brand activations, and PR stunts. To be good at social media, you need to do the old-school marketing stuff well – i.e. create a moment around something that people talk about. You still need to do your billboard campaigns and gorilla marketing to drive those conversations. So social media is the majority of what we do but it’s driven by creative marketing to start a conversation.”
What were the obvious glaring issues to you both when you started? What did you feel like everyone was doing wrong?
“We were one of the first agencies video editing for artists which started with Exhale, Amelie Lens’ brand, so we were ahead of the curve with that. We’re always trying to be up to date with what’s coming next. There isn’t really any set education for social media – you’ll hear someone say ‘My friend says the best time to post is 7pm’ and then that becomes the rule for everyone. It really doesn’t work like that. Everyone’s accounts are different. If you’ve got 70% US followers you can’t be posting at 9am in the UK.
“For us, giving people accurate guidelines driven by data, and telling them about best practices [is key] – if you want to grow your followers on Instagram, you can’t just post carousels cause they’re only shown to people who follow you already. A reel is shown to people who don’t follow you. But if engagement is the goal, a carousel is better. So it’s about helping people navigate these best practices.”
It kind of feels like everyone sees ‘The Algorithm’ as some kind of opaque deity that sits above the whole internet ready to reward those who play the game and strike down those who break the rules. What have you learned about ‘The Algorithm’ since starting NYX?
“My honest opinion is, if your content is shit, that’s why it’s not doing well. The algorithm will show it to 1,000 people at first. If 50% of those people engage with it, it’ll then show it to 100,000 people, and that’s how it scales up and goes viral – it’s based on a percentage of engagement. The algorithm will tell you if the content is shit. This whole thing of shadow banning [isn’t real] – the reality is, your content is not up to scratch.
“But for me, I always say to our team ‘We wanna do less branded stuff.’ It has to look as organic as possible and then after three seconds the branding comes up, the messaging, or the call-to-action. [People are] more likely to stick around until they’re sold to at the very least, and that increases the percentage of time watched which is good for the algorithm. Ten-or-fifteen-second TikToks tend to go more viral because if you watch five seconds of a ten-second video, it’s fifty percent. If you watch five seconds of a minute-long video, the algorithm will decide it’s not that interesting.“But it’s also about understanding each platform. Instagram’s algorithm is designed to show content to those who follow you, so unless you’ve got good stuff to post, don’t. You don’t need to post three times a week. Quality over quantity is super important on Instagram. TikTok’s the opposite – the algorithm is designed to show things to people who don’t follow you, so you have to feed the algorithm and find something that hooks. Some of our clients will be doing six or seven posts a week on TikTok, but once a week on Instagram.”
“Instagram’s algorithm is designed to show content to those who follow you, so unless you’ve got good stuff to post, don’t. You don’t need to post three times a week.”
There are certain approaches you can take to gather as much attention as possible when you’ve got a time-sensitive event or record release, with a very clear call-to-action around making a purchase. What about when you’re trying to build a brand over time, say 12 or 18 months?
“Exhale is a really good example of this. It’s a brand we’ve been there with from the start to where it is now. At ADE it sold out a 14,000-capacity stadium show. It’s grown to something quite huge. Our rule is to put people at the centre of it. It’s a buzzword that everyone uses but it’s very ‘community-led’. We know the people who come to all the shows and we put them in the videos, we work with them on content and ideas so that they feel a part of it. The other rule is we try not to sell on-page. We’ll sell through Stories, where you can have a link. The page might have an announcement on there but it’d be very rare that we’d be pushing people to buy tickets. People get turned off when they feel they’re being sold to.
“There’s also a new feature on Instagram called Broadcasts, and since Seth Troxler started using that the engagement has flown on his feed. We’ve moved any sales links to the Broadcast channel, so people are enjoying the feed more now but they know they can go to the Broadcast channel to buy. You need to create relationships with your audience and create good content that people enjoy. You need to keep them warm so that when you’re ready to sell they’re there, but also not over-sell. You don’t need to be saying ‘Buy Tickets’ every day for the next four months. Fans will find that anyway. They want to know about the after-party you got kicked out of and those other parts of your life – that’s what builds the loyalty and the relationship for them to go and buy your record or your ticket.”
Do you get pushback from promoters and maybe other types of artists that just want the vanity metrics, or they just want X conversion rates, and they’re just like ‘Post the event again, post the event again’, and trying to put pressure on you.
“Not so much with the people we work with, because all the people we work with came to us. They came to us because someone told them we understand what we’re doing – they wouldn’t have come if that wasn’t the case. And everyone we’ve worked with, we’ve proven over time to trust in our process and you’ll see the results. Yes, there’s a bit of back-and-forth on that and yes it’s not worked for everyone, but most of our clients we’ve worked with for multiple years. Less clients for us is important, and clients that trust in our process.
“We’re a younger generation – everyone who works for us is super young. We were born with phones and apps in our hands, it’s not something we have to learn. Even the way we edit content – there’s a young kid in our Ibiza office and what he can do on a phone it’s ridiculous. He’ll be shooting content at Exhale, on a phone, and editing within five minutes, what would take a normal videographer 48 hours. Having people who were born with the technology, they tend to know how to get the best out of it.”
You mentioned community, and another buzzword at the minute is ‘authenticity’. A lot of it is PR bollocks of course, but I feel like the word ‘authenticity’ and social media are not compatible. Social media is inauthentic by design. What’s presented is intentionally obscured to relay a certain narrative that aligns with how an artist wants their brand to look, to increase their perceived image, therefore increase their value, therefore increase their fee.
How do you walk that tightrope of treating social media as a shopfront, as you said, but also being a diary? Because it can’t be both, without being inauthentic.
“Most people come to us when they’re fed up with it. They think ‘This is the last straw, we need to pay someone to sort this out.’ One of the things that I always say to them is: ‘It’s a bottomless pit. If you’re gonna have any chance of keeping up with the constant need to create content, it’s gotta be something that you don’t find annoying’. If you’re really into analogue gear, that’s what you need to create your content around. When you’re in the studio jamming, flick on a GoPro and let it run, don’t even think about it. Then just cut some bits out of your jamming – that’s authentic you. If you are the afterparty fun guy, that’s the content you should be getting or the bits you can post. That’s your personality, that’s the bit people want to see.
“It’s about creating content that works for you. I do think you can be authentic, but people see their peers doing stuff and they think ‘I need to be doing that’. That’s where the issue lies. People will look at what others are doing, everyone feels the need to be validated. Electronic music specifically was never about that. It was about being forward-thinking, doing stuff other people HADN’T done. Now it’s flipped and it’s only worth doing if other people validate it. If you look at Kompakt Records and what Michael Meyer did, it was taking punk music and putting it with electronic music, and pushing boundaries there.”
They were also very faceless, by design.
“Exactly. Now, a kid buys a pair of decks and thinks he should be playing DC-10 by the end of the year.”
That leads perfectly to my next question. It’s quite a long one so bear with me.
I feel like there are a few consistent narratives that people complain about in dance music at the minute. One is people on their phones on the dancefloor or filming everything. The other is that everyone is just there for ‘the record’ and not there for the whole two or three hours of whatever the DJ wants to play.
I have a few theories around this – the first is DJ streaming, not Spotify but video streaming. When BeAt-TV first came along, everyone was horrified and kicked them out of the booth, as it was seen as a sacred space. People didn’t like cameras. Slowly, things changed and Boiler Room, Mixmag Lab, DJ Mag HQ etc, all became normalised. Now the vast majority of festivals and big events are streamed with really high production values. It made DJing more of a visual phenomenon than it had been before. Then when COVID hit, the entry point to a lot of DJ sets for younger people was through streaming.
Then on top of that, there’s music streaming and how we now consume music, completely divorced from context. Everything is inside a Discover Weekly, Altar, or whatever playlist you get your music from, with no reference to the artist, their other tracks, the style of music they might play when DJing etc. Yes, people can find that out if they click around, but what’s presented and therefore the most accessible, is the track in isolation. So ‘the hit’ becomes the only reference point that casual clubbers will have. Of course, that’s always been true and is definitely true in other genres, but it feels like individual songs are trumping the artist across the board to an extreme that wasn’t the case before.
I think the combination of the visualisation of what DJ culture is on both streaming platforms like Boiler Room but also social media, and casual music discovery happening out of the context of the artist has led to both those problems. Thoughts?
“The Spotify reference is the same as the TikTok problem. Someone on TikTok might have 500 followers but have a video with a million views. They don’t convert [those views] to followers so it’s a similar thing. But on that in general, I remember 10 years ago working at a festival and Ben Pearce was playing and he had that track ‘What I Might Do’ and he was playing a disco-only set and he turned up and it was a tiny little stage with no barrier or anything and it was rammed, people flooding out of the tent. And they all turned up for that song and he was like ‘It’s a disco set, I’m not gonna play it’, and people kept asking for it. So I think that’s always been a problem. But it’s now been amplified by the way people are fed information.
“In terms of the first part of your question – Seth [Troxler] said this and I thought it was really interesting – before, he could differentiate himself from other artists, like a bedroom DJ or producer, because he could afford to take a videographer on the road and capture moments from his tours. Now, even the bedroom DJ has a videographer. All the content people see is the same shot – over the shoulder, in the booth. So now, we’ve decided to take a documentarian approach, and we are capturing all the moments right up to that point. We wanna capture everything in the build-up to the club because the club is the bit that everyone knows and sees. They know what that’s like. So what is Seth doing while he’s waiting for his gig? OK, he’s eating some food, so we go into different restaurants and although it’s not DJ-related, it’s still Seth’s life. Someone who does it really well is Fleur Shore. She showcases her life outside the booth as well. And that’s why she’s going so big – she’s a perfect case study.”
“Now, a kid buys a pair of decks and thinks he should be playing DC-10 by the end of the year.”
The phones on the dancefloor thing – I know it’s a loaded topic – but one of the reasons I think people are filming so much now, apart from the generational and cultural changes, is that the content that’s going out from DJs is intentionally projected as this FOMO moment, stylised and professional. It projects this exclusive, perfect scenario that is designed to make people who see it want to be part of it, so they buy the next round of tickets or whatever.
I know that’s just marketing 101, but you can’t then chastise people for wanting to capture the moment on the dancefloor with their phone to do their own version of a FOMO moment on their own socials, to show people that they are now part of this exclusive club. If the DJs are putting out content that’s hyper-stylised and cliquey by design, then you can’t really blame the clubbers for wanting to brag that they are part of it too.
“It’s the same as people on stage – you used to never have anyone in the booth, then Afterlife and Tale of Us started selling backstage tickets, and now every booth has to have 200 people in it.”
And then the people in the booth are more incentivised to film themselves in that exclusive and elite location too.
“For me, there’s an underground legion of no phones on the dancefloor, it’s all about the music, and that’s fine. The reality is Warehouse Project, Drumsheds, Broadwick and these big promoters, they’re the gateway for kids to come into electronic music. For me, it was going to Warehouse Project. After a while I didn’t like getting stood on and my drink knocked out of my hand, so I eventually found more underground stuff. There are plenty of clubs you can go to where there aren’t any phones, and that’s more like the traditional underground, but at the same time, you need the stadiums filled with crowds at Afterlife to get the new people to come through. Both ecosystems have to be present. You can’t have one without the other.”
But at the same time is that happening? Independent venues are closing all the time, smaller promoters are struggling. Is it just that Afterlife is packed because it’s become more mainstream, but the next week those people are just at Elton John at the O2 instead of The Cause or whatever? No shade on Elton.
“The underground will always be a much smaller percentage – you’re going against the grain of being commercial. I understand what you mean about venues closing, but there’s always a transition. There’s a really healthy illegal scene in London, in Paris it’s huge. The reality is if you go to one branded party compared to another, it’s pretty much the same club experience. If you’re a more underground kid, you’re more into the community aspect of it. Same as booking the same headliners all the time – how are those promoters differentiating themselves? The best parties are the ones that have residents and have the same people there every week that you meet up with and build a relationship with. But that’s an underground thing.”
It’s like an open secret that social media is toxic and a lie and that it’s harming people’s mental health. But at the same time, there isn’t really a deeper movement to find a solution. People are saying all the right things but nothing seems to be changing. Are people actually willing to find a solution do you think?
“I have a big issue with virtue signalling in dance music as a whole. There are people playing in Saudi Arabia – we see it a lot where the artist we’re working with gets booked, but they don’t want to promote it on socials. My thing is, if you’re gonna take the money, you can’t then tell the promoter you’re not gonna promote it. You’re not promoting it because you know it’ll get backlash and you know there’s an issue here. So don’t take the money if you’ve got an issue with it, and if you do take the money you have to promote it. You can’t have it both ways.
“It’s a common thing in this industry, especially with mental health, it’s become a bolt-on at the end because it’s trendy. People aren’t getting down to the root of the problem, which comes back to promoters, agents and others. People don’t actually take the time to understand what the problems are to find a solution.”
There was a quote going around socials recently, and it’s actually from a country music singer called Gretchen Peters, but it says:
“The music business has become increasingly, relentlessly demanding of new artists. The pressure to release new “content” (not a synonym for art), to churn out singles and albums and videos and reels and posts on a prescribed schedule, often utterly out of sync with the artist’s internal one, isn’t producing more or greater art. It’s just increasing the noise and exhausting artists. As someone who has always needed to let the field lie fallow in between creative bursts, I understand the pressure on young artists – and I hope they will resist. We need better songs, not more of them. We need artists who want to make art that lasts, not content that’s digested in the time it takes to scroll through your Instagram feed.”
It’s out of the box now. Socials are how promoters understand reach and accessing audiences, that’s how labels understand reach and accessing audiences – it’s not going to go away. How do you balance the reality of what it takes to market someone in electronic music, with what Gretchen Peters is saying, that doesn’t strip the artist of joy around what they do?
“It’s a really accurate statement. One thing I’ve noticed about certain artists, especially around the release of an album, is that they put so much effort and time into making it and getting it perfect, but by the time they get to release, they’re so fatigued with it themselves. This is an issue because, whether you have the perfect social team and plan or not, they need to promote it. But there’s this need to just get things out quick, and get more and more out all the time.
“The second point – I totally agree about letting things have their time. I’m managing this young artist and he went from having no releases to having three releases all coming out in November. As I said to him, as soon as you release the second one you’ll stop talking about the first one. You’re killing the promotion on it yourself. I think, once a quarter, a solid release, delivered properly and thought about makes sense. That gives you time to give advance notice, to promote it, it keeps some momentum going. The more you put out, the harder it is to talk about everything. If you’re a label putting out a release every week, you’ve gotta create content every week, which becomes stressful. All of this is demanding your time and your energy. Give yourself the gap, and let the track breathe. We’ve seen quite a lot of stuff where a track might start to take off a year later. Sometimes it takes time for things to filter into their ecosystem.
“Maybe the root cause of all of this is this need for everything to be ‘now’. That’s a wider commercialisation and globalisation problem.”
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