Every Musician Is an Influencer Now, and Everyone Is Exhausted –

A band being on your radar once meant knowing when the new single landed, catching the tour announcement before your city sold out, and perhaps seeing the occasional photograph from the studio. The relationship between artist and audience had breathing room; fans could care without feeling as though caring meant taking on another daily administrative duty.

Now, artists are encouraged to occupy every available corner of our attention. Watch the GRWM video. Consume the day-in-the-life content. Study the selfies snapped beneath suspiciously flattering rehearsal-room lighting. Witness breakfast, soundcheck and another solemn face-to-camera appeal concerning advance ticket sales. The modern musician receives relentless instruction from the algorithm: remain visible, feed the machine, turn every ordinary hour into content.

Musicianship has become tangled with influencer culture, leaving artists to audition for our attention long before they ask us to hear a song. It’s all a bit surreal, especially when the same strategies are adopted by every band until individuality becomes another casualty of platform obedience.

Music discovery requires the right headspace

More often than not, the content appearing across my Instagram and Facebook feeds comes from bands I already know. The algorithm has learnt my occupational habits and built a padded cell from them, one filled with release clips, festival announcements and musicians explaining their latest promotional anxiety directly into the front-facing camera.

Being a music journalist has turned this into an occupational hazard. Around 90% of my feed has become music-related content, recycling the same ideas until each one feels predictable and ultimately pointless. Everyone appears trapped inside the same content calendar.

When I open Instagram to zone out and hopefully encounter an animal reel that I will inevitably send to my boyfriend, my brain has entered a very specific state. I am prepared to watch a cat fall into a laundry basket; rarely prepared to investigate an unfamiliar band because its bassist filmed a morning routine.

That admission may sound brutal, yet I suspect plenty of people experience social media through similarly divided moods. Music discovery requires curiosity and emotional availability. Passive scrolling usually offers distraction. Dropping an unknown artist into that environment and expecting a meaningful connection asks a disposable piece of content to perform the work once handled by radio presenters, trusted publications and local scenes.

The content may technically reach someone new. Reaching a person and entering their consciousness remain wildly separate achievements.

Big Brother has a ring light

This decade’s version of the music industry has acquired an Orwellian edge. Big Brother is watching because the musicians hit record themselves.

The minutiae of everyday life are placed on display for the chance to snag a handful of fans if one video travels beyond the existing audience, and I’m sorry, isn’t it dystopian as hell that musicians’ lives have become expandable promotional assets, endlessly available for extraction.

Virality then creates its own false promise. A video might reach hundreds of thousands of people, while the next tour announcement reaches a fraction of them. Fleeting exposure becomes difficult to translate into sustained interest because platforms distribute attention according to their own commercial appetite. The people who laughed at a drummer’s skit may never hear the band’s single. Those who liked a backstage anecdote may remain entirely unaware that tickets went on sale.

Artists are effectively asked to create two bodies of work. The music demands time, financial sacrifice and emotional concentration. The promotional persona requires a separate stream of ideas engineered for platforms that reward frequency. Each post must carry the possibility of discovery, even while its lifespan may amount to several forgettable hours.

There is something profoundly bleak about musicians documenting themselves into exhaustion for an audience that may only remember the joke and scroll past the song.

The face-to-camera plea has become a genre

The “please buy tickets to my show” video has become its own category of content. You can almost feel the physical cringe behind certain uploads: the breath taken before recording, the rehearsed vulnerability, the management advice insisting that direct appeals feel personal.

Hype rarely sustains itself now, so bands must self-manufacture it. They announce that tickets are moving fast, explain why a particular show means everything, and offer increasingly intimate accounts of the financial consequences surrounding low sales. Some of those fears are completely genuine. Touring has become ruinously expensive, grassroots venues remain vulnerable, and independent artists absorb levels of financial risk that audiences rarely see.

Still, repetition drains urgency from the appeal. When every show becomes essential, every release becomes deeply personal and every presave becomes vital, the language begins to collapse. Genuine stakes become packaged through a familiar performance because the platforms have taught musicians which emotional gestures generate engagement.

I am cursed with the disposition that sniffs out performative insincerity from a mile away. Plenty of viewers remain susceptible to it, softened by a sycophantic belief that musical talent entitles somebody to constant attention. Admiration turns into obligation. Following a band begins to resemble unpaid promotional work, complete with instructions to save, share and comment for the algorithm.

Fans should be allowed to love a record without maintaining a daily relationship with its creator’s content strategy.

Guitars have replaced gifted skincare

Influencers traditionally sell access to an aspirational life – even though we all now know it is mostly a lie, because the expensive skincare arrived in a gift package, the hotel stay carried an advertisement label, and every polished surface promised that sufficient consumption could purchase proximity to the fantasy.

Musicians now occupy an awkward mutation of that role. They stand beneath the ring light holding their guitars and the hope that someone will give them attention. Their product carries years of rehearsal, personal history and considerable financial investment, yet the promotional language surrounding it has been flattened into the same mechanisms used to sell moisturiser.

That flattening affects the art itself. Songs become hooks for short-form clips before audiences experience them in full, while identities are judged by their usefulness within vertical video. Artists may begin considering whether their lives contain enough marketable moments, as though an ordinary existence represents a professional failing.

The industry then praises relatability while demanding a highly managed version of it. If you’re going to be vulnerable, make it photogenic and give spontaneity the best lighting.

Independent artists deserve avenues towards discovery; they also deserve the dignity of making music without turning their entire existence into an extended advertising campaign.

Conclusion: the algorithm cannot manufacture devotion

The answer cannot involve artists simply giving up. Silence carries genuine commercial consequences when tour sales and streaming figures determine whether another release remains financially possible. Musicians are responding to a system that punishes absence and presents perpetual exposure as the only route towards survival.

Yet the current model asks too much from artists and audiences alike. Musicians must become entertainers between releases, amateur videographers and full-time custodians of synthetic hype. Fans are expected to reward every post as evidence of loyalty, even when they originally arrived for the music.

Article by Amelia Vandergast