Episode 69: The Virality Trap

The age-old belief that viral social media moments convert seamlessly into genuine fans may be crumbling before our eyes. Drawing from some outstanding research by MIDiA titled "All Eyes No Ears: Why Virality is not building fandom," this episode explores the troubling disconnect between social media visibility and actual music consumption.

For years, the music industry has operated on a seemingly logical assumption: create viral content, convert those views to streams, and transform casual listeners into devoted fans. But what if this funnel is fundamentally broken? The research reveals that nearly half of consumers never stream music they discover on social media, and fewer than a third become actual fans. Most alarming for artists focusing heavily on TikTok - only 26% of TikTok followers actually listen to more music from artists they discover there, significantly lower than other platforms.

We dive deep into what this means for music creators and marketers alike. Rather than posting relentlessly across platforms, artists might need to focus on making meaningful first impressions that put their identity and narrative at the forefront. The data suggests we should prioritize platforms where listening is a natural next step (like YouTube and streaming services) rather than feed-based platforms where moving from discovery to consumption creates friction. For labels and rights holders, it may be time to reconsider massive investments in viral marketing campaigns and instead focus on building sustainable artist platforms that encourage genuine fandom.

Have you noticed changes in how social media impacts your music discovery and listening habits? Has your strategy as an artist evolved to address these challenges? Subscribe to Music Business Buddy for more insights that help you navigate the ever-changing landscape of music marketing and fan development.

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Chapters

• 0:14 Welcome to Music Business Buddy
• 0:53 Virality Is Not Building Fandom
• 3:59 Key Insights from MIDiA Research
• 8:35 The Discovery Cycle vs Funnel Problem
• 11:14 Recommendations for Artists and Labels
• 14:41 Social Media's Changing Landscape

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:14

Welcome to you. You're listening to the music business, buddy, with me, Johnny Amos, podcasting at Birmingham in England. I'm the author of the book, The Music Business for Music Creators, available in hardback, paperback, ebook format. I'm a music creator with a variety of credits as a writer-producer. I'm a consultant, an artist manager, and a senior lecturer in both music business and music creation. Wherever you are and whatever you do, consider yourself welcome to this podcast and to a part of this community. I'm here to try and educate and inspire music creators from all over the world in their quest to achieving their goals by gaining a greater understanding of the business of music. Okay, so in this week's episode, hello everybody, and welcome. Uh, we are talking about virality and fandom. Okay, let's get going. First off, right? Virality is not even a recognised word yet. I'm sure it will be at some point going forward. By the way, I looked that up because I thought, why is that not a word? It's like the word anthemic is not a word, right? But everyone uses it. It's one of those weird things. Anyway, that's not what I'm here to bore you about. Um, following on from last week's interview that I did with Anya Jasmine, right? Uh, which was a brilliant interview, and I learned so much, and it was really inspiring. Um, and I was thinking about some of the things that Anya had said, and I thought, okay, well, what she really needs now is to kind of, you know, catapult all of that growth from social media into her artist project, and I'm sure she will. However, about an hour after I'd spoken to her, I saw a headline that kind of concerned me a little bit, right? And uh it said, Virality is no longer creating fandom. And it kind of stopped me in my tracks because I'm not a big scroller, right? But I saw this and I thought, wow, because it was from Billboard magazine, right? And uh and I thought, okay, is this some kind of throwaway piece of journalism? And I thought, well, no, because it's it's Billboard, right? So I was like, okay, let me just open up the article and see who the source is. And then I saw that the source was media. Wow. Okay, now uh I'll I'll say this boldly, everybody. Uh if media say something, I listen, right? Because they are um one of the world's leading um, you know, researchers in the creative industries. In fact, I'd probably say they're the best. If you think back to episode 27, where I interviewed Keith Jopling, former global head of strategy at Spotify, um, he is um he's been involved with media since the very, very early beginnings, he alongside Mark Mulligan, who is the kind of head honcho behind media research. They are the ones that kind of they write reports, right? And um, and they're not subjective uh kind of reports, they're very, very, very analytical. And a lot of the things that they say uh go on to become true, right? So I saw that uh they'd created um this particular piece of research just came out just a few weeks ago, uh, called All Eyes No Ears. Why Virality is not building fandom. Okay, so I picked this up, I read this report, and uh first of all, it's an absolutely flawless piece of research, and um it was very, very, very eye-opening. So I'm just gonna go over a few of the key highlights in here because I think it's gonna be pretty educational uh when it comes to the link play between social media marketing and what that actually does in music. Okay, so first off, props to Chris Thacra, Tatiana Cirisano, Olivia Jones, Hannah Carlett, and Mark Mulligan for this outstanding piece of research. They're not paying me to say that, guys, they're just they deserve all the credit that these guys get. They are absolutely outstanding at what they do. So a little introduction onto this report. It says over the last five years, labels and artists have invested in social media. We know that, right? Betting that a steady stream of artist content and influencer campaigns will engineer virality. The theory is simple: virality leads to streams, streams leads to fandom, and fandom leads to long-term sustainable artist careers. With fandom pivotal for sustainable growth, the music industry does not simply want this vision to work, it needs it to work. However, cracks are starting to show in social's social contract. Okay. Interesting choice of words, very good choice of words. So I'm just going to give you a few key insights to begin with. So uh Discovery, it says, is highly fragmented, but YouTube still leads the pack. So no single source of discovery actually dominates, as seven different sources all have at least 10% of consumers discovering music, but YouTube reaches the most at 52%. Now, if we think about the funnel that we've just been kind of referring to there, it says here the funnel is not working on social media, or but at least not like it used to. So almost half of consumers did not stream music because they'd heard it on social media in the last month. Social media is not driving streams for the majority. Forty-eight percent of YouTube weekly active users say they spend more time streaming music because of YouTube compared to 34% of TikTok users and 23% of Instagram users on their respective platforms. Okay, here's an interesting one. Social media is not where discovery begins. 87% of consumers hear music on social media, but most of them, and they've got a number here, 58%, so most, say they have often already heard it in other places at first. Other places. Very interesting. I'd love to dig a little deeper into that. Let's go back to the funnel and let's compare different age groups. So the funnel towards streaming is down for younger consumers. So that's 16 to 24 year olds, right? They are they are less likely than 25 to 34 year olds to take almost every step through that funnel, particularly streaming the songs that they hear and listening to more music from the artists they discover. Now, TikTok users would rather follow than listen to more. So consumers who mainly discover music on TikTok are significantly more likely to follow that artist on TikTok than they are to listen to more of the artist's music. TikTok followers convert into listeners less than on other social platforms. This falls in line with some other things that I've spoken about before on the podcast. So of the 20% of consumers who followed artists on TikTok after discovering them, only 26% listened to more of the artists' music. So of the 15% of consumers who followed artists and discovered them on other social media platforms, 45% listen to more of the artists' music. So let's just simplify that for a minute. This more than points towards the fact that TikTok is not as steady as, let's say, Instagram, for example, for um actually getting people to engage with the music, or in other words, move from that funnel to click out of that platform to go and actually make a conscious effort to open a different app and listen to the music. Discovery is a cycle, not a funnel. So consumers will come back to indulge in what they are first exposed to. If that is a clip or a hook of a song, they will stay in places where they can experience that same hook. If discovery starts with the artist, they will find ways to dive deeper. Music discovery is fragmented. When we asked consumers what their music discovery source is, the most single source garnered was 31%, which was YouTube. Meanwhile, TikTok and other social media's uh platforms combined were just 27%. So this means that prioritizing any single platform essentially cuts out the majority of music fans, even if that is done for targeting purposes. So, for example, only 30% of 16 to 24 year olds say that TikTok is their favourite place for discovery. Younger consumers are less likely to discover new artists in the first place, and even when they do discover, they are less likely to listen. Almost half of consumers, that's 48%, did not stream music they heard on social media in the last month, and fewer than a third became fans. Simply being exposed to music on social media matters little if consumers do not stream the music that they actually hear, or better yet, discover the artists that are actually behind it. Both age groups, that's 16 to 24 and 25 to 34, so in total, 16 years old up to 34 year olds, both of those age groups together are more likely to stream the song they heard and more music from the artist than to stream just the song alone. However, 2016 to 24 year olds are still less likely to enter into fandom. Here's an interesting part: the more reliant that users are on algorithms, the less music they hear. Now, this falls in line with our understandings of the role that passive music plays, right, and how it kind of changes uh how music assists certain behavioural patterns. So algorithms shape our behaviours, but most on social apps. So consumers who hear music on TikTok and Instagram are significantly more likely to say they do not search for music when compared to consumers who hear music on YouTube. So consumers who do not actively search for music are more likely to prefer non-music sounds in their feeds, and to say music is becoming also a less a lesser part of that same feed. The funnel is not just clogging, it's also turning in on itself. So added to the mix, 18% of consumers do not want to leave their social feed when they hear new music. And by the time they do, 33% have forgotten what the music was or did not even see the song's name in the first place. Snippets of music fly past in the torrent of social media feeds. TikTok is a great place to reach many people, we know that. But it is likely that you will only reach them once. We are entering a zero-sum game with little room for any player in the entertainment field to carve out new spaces for attention. Social media's growth is increasingly at the expense of other sources of entertainment rather than as a complement to them. That captured my imagination because it then you start to question yourself, don't you? And go, hang on, do I watch things on YouTube now more than on regular sort of legacy television, if you will? Okay, so you know, this does kind of make for fairly unpleasant, quite glum and quite grim sort of listening or reading, if you will, right? But you know, there's always a reason to smile, isn't there, if we look hard enough. So let's think about this, right? We know that social media uh has changed an awful lot of things, but quite how fast it's changed, even in this decade alone, is really quite, you know, surprising in many ways. You know, I think back to some of the interviews that I've done in the recent months on this particular podcast, and actually, you know, all of these signs start to point towards this. There have been many, many music industry professionals that I've spoken to that have alluded to this and this change. So let's think now about this final part of this report where media highlights some call to actions from stakeholders, so from rights holders, from the platforms themselves, and from artists. And here is what they advise. Artists, make your first impression count. Posting relentlessly to social media reduces the need for fans to listen and engage off the platform. So instead of aiming to reach as many people as possible, focus on reaching the biggest fans on the platform, which are more aligned with your scene, but also more effective at driving listenership and ultimately that circle then onto fandom. So it's never been more important for artists to have clarity on their identity and their narrative in order to determine what the best channels are to express that identity. So this may well be TikTok for music, you know, like K-pop that soundtracks, dance content. But for hip hop and metal artists, engaging with kind of gaming scenes, Discord and Twitch are therefore no-brainer as they say. Focus broader marketing efforts on spaces where listening to music is a natural built-in next step to discovery, streaming and YouTube rather than feed-based platforms where migration causes a sense of friction. To labels and rights holders, the advice for many of it is this put artists on a platform, not in a platform. Take heed of the limits and negatives of social media marketing for songs and artists. Invest in revitalizing discovery sources beyond TikTok, YouTube and Spotify, which currently serve as the bottlenecks for discovery. Recognize that if fans get hooked on a hook, then a hook is all they will need. If their first point of contact is with the artist and the narratives behind the music they make, then that is what fans will keep coming back to. Again, guys, this falls in line with so many of the interviews that we've had on here. There will always be opportunities to soundtrack a viral craze with trending music. There is only one opportunity to make a first impression and to build a career on fandom. That impression needs to put the artists front and center and start the discovery cycle strong and reap the rewards. Okay, and finally they talk about the guidance for platforms. And it actually, you know, you it could strongly be argued here that the platforms are the ones that really can make the biggest difference here. So platforms, they say, make a choice. The platforms must decide what their role in music discovery and consumption is going to be. Streaming services and social media platforms pushing non-music content will have an impact on their users and the broader industry. It may meet consumer demand for some, but what platforms cannot ignore is the way music forms the soundtrack of wider lifestyles and cultures that drive the leading categories of entertainment. Pushing music away only serves to diminish the cultures that platforms depend on for capturing attention in the first place. So the path forward for future music business, right? They say ultimately music rights holders have a decision to make about how they view social platforms. Are they primarily marketing tools, consumption platforms, or equally both? For the labels, the answers will determine the volume of marketing effort invested in social media, the marketing objectives, and of course the licensing models for that. So to dig into this just a little deeper, right? If we just think about our own patterns, the things that we do when we use social media as consumers, and also the things that we do when we want to push something on social media. Has that changed? It's good to just think about that yourselves, guys. Just think about those patterns yourself in those two ways and think about that extended funnel from that because it is clear to see that things are changing. Let's just take a couple of small-scale examples. Right now, you can only use five hashtags on TikTok, and many marketeers argue that hashtags on Instagram barely even work at all anymore, dependent upon the context. So the changes around us are happening. I'm not sure what all the answers are to this stuff. I'm not sure anybody is, but it's certainly worth considering. Okay, so there's a little bit of an overview, and this all came, guys, as I said earlier, this all came from me kind of seeing a headline and going, hang on, where's that come from? Oh, it's media. Okay, it's time to listen. Uh big props to MIDI and to the team behind their research. Uh, I value them and respect them hugely, and I'm enormously grateful for what they do. Um, this podcast episode today just simply wouldn't have worked if they had not done that piece of research, and it's there to inform uh those of us who want to learn more about this kind of stuff. Okay, I hope that's been useful. Have a great day, everybody. Until next time, may the force be with you.