It's 7.30 am, and I open Instagram. I am the one who regularly deletes and reinstalls the app. This practice of deleting and re-downloading is surprisingly common amongst people I know and work with.
The first post I see is of a young artist, thanking their fans for pre-saving their song. “Your support means everything to me.” I click through and see that the artist has a few thousand followers. Engagement is low, but that has not stopped the artist from posting every day into the void in the hope of something changing.
There is nothing wrong with this practice. In fact, it is the norm. Post once a day. Throw something at the wall - you never know. The artist is doing exactly what the industry has told them to do.
But when did we get so desperate?
In 25 years in the music industry, I have never met an artist who enjoys making content. Not one. Not “finds it a punish but gets it”. Enjoys. I've worked with dozens of artists and their teams as a signed artist, a promoter and now a manager, and the consensus is close to unanimous.
An entire industry has organised itself around a daily activity that many of the people doing it privately hate. It's worth asking what we're doing.
The rise of social media has not been all bad. Media being democratised has meant that artists can build a brand on their own terms. Discovery can fall in your favour: the algorithm may choose to bless you on any given day. Pray for such a blessing.
But remember when triple j playing your song meant your life was about to change? Those days are long gone. Legendary booking agent Tom Windish, the man behind Billie Eilish and Lorde, put it plainly in an interview recently with Mauricio Ruiz: artists used to develop quickly.
Play the little clubs, word spreads, the support tours and festivals come, then Pitchfork and the New York Times write about you. And then you were on your way. Now a viral hit on TikTok does not guarantee the same outcome. I have worked with artists with crazy Instagram and TikTok numbers that cannot sell 10 tickets in their hometown. Or anywhere.
This year Instagram changed their algorithm to favour content you're more likely to enjoy over the things you follow. This is monumental if you spent years building an audience. And monumentally sad because you don't own any of the data. Yes, you can still pay to maybe reach them with Meta ads. But maybe you can't.
Somewhere along the way we have lost our power.
It wasn't handed over all at once. We've given it away one post at a time, because each post was free.
Last year I worked on a campaign that spent five figures on content, ads and a social media consultant, and by every number on the dashboard it worked. Streams went up. Traffic increased. Followers arrived by the thousand, many from cities the artist will never play.
Then the tour went on sale, the only number that pays anyone, and the rooms were half empty. We had bought attention everywhere and connection nowhere. They call them vanity metrics for a reason.
I have watched the handover play out most painfully at the major labels. In Australia, they still have the money and the vestige of power. What they no longer have is a strategy. Sit in the campaign meetings, and it comes down to: let's create some content, put it up, and see. Nobody knows what will work, because the machine deciding what works is in another time zone and does not take meetings.
A major label without a channel it owns is just a bank with opinions. It's not uncommon for the industry to refer to major labels as 'banks'. They are flush with cash from streaming deals (they monetise back catalogues aggressively). But investing in new talent in Australia? Nothing has broken in years.
“We should add text on screen.” “This caption is working.” “It needs to be short and punchy.” “You can't actively promote the music.” “Follow trends.” “Don't follow trends.” “What is your brand?” What the hell are we meant to do?
All of that lands on the artist. The label has a marketing team, the agency has a marketing team, and yet the person expected to actually make the thing every day is the one who signed up to write songs.
We have done this to ourselves as an industry. Hopefully some of that pressure finds its way back to the marketing departments, and away from the artists and managers who were never hired to make content in the first place.
Marketing agency Chaotic Good caught headlines recently for gaming the TikTok algorithm, and the band Geese were labelled as industry plants as a result. For the record, I love Geese, and Getting Killed is a great record. That is why it went properly viral.
The clips got it in front of people; the songs did the rest. But now everyone is trying the clipping thing, and it is returning less every time, because the game has ceased to be winnable.
It may not stay that way. Look at what is happening around us. Australia banned under-16s from social media last December. The UK followed in June, and the rest of the world will likely fall in line.
Likes have been quietly hidden for years. YouTube now openly calls itself television, and by the numbers it is right: the biggest screen in the lounge room. Instagram wants to be the new TV too. Fine. But nobody ever built a career by hoping the TV network would put them on.
Age verification is identity verification by another name, and once every account has to prove there is a real person behind it, the bots and follower farms are finished, and so is the clip farming that copied the Geese playbook without the songs to back it. That is a good thing. A game that can't be cheated drifts back towards being won on the music.
“I would rather not do social media, but this is the world we live in,” says a colleague of mine. Is it really? Have we ever asked why we would have to pay to reach someone who wants to follow us and be updated on things that are happening?
The solution? Two things, and neither is a content calendar.
Own the audience instead of renting it. Every artist needs a direct line that no algorithm change can take away: the names, the emails, the community. If that sounds old school, it is. Message boards. Fan clubs. The mailing list.
Artists are already heading back there, with Discord servers and private group chats doing the job the forum used to do. Use one of the platforms popping up to serve this, or vibe code your own community platform. Why not. The tool matters less than the principle. If a platform sits between you and every fan you have, you don't have fans at all.
And play. Real rooms, real people, over and over. Chappell Roan spent seven years grinding, got dropped by her major, and broke on festival stages before the internet caught up and called it overnight.
Last year she was up for Best New Artist at the Grammys alongside Sabrina Carpenter and Shaboozey. Three 'new' artists, each close to a decade in, each dropped by a label or reinvented at least once along the way. It was always about the talent. It was never about the numbers.
Closer to home, Melbourne’s own Ecca Vandal has put in more than a decade of ferocious live shows to get to her moment, a Coachella debut this year. Along the way, she logged off music and social media entirely, and came back bigger. Her comeback album is called Looking For People To Unfollow. The clips went viral because the rooms went off. Not the other way around.
Which brings us back to time. I wrote recently that AI can make a song in nine seconds, but musicians still need years. Same rules apply. Ten years is not the punishment for doing it wrong. It's the price of doing it at all. The feed creates the illusion that it can happen overnight. The true litmus test is hard tickets. It has always been.
It's 7.35 am now, and the young artist's post is already sliding down the feed. If I could reply without sounding like a manager, I'd say: keep writing, keep playing, and start collecting names, email addresses and locations, because the platforms will keep the reach either way. The algorithm decides who gets seen. It has never once decided who gets loved.
Matt Walters is an Artist Manager at Unified Music Group.
***SOURCES***
Tom Windish on artist development: The Managers Playbook hosted by Mauricio Ruiz, 2025.
Instagram feed shift to recommended content: 'Your Algorithm' expansion to main feed, June 2026, reported by Digital Trends and Search Engine Land; social graph to interest graph shift per Buffer, 2026
Under-16 social media bans: Australia, in force December 2025; UK announced 15 June 2026, in force Spring 2027 (GOV.UK fact sheet, July 2026); Austria, France and others moving on similar restrictions
Instagram hidden like counts: optional since 2021, following tests from 2019
YouTube as television: YouTube has repeatedly stated TV is its most-watched device (Nielsen The Gauge, 2025-26)
Chaotic Good / Geese: Billboard podcast interview (SXSW 2026); Eliza McLamb, 'Fake Fans' (Substack); Wired, April 2026; Music Ally, 15 April 2026
Chappell Roan: seven years from first releases (2017) to breakthrough; dropped by Atlantic in 2020; broke via festival performances 2023-24 (widely reported)
2025 Grammy Best New Artist nominees: Chappell Roan (won), Sabrina Carpenter (first EP 2014, left Hollywood Records 2021), Shaboozey (first single 2014, left Republic), among others
Ecca Vandal: debut single 'White Flag' 2014-15, triple j rotation; sabbatical from music and social media (NME cover story, June 2026); comeback album Looking For People To Unfollow (2026); Coachella debut 2026
