In the process of writing my recent (& slightly tongue-in-cheek) post about which city has the best music scene in Aotearoa I discovered something - it can be really hard to figure out where an artist is based.
During my research (this term is doing a lot heavy lifting here) I found Instagram bio after bio filled with links, quotes and calls to action but no location.
I dove into one Spotify artist biography after another and still found nothing. More often than not if a location was mentioned it was where the artist was born, not where they’re currently based. I was stunned. This absence of ‘place’ struck me as a symptom of a greater trend.
That trend? Artists are giving up on audience building and gambling on algorithms instead.
Let’s explore.
"Algorithms Provide Audience”
This is the rotten idea at the core of the Music Industry in 2025. You feed yourself to the algorithm and the algorithm will deliver you to an audience. How does that make musicians feel?
Disempowered. Disenfranchised. Desperate.
No wonder theres a strong psychic layer of doom & gloom permeating the music communities I’m lucky enough to brush up against when this is the core belief at the heart of the system.
It presupposes that building a career is now completely out of the control of the artists and purely a function of fitting themselves into the exact requirements of opaque algorithms built by lunatics with illegal levels of pick-me energy.
This idea casts the musician into the role of a gambling addict, returning to the slot machine of content each time they have a piece of art to present to see if they can ‘win it big’ and get their music in front of people.
There’s no such thing as a successful gambling addict. Even those who hit it big the find themselves discovering its a hamster wheel they can never get off.
This idea drives disengagement which in turn decimates community.
I also think it’s complete nonsense.
So why has it been so embraced by the wider Music Industry, including artists?
Because it allows both the music industry and musicians to externalise their failures without taking any responsibility.
Whether you work in PR, as a Manager, a Label or you’re an Artist yourself there’s now no need to critically evaluate what went wrong with a release in an effort to improve on the effort for the next go round.
In 2025 its acceptable to say “It didnt work because algorithm. It didnt hit because no playlist. It didnt go viral because it didn’t have the right hook for Tik Tok.”
It allows excuses to remain unchallenged because we can safely blame the lottery we’ve embraced as an industry.
This idea of ‘Algorithms Driving Audiences’ has been embraced in part because it serves us. It protects us from the pain of failing even when you do everything you can. It’s easier to accept the algorithms have all the power, and to blame them.
Except it’s not true. You can build your own audience. We’ve just temporarily forgotten how to do it.
People Like Music But They Love Stories
Musicians are generally musicians because they love music. We’re a bunch of geeks - nerds - obsessing over the slightest details song to song, band to band.
For a musician, music alone is enough.
Yes - I will turn up at the same time, on the same day of the week, at the same venue, standing in the same spot, drinking the same beer because each band I see is infinitely unique and sacred to me.
But for most people, that seems awfully like a job. That sounds like work. They’re bored. They’re regular people, not obsessives like us. They need something more than just frequencies hitting their ears in a pleasing way.
This misaligned dynamic between the musicians creating the art and the audience they’re creating it for is a key mechanism to explain the lack of resistance to this toxic idea of algorithms build audience.
Algorithms put you in the shop window, they get you a seat at the dinner table. If you’re a musician this context-free presentation of music isn’t an issue, you can connect with any music you come into contact with easily.
However, everyone who isn’t a musician needs something more to connect to, something more to remember you. They need stories.
Our inability as musicians to really understand this is why we are so easily tricked into thinking algorithms can do it better than we could. Because algorithms dont tell stories, and we don’t tell stories, then believing the Algorithm can do the same job as us becomes easy.
Put it this way - 60,000 songs were uploaded to Spotify today, on top of the 60,000 songs uploaded yesterday, and the 60,000 songs the day before.
What are you doing to help any person miraculously finding your song to remember it and you? Because if they’ve got nothing to connect to - you’re just 1 in 60,000 today. 1 in 2.3 million songs this year.
And all you have left is to blame the algorithm.
So Start Telling Stories (Even In Small Ways)
Being mysterious or glib online may have been cool once upon a time but I always thought it was just lazy posturing. Now it’s actively hurting you.
Just ask yourself - what is it about people that you tend to find memorable in your life? Tell those stories yourself.
Remember that you’re a Creative Being and you can apply your creativity to areas outside of literally writing and recording a song.
You could start with the basic one from this post: Where are you based?
Take some band photos at recognisable spots
Put your location in your bio!
Film a performance somewhere meaningful for you.
Scenes & community build more audiences for bands than social media. Imagine if it was not only obvious where you were based but far more obvious who else was here too. Not only for you as a musician but the audience in your city.
There are currently 410,000 people and growing here in Ōtautahi Christchurch. I often give the advice, as silly as it sounds, that you’d probably be better off going door to door in a couple of neighbourhoods with your music than posting another link to your story or asking again for a ‘pre-save’.
They’d see a real human in front of them, they’d understand instantly that this was made locally, by someone just like them. You offer points of connection and hope they connect.
Or you can stay inside, hope for a playlist placement and blame the algorithm. Your choice.
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