Everyone from FKA twigs to Florence is under pressure to provide viral social media content, but it’s at the expense of building a sustainable fanbase and honing one’s craft
I started making music full-time at the age of 18. Arctic Monkeys had just blown up and the idea that you could be from Sheffield and become a global superstar hung thick in the air. I believed if I worked hard enough, I could be a star, too: it was just a matter of time. But this was also the dawn of MySpace. Suddenly years of playing, writing and recording wouldn’t be what broke you; it could happen overnight if you played a set from your bedroom and you had a song about being a punk rocker with flowers in your hair. I remember watching a piece on Look North about how Lily Allen had got signed after being spotted on it. I realised I had been putting my energy in the wrong place, and the gnawing feeling that I could be missing the boat began.
Fast forward 17 years and your ability to understand and work at social media is the No 1 way to grow your reach as an artist. Every record label subscribes to this idea, and to be fair to them, the numbers speak for themselves. Arguably, though, the numbers have come to mean more than the creativity that creates them in the first place. It’s left a lot of artists, mostly women, frustrated at being asked to drum up content for platforms such as TikTok in addition to making personal, considered music: just in the past few weeks, FKA twigs, Halsey, Charli XCX and Florence have gone viral for protesting at their respective labels’ insistence that they should fabricate a viral moment.
