Among the latest statements that have come through is that the latest artist that trends on the top charts is not really artists, it’s influencers that are doing some music. In this focus on social media, it’s totally right. The real artists are sucked up in rules that are not really for them, instead, it’s for an influencer, and there is a difference between these two.

One big problem is that the music industry has totally forgotten what they are actually doing. We have lost our core values. We are promoting music. To be able to promote music you must have good music. Over the past ten years, we have replaced the good ears that could define what is a golden nugget in the brown wave of music that is washing over us.

Somehow, we thought that social media and likes or followers would solve an old problem and reach the nirvana that you could pick artists and songs out of numbers and just put the money on the right artist and be safe when you invest in an artist career. In fact, we just pushed over the whole process of risk-taking onto the artist, not enough numbers no investment.

Instead, we started to hire young wizards on social media telling the artists how to post and how to run their social media accounts. And many accounts it is, you must make content for each channel, and since really none is for music in that kind of way you just have to deal with a lot of other things than music. During the time here after the pandemic, I have bumped into several managers that are so into social media and how their artist is performing on followers and other stuff they just forgot that they need quality music. Instead, they are focusing on pressuring the shit out of the artist to get to a label where they will have another social media person and they are two to whip up more content around the artist. At the same time, none of the artists are good enough to write or produce and music that is needed to break into the minds of the audience. At its best is just mediocre, in many cases just crap. And the lack of good music has been replaced with social media porn. Pictures of luxurious beaches, strolling down the shopping avenue, some stupid pictures in a studio with some old fart that produced a hit song in the 80:s that no one really remembers.

Back in the day, you got these people that were restless souls, probably had a letter combination. They wanted to be famous, and the music industry was an easy gateway for them to get there. Then you had the introverts that just cared about how everything sounded, barely changed clothes, and was kind of eccentric oddball. Today we don’t get so much of the first one. They have found a much easier way to become famous by doing stupid stuff on TikTok or any other social media channel. It would be interesting to see how many of the top influencers on TikTok have ADHD, seems like everyone in my channel has that diagnosis. The other ones that are left and are doing good music. They are not good at social media at all. Many of them have some social phobia and are just to express themselves with music.

In the end, with all this media noise we must focus on good music. Sorry even with the most staggering following and posting on social media won’t help if you don’t do more than great music. Otherwise, you are just an influencer that do some music on the side. And to be able to do this you need to have an ear to hear good music or develop music into good music. Sorry, none of the music schools today teach that. My firm belief is that you can only do that by working with music and real artists to reach that goal. Too many of these young managers have no clue of a good song, it could paint itself purple and dance on their desktop singing “I’m a Hit song” from the top of their lungs and they just look at the numbers and just dismiss the song since they are not listening just rely on numbers. History tells us about so many songs that many people back then dismissed, and then back then they were trained to hear a good song.