i wasn't going to say anything about the joker out social media/communications/gen ai thing because frankly, discourse is usually not very interesting to me and not what i want to do on social media myself. i kinda just want to vibe.
but then i figured, i actually have some insight into the matter, both through personal interest and professional experience. so i thought i might share the way i approach it.
not here to start anything, just to share one perspective, so please read with that in mind. it's long, and it's just my personal musings.
for background information:
i have been engaged with band fandom for damn nearly 20 years, long before social media. back in the day when there was drama with a band, their website would simply just crash and the conversation would happen in traditional media. that's how long i've been following bands.
i have worked in marketing and communications for multiple creators and artists in the field of arts and culture (live music included, but not recorded music). i have been in charge of many social media accounts and the overall communications and marketing for both small and medium companies in this field, both completely independent and more supported.
i have seen and been involved with building companies from the ground up in the field of arts and culture.
so to that first point, about having been involved with band fandom for that long, i want to say: i have made my peace with my favourites doing things i disagree with a looooooong long long time ago. i have found ways to deal with that on a personal level and i have learnt to recognise my own boundaries with that. it's not a source of drama in my life, but a moment of introspection and prioritising. i'm saying that just to set the tone for the rest of this looooong post, because i think that in these situations it is easy to read opinions trying to either look for ways to support your own opinion or think of ways to dismantle others. so i just want to make it super clear that my intention is not to tell anyone how to feel, simply to share how i look at it.
the way i look at communications and the social media behaviour of anyone these days is through the lens of someone whose job it was to try and reach new audiences through social media, through advertisement, through events, through newsletters and really any means necessary, because audiences are literally the lifeline of any artistic profession.
so what i see happening here is this: joker out needed a new way to deal with their communications and marketing, across the board. why?
because it's vital but exhausting to do.
if you have never used the professional, business side of social media, there's a good chance you have no idea of just how brutal it is, and it's getting more and more chaotic frighteningly fast. the conversion rates from passive audience to engagement, let alone active followers, are abysmal. you know how on tumblr creators have suffered from people not reblogging anymore, just liking things or worse, scrolling past? it's the same everywhere, except on other platforms people don't even necessarily hit the like button, they just keep scrolling, endlessly. you go into the stats and you see that thousands and thousands of people have seen your post, but only five of them have even visited your profile at the back of it. this trend has been accelerating since the covid years. it's bad.
also feed posting is becoming less and less popular, for example on instagram. feed posts get drowned out under the algorithm recommendations. you ever notice getting recommended posts long before your feed hits posts from accounts you actually follow? it's harder and harder to show up in the feeds of people who actually already follow you, let alone get new followers.
it might not be so obvious to the average user, because when you scroll algorithm based social media, what ends up on your feed usually ends up there because it already has tons of engagement. but for every popular video like that, there are millions of posts trying to reach attention and getting nothing. that's how algorithms work.
for all of these reasons, social media IS a full time job if you want it to be effective. but it's also often times the last on the list of priorities, because other things need to happen and be ready before you can even think about social media content.
but then why is it important to get new followers? why not just focus on the existing fans you have and post content they will engage with?
well, i'm not in the music industry specifically, but my educated guess in the case of an independent band is this:
they need money
to get money, they need sponsorships and collaborations
to get sponsorships and collaborations they need an audience they can sell to said sponsors and collaborators
the bigger the audience, the better the deal
but why do they need money from sponsorships and collaborations? why can't they focus on their music?
because making music as an independent artist doesn't make you money, before it costs you money.
to jump back to what i was saying about following bands for 20 years, things have changed drastically in that time. the most important change being where the money comes from.
because it does NOT come from selling music anymore. people do not pay for music anymore and they don't want to pay for music anymore. people want to pay a monthly fee for spotify and listen to as much as they like. and we all know spotify pays less than crumbs to their artists.
spotify is not going to pay five sets of rent, food, electricity, water, medical care etc etc etc. not even their most devoted fans buying physical copies of albums and merch is going to cover that, because making those physical copies and merch actually costs something too, and as an independent artist the cost is on them.
every single time they make an album, or even a single song, it costs them money. they are an independent band, THEY pay for the studio, THEY pay the producer, THEY pay for the equipment etc. etc.
everything you get from an independent artist, they paid for.
i'll give you an example from the world of metal: there is a man called devin townsend. he started his career in the 90's, in a band called strapping young lad. they were iconic and important in the scene of extreme metal. they were successful. since SYL disbanded, devin has worked on multiple projects, most of them carrying his name. he has a following that spans decades. he is 53 years old.
in 2014 he had to crowdfund making an album. otherwise he would have not been able to make said album. he did not have the means to operate as an independent artist, after twenty years in the industry gaining a following.
now his crowdfunding campaign was a success and people were happy to support it, but my point is that independent artists are having to come up with more and more creative ways to just be able to work. to create more.
to top that off, an independent artist is also going to be paying every single gig and tour themselves. to be able to afford a tour, they need to be able to ask for ticket sales percentages and fees that actually somewhat cover the cost of the tour at least. in order to be able to do that, again, they need attention. they need a name. they need fame.
they need a following.
and the more they want to tour? the further they want to go? the bigger a following they need, so that they can get that sponsorship deal that pays for the bus, get that collab that covers the catering, so that the money they might have left over from the tour might go towards their housing and food.
(and some of the places they go to? to me they speak volumes on how much they care about their existing audience. finland, for example, makes ZERO sense as a gig location for an independent band their size. it's a small and isolated market, it's expensive, and it's a logistical nightmare because travelling to finland will always be a detour. it's not on the way to anywhere, you can't access it by land now that the border to russia is closed, so it's hard to get in and out with expensive equipment that might not survive long flights, and the venue selection in the capital city, aka where the biggest audience is, is surprisingly poor these days. it makes no sense for them to play finland as much as they do - unless they really, really care about it.)
now, joker out is clearly in a relatively good place, or at least they have been, since they were able to take time to go work in london, for example. but i personally always try to keep in mind, that their day to day work involves big expenses, and even though things might be looking good at one point, it might not take long for things to not look that good again. and they need to be able to plan ahead, by a lot.
all of that is to say, they need social media and other means of reaching people. they need growth on all platforms and they need to explore how to do that in a way that is cost effective.
now, of course the most cost effective thing would be to do it all by themselves. make their own social media posts, write their own newsletters etc. etc.
so we come back to my actual expertise.
like i said before, it is a full time job if you want it to be effective in this day and age, so that's the first hurdle.
the second one is that while social media as a past time and a hobby can be lots of fun, as a compulsory work task that you have to do or else you lose your audience? it is soul numbing, boring and kills any creativity you have.
social media as work fucking sucks, unless you are a special kind of crazy that most artistic types just are not. and the connections through social media can easily feel so incredibly fake. and i think joker out have had their share of fans who treat social media as a channel to shit on them for every inconvenience.
it literally kills any joy you have in your life, when you try and try and try to get people to see your creativity through social media but the vast majority of what you get back are demands to come tour here or there, the same stalkers being weird in every post, or fans bickering between themselves.
i have worked with people who have tried their best to balance both creating art and communicating about it. it's not possible to do and still stay sane, not in this day and age and in this cultural environment. it just isn't. that's why the people i worked with hired me to do the communications part, so that they can try and focus on creating.
now, what do i, as somewhat of a professional, think is happening with joker out right now?
i think they have hired help, and their social media manager is trying out a new approach online. it's basically that simple.
she is trying out something new to see how a new approach performs. that's her job. it's going to take a little while for her to see if the new approach works or not. that's just how it works.
do i personally like the new approach? no. but the thing is, i've been there.
and no, before anyone says anything, i have not used generative AI to do my work for me. never. i've never touched AI at all.
but i've been there, trying to build a new approach on social media. and that's what i've also seen people discuss, their tiktoks etc. suddenly being a different tone, a different vibe, trying to follow trends etc. and i've been the one desperately trying to reach people. desperately trying to get people to see the content i create. desperately trying to build a bigger audience, because collaborators care about that. and the thing is, trial and error is the only way. THE ONLY WAY. there is no manual. you have to try and see what happens.
(and the truth is, and i can say this from experience, what usually gains most engagement these days are posts that follow a trend or a meme format, or reference something that is currently trendy. it's what the big crowds like, because it's instantly recognisable, because it's light-hearted and fun, and because it's easy to understand, share and engage with.)
so, what the audience needs to do is simply either engage with it or not engage with it.
you can, of course, always send feedback, but as someone who has been on the receiving end of that feedback, my advice would be to be mindful of the history of social media feedback with joker out. unfortunately expressing downright anger over social media posts or marketing campaigns is not super effective. because at the end of the day, they know and we all know, it's not life and death. it's not the most important part of what they do. it's "just" social media.
engage with the posts you actually like. if that means only engaging with the accounts of the individual members, when they post something authentic, do that. for someone whose job it is to follow the numbers and analyse them, it matters and they are going to notice the pattern.
personally, i don't know much of what goes on in their tiktok because i don't use tiktok for myself and never have. so what i know is based on things that get shared on here. but my advice would simply be to let the numbers speak for themselves and not engage if the new style on tiktok is not to your liking.
(that being said i do think they have tried to engage with trends on tiktok before. it's not completely out of the blue. their new social media manager just has a different voice than what they used to have. now it's about seeing if that new voice works or not.)
now, one last thing. when it comes to not being up front about the use of AI. that is of course something everyone has to decide for themselves how they feel about it.
with that being said, i'm not so sure comments and messages on the band's account reach the members very effectively. i think they have left as much of the official communications side of it all behind as possible. i can't fault them for that, because i know how exhausting it is, and the scale i worked on was much smaller than theirs. so i personally find it hard to accuse any single one of them of lying, when i do believe that the point of hiring a social media manager is to let them manage the social media so you don't have to. at all, if possible. (and that's also something i've seen in all my years of following bands. members who barely know what a tiktok is.) your comments and tagged posts are most likely seen by the social media manager, and she chooses if and when she brings them to the band's attention.
so the tl;dr version of this all is that both the world of music and the world of marketing and communications have changed and keep changing fast, in a way that is frankly a nightmare for anyone trying to actually create something artistic. i do think they could do better in their communication overall, but they are navigating a new situation and learning what works for them and what doesn't. that's not something that ever ends, no matter how experienced you are as an artist, because the world of communication keeps changing.
and so personally, i'm inclined to give them grace.
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