An open letter to Mark Zuckerberg
I respect Facebook as a company. I think you’ve done a great thing with it. It’s been an amazing, world-connecting platform. It’s helped fuel revolutions. It’s changed the way we live and connect with others. It’s a grand, social experiment, whose end results we have yet to see. The optimists among us believe that this platform will lead to a greater good; more connections between people, more compassion, more unity between different people.
I also respect that you run a tight business; that our attention is a source of income for you and your company. The economics make sense. I have no problem uploading content while knowing that Facebook has some sense of ownership and some stake in that content. It’s a fair trade for being able to connect with others who I share life with, and who I want to share content with.
However, I want to urge you to make some changes with regard to how you treat artists on Facebook. Right now, an individual can share any content on their personal page, and a mysterious algorithmic meritocracy seems to make good content rise above the general “Facebook din” and get noticed. But an artist, with an artist page, has to pay to get their content to be seen, even by the people who like their page.
It’s your prerogative to make it this way, it’s your platform, your business. But consider what it’s like to be an artist these days. From my perspective, a musician, the outlook is pretty dim. There are many, many ways to get my music heard these days, which is positive for me as a creator. But streaming has killed revenues - it’s a simple fact of the technology and the economics. A superabundance of free material on practically every platform means people get their music fix the easy way. A few altruistic people pay for music, but most people gladly listen for free (or pay into a system that pays artists a fraction of a penny for a play and unfairly divides the paid subscriptions in a way that doesn’t reflect an individual’s paid listening or the artists they listen to).
At this point, we creators are scrambling to make ends meet any way we can. Doesn’t sound too different from art in any era of history, but now the majority of artists trying to create high quality work, especially musicians, must find other means of funding it than selling that work itself. Kickstarters up the wazoo. Patreon. Whatever the platform, it’s all the same story. The buyers just aren’t there the way they once were for the product itself. It’s the economy of the new era. The smart artists (or those with a dogged tenacity) figure out a way to make it work. The rest are slowly discouraged out of it.
However, Facebook, a wildly successful corporation, could make a difference for artists. You could if you wanted to. The simplest way you could do it is by allowing artist pages, by algorithm, to get the same amount of exposure for posts that individuals’ personal pages have. That would mean much to an artist. As an individual, I have 2,146 friends on my personal page. (I’ve been an artist for a long time, and I get around. I know who they are, and I pay attention to their lives). With my artist page, which has been in operation for a couple of years, I have a modest 745 likes; a fraction of the amount an artist who is really doing well has, but that’s fine. It’s growing. I know that in the Facebook economy, I have to pay to get any content from my artist page in front of the eyes of even those who have liked my page. I sometimes share the exact same content on my personal page and my artist page, because I’m an individual person, and I make art. But the numbers are staggeringly different. The views for my artist posts just never happen. Not unless I pay. Sometimes I do pay, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth to do so. You see, paying is voting with my dollars. And I have to admit, I resent paying to have content I uploaded viewed by people who, in the economy of the “personal page,” should see it for free. I admit that I seldom share content on my artist page for that reason. It just isn’t worth it for me. I connect with people, including those who love my art, primarily on my personal page, because there’s a sense of genuine interaction, community, life, connection - the stuff that inspires art. By contrast, what I see when I engage with my artist page is dollars paid for eyeballs, meted out on a really small scale unless I pour in a lot of money. Again, that’s your prerogative. But let’s be real about what an artist page is - it’s an expensive promotion system that milks artists for nickels and dimes, which feed the Facebook machine. It’s not artist friendly, and it’s especially unhelpful for the small-scale artist, for whom even a small amount of money is meaningful. What I suggest is that you make an artist page at least as successful (in terms of the reach of unpromoted content) as a personal page. That we can at least reach all of our fans for free. Above that, if an artist wants to invest in promotion, eyeballs are reached outside of the network of people who have “liked” that artist’s page.
You don’t have to do this, of course. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. Our nickels and dimes are valuable to you. You’ve been very successful. So successful that you are able to give away millions. That’s great! (I’m sure you’ll choose the recipients wisely - you seem like a shrewd individual.) But I do ask that you give something back to artists. Not money, per se. Just eyeballs. The eyeballs that we’ve earned by every long drive, tough gig, or late night. Each week of tour I see my Facebook page likes increase - by increments. I recognize the faces of each “like” from the night before. Great people who I connected with, who had kind things to say about my music, and who were enthusiastic. Many of them don’t feel comfortable connecting with me through my personal, individual page, which is an intimate choice, but they want to stay connected to what I’m doing, so they like my artist page. I’m asking for that connection back. I’m asking for my content to be freely placed in front of their eyes, like it is when I post from my personal page. Of course, if I want to pay for my content to be in front of MORE eyes, it makes sense for me to pay for it. That’s advertising. But let’s face it, an artist page, a thing which implicitly seems to carry intimacy, has no more intimacy than any brand page, like Doritos, or Ritz Bits, or toilet tissue. And art, music, these things are supposed to be more connective than that. At least, that’s how fans feel about music. And if you don’t feel that way, if you feel that music and toilet tissue are on the same plane in terms of emotional value, that might be a problem. Don’t get me wrong, if I discover that the rest stop bathroom I’m using (on tour) is out of toilet tissue, it’s an emotional issue. But that’s not what I’m talking about. Music and art connect people in a very deep and human way. You’ve taken the personal out of the art and relegated artist pages to the sphere of commerce. An artist page is a brand page now - it’s no place for real, human, intimate, individual connection. All of the artists I know lament the way Facebook treats artists. Because we truly connect with people through our art, and we used to be able to do that on Facebook before things changed. I’m asking for our hard-earned eyeballs back, for free; nothing more. You can still make money off of our desire to reach new people. But give us the eyes we’ve earned one-by-one each night as we dig deep into ourselves to make something beautiful. Give us at least that.
Those of us who are tenacious will survive and make great art because we have to do it. We’ll make our art no matter what. But you can help by giving us back the eyes we’ve earned. And give us back real connection and intimacy through our artist pages. The deck is stacked against artists, financially, and that’s especially true for musicians today. That clock can’t be turned back. But what we’ve gained in the new economy is connection, in some places, and Facebook could really be one of those places. It could be a place where artists truly connect with the people who love their work through their artist pages and artist persona. But it isn’t now. Not anymore.
snowghoul
vaporwave
2087
discoholicmusic
kianamaiart
dededos
romaincrisis
janainaart
