Mark Roberge warns musicians that social media followers are rented, not owned. His band Prospect Hill lost everything when MySpace collapsed, so now he captures email and text contacts instead, using platforms just to funnel fans into lists he controls.
Most artists are focused on building their follower count on social media platforms when they should be focused on acquiring their fans' information and building their email and text message list. Remember, these platforms are renting their audience to you. You do not own that audience directly. Take it from me, my band was one of the biggest bands on MySpace at one point in time. Prospect Hill, we had hundreds of thousands of fans on there, millions of streams, and an inbox full of messages, and then literally one day it was gone. You know, so that was a big blow. And from there on, I've always made it a point to capture our fans' information so that we can speak to them directly and that the platforms are not going to be able to rent them to me. I use them as an aggregator to then drive audience in and then get them into my platform so that I can speak to them directly. Right. So my challenge to all of you is to ensure that all these fans that you're acquiring across all social media platforms, that you have the ability to then speak to them directly through text message or email, at the very least email. So from here on out, what I would suggest is any fans that you acquire through Instagram, through TikTok, through YouTube, speak to them directly through the DMs, through the comments, and get them to then sign up into an email list, whether it's on another platform or even just acquiring it yourself and putting it into a Google Sheet. Ultimately, I suggest using FanFlowy because that's why we built it, and it ensures that those emails that you're acquiring don't just sit there. There's actual action that goes on and systems built so that now these emails go out in an automated fashion. Ultimately, though, make sure you're capturing them. That is my information for you guys. That's my biggest gripe right now, and that's one of the biggest points of view that we push to all of our Maker Music artists.
