James Blake made headlines again yesterday for this post, which I've transcribed for you in its entirety and to which I'll add my own thoughts inline below.
Blake's message originally appeared as text on a carousel post on Instagram:
"If you are a fan and you wanna see me perform, please sign up for free at the link in bio cause otherwise you might never hear about any of my shows. I'm not going through the monopolies any more. I'm not having my fans and myself be ripped off by people who don't care the way we do about live music. They own all of our mailing lists and won't let us use them to reach our fans and now this app is restricting all my posts about shows, I don't have any other way of letting you know.
"Are any of you actually seeing these posts about shows I'm putting on? I'm seeing crazy bottlenecking. 3000 views on a story when I have 691,000 followers.. grid posts reaching hardly anyone.. why can'tI promote a show to people who follow me? How else am I supposed to let people know l'm playing?"
Feeling entitled to a certain throughput of social media reach is as Millennial as it is boomer to make real estate your retirement plan. The era of Millennial vigour, especially the early 2010s, saw Facebook (in particular) deploy what we now call organic reach generously as a growth tactic. Now people call it enshittification that the biggest and bluest of what Blake calls "the monopolies" above has continued along a normal business life cycle.
The real questions aren't Blake's last two above; those are rhetorical questions, and we could brainstorm as many answers to them as we like. (An artist of Blake's size has professionals in his corner who think about those answers on a full-time basis for the benefit of his artistry and for others.) Rather, why does he feel disappointed by those numbers? Why did he set his level circa 2013 and feels like something got taken away from him? Oh, right, because everyone does that about their prime, their youth. Don't worry: housing can only go up.
"That's why all of these upcoming piano shows are on a new platform I'm working with - bside Every show l've ever done for 13 years a company has taken the 'data' - I.e email addresses/phone numbers of my fans. I didn't know how important that was at the time. My IG was reaching more people than it does now because algorithm bottlenecking. And in the meantime those companies have built huge piles of data to be able to market other shows or anything else, to our fans, and all the musicians who weren't savvy to what was going on, are now struggling to get the word out about their shows or records. @bside.show gives that data to the musician so they can reach their fans."
Gotcha, this message is just another cynical in-kind spon-con by Blake for a platform that he has a stake in. It worked well last time, right?
"I refuse to subject my fans to the ridiculous amounts of unexplainable hidden fees they have to pay to come see me live."
"It's not just the ones you see at checkout. There are more than we even know about, buried in countless deals we artists never see, padding out the bill you pay and making touring too expensive for upcoming artists. I'm sick of the control over every single aspect of the live experience meaning that means everyone who actually works on the show can be squeezed until a career in live music being a rigger, tech, sound, lighting, producer, tour manager, all of the amazing people who make it possible for us to be in a room together playing live music safely, is harder and harder to justify as a career path."
Sudden change of subject. We're ranting, just like how we love to rant at Daniel Ek for not solving all our problems. We're not saying anything profound that a bunch of artists should thoughtlessly repost to their own Stories. It's funny that many comments on the original post are fans who, to paraphrase, are saying, "I love you man, but your tickets are so expensive, so I can't afford to go."
"For so long artists and fans have been kept in separate rooms, and prevented from talking to each other about how bad it's been getting. I wanna be in the same room as you, figuratively and literally.
"And while they kept us in different rooms they were robbing you and robbing the artists. I know huge artists who've been on tour for two years and made a LOSS on touring. They have to rely on branding deals or literally anything else to keep going. And that's super established artists! How the hell is a new band supposed to afford to tour... have you noticed there aren't as many bands around btw?"
You are in the same room as me. The number of people who view your Stories, which you complain is too small, are the ones who continue to view them despite the volume of content growing higher by the day. Likewise for those who stream your music. I'm curious: is someone else on your team complaining that your social media engagement rate is too low, or are you just hungry for it?
If you can't afford to go on tour, don't go, and either fire or put healthy distance between those who sent you out there. Exhibit A and Exhibit B.
"When streaming decimated artists income from music we all said 'oh I guess we've still got live music, that's how we'll sustain ourselves and give the music away virtually free to promote the shows'. Well now a different set of vampires has done it with live music as well and with this the fans suffer even more. When somebody asks me how to get into a career in music my answer cannot be 'become a content creator and sell products'. I refuse.
"To all artists out there - the humble mailing list is your way out of this. love you."
On this ending note with which I largely agree, I come away feeling like it is other people in Blake's corner who have been misdirecting his career. Has he never had a mailing list? That'd be unthinkable for me at any step along the lengthy, successful road he's walked. I feel bad for him.