I see something in the music business today that amazes the hell out of me.
An artist will have 50,000 followers on Instagram.
Another 5,000 subscribers on YouTube.
Videos getting thousands of views. Comments full of fire emojis and people saying, “You killed that!”
Looking at all that shit, you'd swear you're dealing with a superstar.
Then Saturday night comes.
There's a club ten minutes from their house. Tickets are twenty dollars.
And they can't get 50 damn people in the building.
Something ain't adding up.
Somewhere along the way, we forgot the difference between a follower and a fan.
A Follower Ain't Necessarily a Fan
Let's get that straight.
A follower clicked a button.
Maybe they liked one of your videos. Maybe they thought you looked good. Maybe you said something funny. Maybe the algorithm put you in front of them while they were sitting on the toilet.
Hell, they might not even remember following you.
But we started treating that number beside “followers” like it represents thousands of people who actually give a damn about us.
It doesn't.
A fan is different.
A fan knows your songs.
A fan tells somebody else about you.
A fan buys the T-shirt or the record.
A fan drives across town, pays admission, stands in front of that stage and sings your damn song back to you.
And if you've really touched them, they'll come back.
That's a fan.
Don't confuse that with somebody who double-tapped your picture while waiting on their chicken wings.
Social Media Gave Us a Funny Kind of Fame
Before social media, if somebody told me they could draw 500 people, that meant something.
That meant 500 human beings were willing to get dressed, leave the house, burn some gas, find a parking space, pay some money and spend part of their night with you.
That's commitment.
Today, we count somebody scrolling past a fifteen-second video as evidence that we've “built an audience.”
Maybe.
Maybe not.
The internet made it possible to become visible without becoming valuable to anybody.