What the F*ck to Actually Post for Content as a Music Artist (You're Not Being Real) Vol. 2...
What are the exact things to be posting right now to get more people to hear and see your art?
There’s a major shift happening across almost every creative medium right now in the world of communication and content, and if you’re a music artist, it will likely change the way you think about your content going forward.
For the last decade, the internet and the industry steadily pushed music artists toward getting “better at social media.” Managers, promoters, labels, agents all said the same thing… “What’s going on with the content and are people feelin’ it?”
So artists were expected to get good at all the things. They were told you needed more and you needed better.
You need more engagement. Better hooks. More channels. Better editing. More of you on camera. Better cameras. More followers. Better marketing.
Do whatever you can, but you need to STOP THE SCROLL.
But something interesting is happening… Now the pendulum appears to be swinging in the opposite direction. A new ERA is emerging and it’s not the super polished, perfectly curated, or highly marketed brands…
There’s a craving for something else. Something more “real”, more “human” and if you can understand it, it will play into exactly what YOU should be posting for content RIGHT NOW.
Being a creative director and brand strategist for the last 15 years, I’ve been fully immersed in this world of “content”. My creative agency The Cult Creatives has worked on global campaigns across every creative medium with some of the larger music artists, record labels, and fashion brands in the world. But this shift is something myself and my creative collaborators are seeing and feeling in all parts of our businesses.
But before we go further let’s watch this clip from Charlie XCX
Charlie is 100% right. The anti-marketing, pro real, pro human era is upon us.
This wave is absolutely coming and its going to hit like a tidal wave.
Its going to effect all creative mediums across the board…
But how does this affect music artists and their content specifically?
More importantly, how does it answer the question we’re asking which is: What the f*ck are we supposed to post right now?
There are specific formats, styles, and approaches already starting to work. But before we get into what those are, we need to understand why this shift is happening in the first place and why recognizing it matters so much.
And maybe the best place to start is by asking an even bigger question:
Has something like this happened before?
Because AI has to be the reason for all of this, right? We’ve never had technology moving this fast, this much content being created, or this many people reacting to it all at once. It feels completely unprecedented.
So this must be why?
Well… yes and no.
If you look back through the decades of recent culture, you can actually see this same pattern happening over and over again. Not AI, but a pendulum swing between popular styles. You get an era of more manufactured content, more polish, more fantasy, escapism and then eventually people get bored of that a new generation comes along and the culture starts to shift the other direction toward more real styles. More reality, more personal and more human.
As an example look at America in the 1950s. Advertising presented an incredibly polished version of life: the perfect kitchen, perfect lawn, perfect family and all the perfect products required to complete the picture.
But then pendulum swing… the 1960s arrive and suddenly you have counterculture, underground publications, pirate radio, hippies and an entire generation pushing against that manufactured world.
You can almost watch the transformation happen through a band like The Beatles. 50s Beatles: matching suits, matching haircuts and an incredibly controlled image. 60s Beatles: long hair, facial hair, individual styles, psychedelia and increasingly more intimate and human vibe.
Same four people. Fun thru completely different cultural filters.
But maybe that’s just a fluke… one example, a weird shift that happened in the 1960s and you point to the Vietnam war and the hippie movement as the catalyst but that’s not the case.
It happens again in the 1970s. Disco becomes enormous: Studio 54, big fashion, massive clubs, production and spectacle.
You have movies like Superman, Grease, and Stars Wars leading the charge in movie theaters… all great movies, but manufactured worlds.
But then we swing back and the 1980s go even bigger with the manufactured more synthetic worlds. There’s not just bright colors it the brightest it can go with Neon everywhere. Loud patterns. Big hair. Really big hair. My mom would subconsiously measure the height and if it didn’t make the cut… more hairspay. There was new tech. Synthesizers. Hair metal. Flock of Seagulls. And Tons of movies and TV shows that live inside these giant constructed worlds: Back to the Future as one of the key examples. Its the 80s, but it’s really a picture of the 80s run thru this manufactured lens. There was Ghostbusters, Fantasy worlds like Labyrinth, The Neverending Story or The Princess Bride, and even film noir got the 80s treatment in Dick Tracy.
But then the pendulum swings… you enter the early ’90s and things suddenly get real again. Grunge. Gangster rap. And Alt rock take the forefront. The hair comes down. The colors get darker and more earthy… And movies also start going more real more intimate and more grounded: You have movies like Boyz n the Hood, Menace to Society, Dazed and Confused, Clerks, Reservoir Dogs, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Swingers, and a bunch of other art house films being huge in pop culture. Television moves in the same direction too. The Real World (Actually called The Real World) illustrating my point… turns ordinary people and their relationships into entertainment. Cops makes unscripted reality itself the show. Across music, film, and television, culture starts stripping away the big, the loud and the fantasy and starts moving back toward something that feels raw, imperfect, and real.
But then into the late ’90s back again… the rise of Boy bands, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, giant multimillion dollar world building music videos, perfect choreography and cinematography and with intentionally packaged pop stars.
But at this point you can see where this is going… Mid 2000s Pendulum swing back… now we’ve got the The Bands. The Strokes. The White Stripes. The Hives. The Vines. The emergence of blog. You get Vice Magazine, American Apparel and Urban Outfitters come the scene… Cobrasnake Photography, Myspace, underground parties, and eventually what people would call indie sleaze or scenesters.
So why do you keep seeing this same pattern?
Because every generation subconsciously wants to be different than the generation before. They want their own thing… and the easiest way to stand out and have your own thing is do the opposite of the status quo. Every generation wants something it can call its own. And often ts definition of “new” is simply the counter of whatever became popular before. 70s pants where flared and big. 80s pants were skinny. 90s pants were baggy. Early 2000s pants were skinny.
Skinny. Baggy. Skinny. Baggy. Pendulum Swinging.
Right now baggy is super in, but you now you know what’s coming next…
But there is a difference that’s happening right now. This isn’t just a typical generational pendulum swing moment. There are additional elements that are making that swing more aggressive. And you can understand these you can understand better where to take your own content and play into this new era.
WHY THE SHIFT IS HAPPENING IN THIS EXACT MOMENT
First, AI is obviously part of the story.
We’re entering a world of nearly unlimited “synthetic” perfection. AI photography, AI video, AI design, AI writing, AI music. The technology will continue getting better, faster and cheaper.
Which creates an interesting question:
If everyone can make something perfect, how valuable is perfection?
But AI isn’t the only thing that changed. You and all the other music artists were given the same internet content playbook on how to promote your music. You were told to make more content. Get good at social media. Get good with hooks. Put giant captions on screen. Cut every second. Add B-roll. Use pattern interrupts. Get confident on camera. Change the camera angle. Well not much. Get to know the algo. Study your data. Stop the scroll by any means neccessary. Sound familiar? Thought so.
But here’s the thing if Everyone is learning how to optimize content who’s really standing out? Its like getting better at a sport, but everyone else is getting just as good so the playing field remains the same.
But here’s the kicker in all this… while you were learning this playbook… your audience learned the playbook too. Either consciously or subconsciously… They know you’re game and they know your about to sell them something. They know when your “casual story” is conveniently leading toward your new single. They can feel when the vulnerable moment was actually rehearsed. They know when the spontaneous iPhone video wasn’t really spontaneous. Artist can sometime think their audience doesn’t know what up, but they do. And this generation is more Savy than ever and recognizing when a sale is coming.
You became like Neo and you could see the matrix, but now your audience can see it too.
And when everybody understands is see the same thing… truth, real, and trust starts to become exponentially more valuable.
When audiences find something real and cool that they stumble on it feels like stumbling on a diamond buried in a sea of slop.
The more synthetic the online world becomes, the more valuable evidence of actual human life with actual human emotion becomes: your actual handwriting, your mistakes, your weird opinions and quirks, your sense of human, your awkwardness, your real life experiences and your specific taste and your specific POV.
1. Handcrafted, Anti-Design Graphics
Messy collage. Handwritten elements. Rough illustrations. Cut-and-paste graphics. Lo-fi cartoons.
The point isn’t making bad design.
The point is allowing evidence of the hand to remain visible.
Older versions were Xerox flyers, zines, DIY record sleeves, mixed-media artwork and hand-drawn cartoons. They communicated that somebody actually touched the thing.
In an AI-heavy world, real, human effort itself can become part of the aesthetic.
2. Real Photos and Video
We spent years learning how to make images look better. Now some of the most interesting photography looks intentionally less perfect.
Harsh On Camera flash. Motion blur. Crooked framing. Red eyes. Someone accidentally half outside the frame.
Why?
Because it doesn’t immediately feel like a campaign trying to sell you a perfectly placed product. It feels like a documented moment that happened.
Older versions in video might be MiniDV, webcams, phone footage, screen recordings, security cameras, GoPros or old home videos.
This really happened.
3. Digital Artifacts
One of the easiest ways to communicate something real is simply to show the evidence.
Texts. DMs. Notes-app screenshots. Voice memos. Calendar entries. Google searches. Group chats.
Instead of designing a graphic explaining that you spent six months finishing a song, show the text you sent your collaborator at 3:14 AM when you finally figured it all out and their text reaction.
The old versions of this were letters, diaries, photocopies and found objects.
You’re not explaining the whole story. You’re giving someone a fragment and allowing them to participate in putting the story together.
4. Work in Progress
Artists traditionally show the final product.
But process can be far more human.
Show the demo that sucked. The lyric you crossed out. The rehearsal where somebody screwed up. The whiteboard of random ideas.
The old version was demo tapes, rehearsal recordings, voicemails, photo contact sheets, sketchbooks, notebooks, manuscripts, workprints, Polaroid tests and studio outtakes. Whatever stuff seems interesting in terms of process.
AI and advertising tend to present perfection. Not artistic process.
Process presents evidence of human creation.
You can see someone changing their mind, making mistakes and getting better.
Picasso has paintings where you can see the painting underneath that he changed his mind on and painted over.
Sometimes the fingerprints left on the work are more emotionally interesting than the perfect final product.
5. The Unedited Yap Video
Put your phone somewhere and talk.
Start recording and just talk.
One camera. Minimal editing. No enormous captions screaming the hook at the viewer.
The catch is that you actually need something worth sharing.
This format doesn’t work because low production style is magically better. It works when remove the script and the editing. You remove the polish and now it just feels like a FaceTime.
The old version was video diaries, home movies and early YouTube.
You aren’t performing being an artist. You’re just talking and sharing.
6. Actual Behind-the-Scenes
A lot of modern BTS is professionally filmed footage of an artist pretending the professional camera and videographer isn’t there.
Technically, it’s behind the scenes. Emotionally, it usually isn’t.
Real BTS includes the bad angle. Somebody eating in the background. Out of focus shots. Crew members talking. The thing that accidentally broke during the capture. Somebody becoming annoyed.
That doesn’t mean everything needs to become full on voyeurism. It simply means leaving enough imperfection in the frame that the audience feels like it witnessed something rather than consumed a piece of content.
7. Lived-In Content
Realness also comes from everything surrounding the content.
Your clothes (Styling). Your Car. Your Bedroom. Your Studio. Your Furniture. Your Neighborhood. Your Friends.
If every environment is perfectly art-directed, you can accidentally remove all the realness… that a life exists outside the content or brand that’s been created.
Instead of asking, “How could we make this look cooler?” ask:
Is this real and authentic to how we actually exist?
8.”Reality” TV
For years, artists showed audiences their extraordinary life: private jets, festivals, giant crowds, beautiful studios, the “cool” world of VIP backstage, and luxury hotels.
But when so many artists are just showing the extraordinary life, ordinary life can start to become more interesting.
Going grocery shopping. Sitting around an airport. Playing with your dog. Eating after the show. Arguing with your tour manager. Playing guitar in the van.
The interesting paradox is that the more extraordinary someone’s career becomes, the more fascinating their normal life can become.
Celebrity creates distance. Human moments close that gap and make the audience feel more connected to you.
9. COMMUNITY-MADE CONTENT Better Known as UGC.
Someone in your crowd films a terrible shaky phone lower res video. Technically, your videographers footage is way better.
But which one makes somebody feel like they were actually there?
Sometimes it’s the higher quality shot, but sometimes it’s the shaky one.
Fan videos, crowd footage, bootlegs, memes, comments and reaction videos can all become part of your official visual world based in “real”
The old version of this was fan clubs, fan websites, bootleg tapes, fan made zines, street teams, and amateur fan concert photography.
Because when the audience helps create the content, you stop serving them assets and start making them feel like you are all one community. You lead the community, but everyone is it together.
These are just a few examples there are many more categories of how to give something a “real” feeling in terms of styling and packaging.
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