A long standing phrase in the music industry encourages artists to ‘fake it until you make it.  In today’s DIY artist landscape that could equate to buying fake likes on your social media accounts to fool people into thinking you have a bigger audience.  According to this recent Music Ally article, you can now cheaply buy Spotify streams to do the same thing.

In some respects, even cropping a photo of you performing at a show to hide your small audience could be classed as ‘faking it’.

A lot of us have been guilty of ‘cropping out’ small audiences in gig photos!

Here  are three reasons why DIY artists should never ‘fake it’:

1. If you buy fake followers, YouTube streams and Spotify plays to obscure the true size of your audience, people will start asking questions as to why you have a massive audience but none of them show up to your gigs!

2. Faking is the antithesis of authenticity and authenticity is the one true thing you should be striving for.  It’s incredibly easy to spot someone who is inauthentic.

3. Your career doesn’t always have to be ‘smashing it’ and ‘killing it’. Sometimes you need to be truthful and tell your audience that things aren’t going the way you want them to.  Here’s a recent post from from superstar DJ Tiga about his shortcomings at a gig.

Wow.  That really hit home didn’t it! Adversity could be an incredibly important part of your story. Perhaps you should embrace it rather than obscure it?

Got any questions about this post or how you can better market yourself?

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