Musicians Are Now “Content Creators” in the Attention Economy

Random Notes 47 Comments

The Doohickeys


If you’re an up-and-coming musician these days, it’s not really about the quality of your songs, your underlying talent, or the human potential that you could bring to your career that labels and managers are looking for. It’s about what kind of numbers you’re garnering through your content on Tik-Tok and other social media platforms, and how that’s translating into Spotify streams.

Except in rare cases, labels aren’t looking to take a chance on a promising artist who doesn’t already have some social media uplift occurring. They want proof of concept. This means artists are doing whatever they can to game algorithms and launch viral content to get the attention of the industry and the public. This is just as important as writing songs and honing performance chops in the live setting, if not more.

Meanwhile, for more established artists to keep up, they’re also being coached to constantly be creating content to keep the public engaged. Not only is this requiring an entirely new skill set from musicians and yet another set of daily or weekly tasks to accomplish, it’s putting them in sometimes uncomfortable positions. And unlike their younger competition, creating regular content on their phone might be a foreign concept for established artists.

Not all musicians have to engage in this practice. You won’t see Sturgill Simpson out there hawking his merch and doing skits on Instagram. But he’s already made it big, and luckily got to skip this era. But everyone else is down in the trenches, slogging it out for a few seconds of the public’s sweet attention in hopes it will result in a few extra streams, and a few more tickets sold to the next show.

One silver lining is that some musicians are having fun with it, and channeling their frustration of being drafted into the army of content creators by making fun of the content creator culture itself.

The Dookickeys are a throwback country band from California who released their debut album All Hat No Cattle on January 24th. They’ve made making fun of the attention economy and the implosion of the conventional music industry their stock-in-trade. In October 2024 they went viral for posting a skit with well-known producer and engineer Dusty Wakeman about the ways the music industry has changed, including the need for artists and bands to create “content” to promote themselves.

There’s plenty more what that came from on The Doohickey’s Instagram Page. Along with creating funny content, a lot of it also comes with commentary on the difficulties for up-and-coming musicians, and the difficulties of simply being young in America with the way the American dream is slowly slipping away.

Recently, The Doohickeys also lampooned the increasing lack of human drummers in modern music in another hilarious skit featuring Grammy-winning drummer and producer Tony Braunagel.


But back on the concern of overtaxing musicians by insisting they become “content creators,” recently the Australian-based rock band from Melbourne called Sordid Ordeal laid it all out in no uncertain terms in a now viral post.


Hi, my name’s Mediocre Man from the local band Musical Group. And I’m here to tell you about our next show or release because I’ve been reduced to uploading stupid f–king videos on the Internet of me literally begging you, our family, friends, and the general public, to interact with us in any conceivable way.

My entire art form has been replaced by pandering to an algorithm controlled by a hive of greedy soulless billionaire megalomaniacs that steal my meager earnings and use it to bolster the profiles of their hitmaker investment artists that they relentlessly fly around the world to harvest attention and money from a despondent, mass media-obsessed brain dead captive audience who rely on massive corporations to tell them what to like.

We’re all really excited to play our next show that almost none of you will turn up to, and repeat this for a few years until we ask ourselves what’s the f–king point anymore, while we lament that even just a generation ago, there were far more opportunities and avenues for grass roots local artists to sustain even some humble modicum of a musical career.

So join us on the date of the next month at Dive Bar Von Scurvy to watch us basically play to nobody, and sing out guts out through the pain of realizing our dreams are stupid.

Underneath all the fun and sarcasm though is a really vexing paradigm for musicians who might be averted to putting their faces out their on the internet and begging their fans and the public for attention. But unfortunately, this is where most or all of the attention for musicians is going these days.

A feature in Rolling Stone might impress your parents, but it probably won’t even raise a blip on your online profile, especially due to the paywall. An appearance on a late night talk show used to be the avenue to a decades-long career. Now it’s only useful for cutting up into clips and placing on Tik-Tok. Publicists? They’re quickly going the way of the dinosaur, as is print media, and anything not appealing to short attention spans. All old media is drying up, and quickly.

But just like the repudiation of fast food and TV dinners for slower more healthier food, and moving past the Bro-Country era in country music to an era of more substance and twangier sounds, artists and their fans can insist on a healthier arrangement for everyone involved moving forward.

Slow down. Take a moment not to just hear a 15-second clip, but to discover the of a 4-minute song. Sign up for your favorite band’s email list, stop by their website to check out their tour dates, pre-save their upcoming single, and pre-order their next album, and without being prompted to do so on Tik-Tok.

Swiping through silly videos can be a mindless escape for a time, and virtually harmless in small doses. But the best of music is about those deeper moments. This could be happen from hearing a great song for the first time and savoring in it, or experiencing a live performance in the flesh with dozens of like-minded individuals beside you.

These are important experiences that are difficult to impossible to get from simple “content.” They’re key to getting the best out of music.

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