Why Musicians are leaving Facebook | Hacker News Reader

Why Musicians are leaving Facebook

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18 pointsjrgentle11 comments

Thanks for the comment. Unfortunately what you expect is not the reality. With Facebook's current algorithm ,to reach the amount of people (who have already Liked your page) in the hopes that they see your post and convert is far more than a couple of bucks. At the moment, Facebook is showing an average of 2-4% of the people who have liked your page without a boost. A $5 boost will jump that up to around 400-500 people. That is per day! When you are getting maybe $100 bucks a gig, and if you are lucky you don't have to split that too many ways, it adds up fairly quickly. YOU may not want to see every post from that band, but if that band wants to grow and get their music heard they need to expand to people who haven't Liked their page yet. The numbers don't make sense for artists starting out and trying to grow a fan base.

Are you targeting your adverts? $5 (~£3) would get me a few thousand views rather than <500.

Everyone arguing against boosting seems to say "They liked our page, they want to see our content!" Nope. I liked a band. I don't care what drivel they're posting every 10 minutes in a hopes of it going viral for publicity.

Facebook would be unusable if it didn't pick and mix what it shows on my feed

"Then you suddenly changed the way Posts are seen by people who have already followed a musician’s page to the net effect that an average post is seen by a tiny fraction of the people who have liked the musician."

As Facebook user and band-liker, I don't want to see every post from a band-- just the posts that are relevant to me.

I'd expect that Facebook's current post "boosting" mechanism should work excellently for self-managed, touring musicians: Make a post about a local show, then pay just a couple dollars to "boost" that post specifically to users who like your page and live in the area of the show. The UI for boosting and targeting posts is super easy already, and we should expect it will just keep getting better.

Is the author asking for automation of the posting/boosting for multiple tour dates?

"As Facebook user and band-liker, I don't want to see every post from a band-- just the posts that are relevant to me."

I think the frustration with music lovers is that relevance isn't really determined by ad spend or what's promoted (I already determined a band was relevant to me by liking them) and it shouldn't be difficult or require extra "boosting" for bands to just have a follower receive each update they have.

I have a friend who is very into music and uses facebook because artists and their fans haven't agreed on some other music centered social app (yet).

He wants the exact opposite of what you described i.e. see ALL updates from all bands I follow in a feed.

His feeling is "Facebook sucks for music because I don't even see the posts from the artists that I follow". I tend to agree. If you are following some niche group or organization and you want to be certain that you receive updates... well facebook isn't good for that anymore. Who knows what you have been algorithmically disqualified from viewing?

Yeah, getting the main feed right is a general issue for Facebook.

If someone really wants to know about a few bands in particular, liking some of their posts will cause more of their stuff to percolate up into the main feed. But they have to keep liking.

To see all posts from bands one can make an "Interest List" containing the bands. Posts from members of that list will show chronologically. But I don't think showing all posts is the solution to getting users the info they want.

What happens if a band page creates a Facebook event? Does the event get recommended to likers nearby the event? That could be an approach.

Author is probably correct in that Facebook needs clear guidance here.

What I am asking for is a different pricing mechanism for bands and artist. This is not an unreasonable ask considering that Music on Facebook is one of their biggest draws and they happily use that fact to sell advertising. They can give a break to the people providing valuable content.

FYI, to reply directly to a comment, hit the "reply" link right below it, rather than typing into the "add comment" box at the top. It makes the thread more readable that way

Interesting to think about for sure. Facebook's algorithmic solution seems to be that to the extent that any post is a true draw to Facebook, that post will get more likes and thereby be more likely to percolate up into other users' main feeds. Boosting that post will therefore cost less. This provides sort of a sliding scale without pricing tiers.

Why readers are leaving this blog post

It's light text on light background, also if you click (Chrome) it puts some overlay of some sort over the page and stops it from scrolling

Dear long web post, light grey on white hurts my eyes, thanks...

Noted

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