By Reece Hallum
For the past few years, independent artists have been given essentially the same career advice: post more. And then post some more.
Feed the algorithm. Stay visible. Make short-form video. Tell the story behind the song. Turn one release into twenty pieces of content. Don't disappear between releases.
Social platforms have transformed music discovery, and I'm not arguing with that. For an independent artist without a label machine behind them, direct access to an audience is enormously valuable. But somewhere along the way, we've confused two different things: the mechanism for getting attention and the thing that deserves the attention in the first place.
The scarce thing isn't content. It's the thing worth making content about (a.k.a., you.)
The Content Treadmill
I've spent a lot of time on both sides of this. I'm an independent songwriter, but I've also spent years working in communications and creative strategy. I've watched good creative work get pulled into a marketing machine and come out looking strangely similar to everything else.
The announcement video, the teaser, the lyric clip, the behind-the-scenes clip, the talking-to-camera explanation, the acoustic version, the meme and then another post explaining the meme.
None of that is inherently bad. I've made plenty of this stuff myself. Some of it is smart marketing. Sometimes the stupid little reel you made in ten minutes is the thing that gets someone to listen. The problem starts when marketing begins determining the creative strategy.
If an artist is spending more time figuring out what to post about a song than figuring out what the song could become, something has gone slightly wrong. A post performs well, so you make another. A format works, so you repeat it. A trend appears, so you adapt it. A release doesn't perform, so perhaps the answer is another five videos.
Before long, an artist can be extraordinarily productive without actually building very much. The danger is that the activity itself can start to feel like progress, even when very little is accumulating underneath it.
The Artist and the Influencer Are NOT Building the Same Thing
Part of the problem is that musicians are increasingly being handed a playbook built for influencers, who build businesses around their ability to maintain attention. Their personality is central to the product, and content is how they keep that relationship going.
Artists need attention too. But attention isn't the thing they're supposed to be building.
A musician's catalogue can keep doing its job while the artist is nowhere near Instagram. A song can be discovered by someone who wasn't even alive when it came out. A record can become meaningful because of something that happens in a listener's life years after its marketing campaign ended.
If your career depends entirely on manufacturing new reasons for people to look at you today, you're exposed to whatever happens to the platform next. If the attention is directed towards a body of work, the platform is doing a different job: helping people find something that can exist without it.
Otherwise, you end up spending your creative energy building the distribution system instead of making the thing you're distributing.
+Read more: "Email Marketing for Musicians: How to Turn Casual Listeners Into Connected Fans"
So, What Are You Actually Building?
“Intellectual property” isn’t the sexiest phrase in music. It sounds like lawyers, contracts and licensing departments. It certainly doesn't sound like sitting on the floor at 1am trying to work out why the second verse still isn't working.
But artists are creating IP constantly. In fact, every time they make anything original. The obvious example is the music itself. A song is an original work that can sit in a catalogue for decades. It can be streamed, licensed, performed, covered, synchronized, rediscovered and recontextualized.
Its value doesn't depend entirely on whether it got traction on Instagram during release week.
And the song doesn't have to be the only thing. There might be a visual language around the music, characters and stories, a particular approach to production, a body of writing, a podcast, a newsletter, a live format or eventually an entire fictional world.
Some artists develop recognizable ways of working, too: the way they write songs, construct a show or keep returning to the same strange ideas.
Those things can accumulate. A song can lead someone to an article, the article can introduce them to the artist, and the artist's wider body of work can lead to a sync opportunity, collaboration or live show. What you're building is a body of work rather than simply accumulating more posts.
When Content Gets Easier, the Underlying Work Matters More
The pressure to produce content isn't going away. If anything, it's getting easier. AI can now produce a frightening amount of competent promotional material before you've finished your coffee. For an independent artist, that can be useful. But it also changes the economics of being “good enough.”
So the question becomes less about whether you can produce another asset and more about whether there's anything recognizably yours underneath it.
Your taste matters. So do the things you keep obsessing over, the things you notice that other people don't and the decisions you make when there's no obvious answer. AI can help you get from an idea to an output faster, but it definitely doesn't remove the harder question: why this idea?
That remains the artist's problem.
Your Weirdest Idea Is Probably Your Most Valuable One
The content machine also rewards things that are immediately understandable. Make this sound like that. Use this format. Follow this trend. Put the hook in the first three seconds.
There's nothing inherently wrong with accessibility. But the things that make an artist genuinely distinctive often don't fit neatly into a content template. A strange obsession. An unusual point of view. A particular visual language. A recurring character. A weird production choice. A way of writing about relationships that nobody else quite approaches in the same way.
Those things can take longer and make less sense to an algorithm. That's also what makes them difficult to copy. Building something recognizably yours isn't just a business strategy. It gives you permission to follow an idea because it interests you, rather than because you can already imagine how it will perform.
Activity Isn't the Same as Accumulation
I've started thinking less about output and more about accumulation. If I spend three hours making a video that disappears from people's feeds within a few days, that isn't necessarily wasted time. Maybe it gets someone to listen. Great.
But if those same three hours could have gone into making a song, developing a visual concept, writing something substantial or building an audience channel I actually own, there's another question worth asking:
Which piece of work is likely to have a life beyond the platform where I made it?
Not everything needs to become a business opportunity. Artists aren't factories, and a song doesn't need to justify itself through a five-year monetization strategy. But there is a difference between being busy and building something. One genuinely distinctive song can keep finding people long after the post that introduced it has disappeared.
That's the asymmetry I'm interested in. The goal isn't to make less. It's to make more things that have somewhere to go after the feed has moved on.
+Read more: "You Released the Song. Now What?"
Content Still Matters, It Just Needs a Job To Do.
None of this means artists should stop making content. For independent artists, it's one of the most accessible marketing tools ever created. Someone with no label, publicist or traditional media campaign can make something in their bedroom and potentially put it in front of listeners anywhere in the world.
But content is distribution. The thing being distributed is what matters. TikTok won't be the last platform. Something else will replace it eventually. An algorithm can change. A format can disappear. A platform can become irrelevant.
But your song is still your song. Your catalogue is still your catalogue. And if you've built a website, mailing list or direct relationship with your audience, you have somewhere to take that relationship when the platform changes again.
So when planning a career, the question you should be asking is somewhere along the lines of: “What am I building that will still matter when nobody remembers what I posted this week?"
Outliving the Algorithm
You can write and record music, design an identity, publish essays, build a website, talk directly to listeners, distribute globally and experiment with new tools without waiting for an institution to decide you're worth investing in. The catch is that nobody is going to decide what you're building for you.
Maybe you're building a great catalogue of songs. Maybe there's a visual world running through your releases. Maybe you're building a community around a particular idea. Maybe the music sits alongside writing, film, software, live experiences or something that doesn't have a neat category yet.
It doesn't have to be an “IP strategy.” It just has to be something more durable than the next post.
The opportunity for independent artists isn't to become better and better at manufacturing an endless stream of content. It's to build the things that platforms can't build for them: the work itself, the ideas behind it, and a relationship with the people who care about it.
Someone finds you. They click your profile. They listen to the song. Then what?
Reece Hallum is a New Zealand-based songwriter and communications strategist working at the intersection of music, storytelling and creative strategy. He writes and makes music exploring character, narrative and artist identity. Find his work at liminl.music.
