Eliza Carthy's News of the Whirl: ‘I am firmly on the side of engaging and I enjoy following my peers and fellow nerds online’

Social media. If there were any positives to come out of the pandemic, one of them must surely have been the ways that independent musicians have taken control of their own houses. Largely we, as a cottage industry, have decided to stop waiting for a mythical label to point the giant lottery finger at us and bestow buckets of cash and cachet for us to serve our art and our dreams.

During lockdown, I joined Clubhouse, as did many sitting with their cats on their knees, looking through the hopeful window to the world that is the internet. Through algorithms directed by choosing your interests when you sign up, I met The Songwriting Academy, and surfed various rooms offering advice on how to manage social media, maximise my potential and push my envelope into actualising my something or others…

In all seriousness though, I did learn a lot. I learned that there are ideal times to post, how not to make your simultaneous posts across platforms so similar that the algorithms punish you (?!), how to create personalised content for your fans so that they feel that they know you, and so on.

Oof, that last sentence makes it feel terribly false. But I can honestly say that involving myself in my own social media has helped me feel connected to my audience, and them to me. Folk music does lend itself to that kind of connection. We’re not in the business of business, it’s community-led music and reaching out to that community during such an isolated time, and since, has felt right and unifying. And sometimes inspiring! They can be a fun and creative crowd.

There are plenty of artists out there who don’t feel that social media is for them. Once you get to a certain level I imagine that having your adoring people respond to your every move, and the negative pushback that seems to invariably happen with success, must be terribly difficult to manage. The personal connection is great until it’s intrusive, inappropriate or unwanted, which is why celebrities frequently deactivate their accounts to give themselves a breather.

Some of them make good points. James Blake, for instance, points out in a recent thread: ‘I spent the years I could have been learning how to be good at Instagram refining and evolving my music.’

To a certain extent, he’s not wrong. It would be lovely to be able to concentrate on art and employ people to do our taxes, push our pens and run our Patreons. There is a section of the creative community that thinks that artists should just be artists. For sure many talented people in the world could run my little business better than I can. But for most of us, that’s not an option, or it’s only an option during specific times when pushing new releases and special projects; it’s also inspiring to watch grassroots musicians take control and speak in the language that most of the buying public responds to.

Okay, so not many of us do TikTok. But some do! US-based vocal group Windborne hit TikTok gold with a piece of plainsong inspired by the unlikely pairing of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s famous paean to the larger female behind and the ‘one of us always tells the truth, and one of us always lies’ scene from Labyrinth: bit.ly/windbornesingers.

And we have memes now! Two favourite Instagram accounts are @folk_musician_memes and @englishfolkmusicmemes, both hilarious to the nerd in me.

If you haven’t spotted yet, I am firmly on the side of engaging and I enjoy following my peers and fellow nerds online. Through social media, I have learned what they’re up to and the various ways in which we are all navigating this new time, a time of declining physical media, streaming services that still refuse to pay anything decent and audiences reluctant to turn up to shows. I have felt solidarity with them during a time when we have not been able to mix in person; I have gained inspiration and watched shows I might not have been able to otherwise. It is a new normal, but I do believe it is a hopeful one for the homemade musician.

This article originally appeared in the May 2024 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe to Songlines today