EO loves a good debate. Thankfully, EDM is a hotbed of contentious issues, interesting ideas, and good ol’ fashioned arguments. Each week, we’ll pick a different topic to examine and discuss. Who knows, maybe you’ll even feel enlightened by the time we’re done…
This week: Has Facebook just killed the emerging artist?
If you're a big follower of EDM, and particularly if you follow lovely music blogs like this one, you'll have almost certainly come across this exact scenario: you hear a tune you like, and discover it's available to download for free. Fantastic! You click the download link, and are promptly taken to the artist's Facebook page, where you're required to like said-page before you can download the track. Hmm.
This is called a fan-gate. It's a tool that many, many artists use - particularly emerging ones, and particularly ones within the world of EDM. I've used it myself, back when I was running a Facebook page for a band I was in. The idea is simple. You set up a download page, or a page with some sort of other exclusive content, but you create two different versions. One you can only see if you've liked the artist/brand/whatever running the page - this is the one with all of the tasty goods on. The other is what you see if you haven't liked the page, and it's simply a holding page that essentially advertises all of the nice things you can have if you do so. You can see an example of this below, on Vicetone's free downloads page (I'm not singling them out for any reason other than that they were the first page that sprung to mind, fyi).
Like-gates: useful, or just annoying?
The goal of this is, obviously, to increase the amount of likes your page has, which in turn will generate yet more likes, but more importantly, will create fans that will continue to follow you. You then monetise that free stuff you were giving away, by selling new stuff to those people.
As I said, you've almost certainly done this if you're reading this blog. I personally have liked countless artist pages just to download one track. But all of that's about to change, because Facebook have just updated their terms of service, and fan-gates (they're also sometimes called like-gates), have now been banned.
The change was announced quickly and quietly on Facebook's Developer Blog - which, as a side note, seems a bit sneaky, given that most artists/brands are extremely unlikely to check that, let's be honest. But amongst all of the other announcements in the blog post, comes this crucial paragraph:
You must not incentivize people to use social plugins or to like a Page. This includes offering rewards, or gating apps or app content based on whether or not a person has liked a Page. It remains acceptable to incentivize people to login to your app, checkin at a place or enter a promotion on your app's Page. To ensure quality connections and help businesses reach the people who matter to them, we want people to like Pages because they want to connect and hear from the business, not because of artificial incentives. We believe this update will benefit people and advertisers alike.
This change comes into effect on November 5th, and is not just limited to new pages - oh no. I'll try to avoid technical jargon, but basically, when you visit a free download page, your Facebook account sends one of two values to it: "liked', or "not liked". That's how the download page knows whether to give you access or not. From November 5th, though, your account will ALWAYS send the "liked" value, regardless of whether you have actually liked the page or not.
In other words, all of the existing Free Download pages will keep working, but from now on, you won't actually have to like the artist's page to access it.
Where does that leave everyone, then? Is it a good thing or not?
Well, that really depends on who you are. For consumers (that's us), this is, in some ways, a good thing. Come on, hands up: how often have you liked a page to get a free download, and then a few weeks or months down the line, got fed up with the artist's posts, and just unliked them again? Let's be honest, with a lot of these freebies, we're really not interested in what else the artist has to offer. It sounds harsh, but it's true. All I want is that cool remix you've done, I don't want to know what you're up to everyday though. Facebook says, "We want people to like Pages because they want to connect and hear from the business, not because of artificial incentives." And it's not often this happens, but I actually have to agree with Facebook's stance here. We all get tricked with freebies into liking something that we simply don't care about. I could easily right now go to my list of liked pages, and probably get rid of half of them.
But then, Facebook also states: "We believe this update will benefit people and advertisers alike." In our case, we can replace the word "advertisers" with artists. So according to them, this isn't just going to be good for us, it'll be good for artists too.
Really?
That I struggle with. I mentioned above that this is a crucial tool for emerging artists. People love free stuff, so giving away tracks is a very good way to get noticed, especially if they're picked up by different music blogs. I personally believe that without this, the amount of likes that smaller artists receive will take an absolute nose-dive. Sure, the artist can keep giving away stuff for free - remember, all of those free download pages will be sticking around - but if people don't have to like your page to get them, then they almost certainly won't.
This then becomes a problem for us, too. I said in some ways, this was good for consumers, but consider this: if an artist isn't gaining any traction from the free music they give away in terms of their social media fan base, where's the incentive for them to keep doing it? It's possible that we'll see a dramatic fall in the number of tracks being offered up for free, which in this day and age, isn't good.
I think that in reality, though, that's not going to be the case. If there's one thing the internet is good at, it's finding a way around things. The obvious solution? Move to Twitter. There are already services out there that offer alternatives to Facebook-likes-for-tracks. Tweet For A Track, for instance, does exactly what you'd think. All you have to do, is send out a tweet about this awesome track you're about to download, and you get sent a link for you to do just that.
So why has Facebook done this, then? Well, it seems to tie into the company's new focus, which is to offer quality content to people, rather than just a place to find out what people had for breakfast. This new vision has seen lots of changes. You've probably noticed over the last year or two, that rather than people's statuses, your News Feed is now swamped with links to articles instead. This newest policy change is almost certainly just the latest effort to reach this reevaluated purpose for Facebook. They're basically trying to clean up the site, and make it a place where you interact with artists or brands, rather than it being a one way street, a stream of information from them to you.
But in doing this, Facebook may have inadvertently shot themselves in the foot. Free stuff for likes/tweets/whatever is simply far too useful a tool for musicians to be without, and whether it's inconvenient for the listener or not, if Facebook isn't going to offer this service, then the artist will go somewhere else that will.
The thing is, though, why bother? Let's be brutally honest here, 90% of people who press that like button for their free download, simply do not give a shit about the artist. So is there actually any point in creating an artificial barrier for these freebies, on Facebook or elsewhere, when the reality is that the people downloading are unlikely to ever become fans? I can't pretend to be a marketing expert, and I could be totally wrong, maybe artists retain far more user attention than I give credit for, but High Impact Designer says, "A study by ExactTarget found that 58% of people who Like Facebook pages ‘Like’ the page in order to access exclusive offer or deals." Realistically though, how many of those 58% are you going to retain? It's definitely something to think about.
In the short term, then, this will actually benefit us, the audience. We'll no longer have to like hundreds of pages just for the one or two things we're interested in. But in the long term, it's going to make absolutely no difference whatsoever.
Writer, musician, and all-round top guy. I set up Excited Octopus. Currently, I'm on a one man team. It gets lonely sometimes. But I don't mind, because I love you all.
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