Social media are dead for industrial music bands in 2025 (unless you use data now)
Social media are dead for industrial music bands in 2025 (unless you use data now)
We have a love-hate relationship with social media, as you all know. They have been around for years, but their ROI (Return on Investment) remains appallingly low, and this is unlikely to improve in 2025.
Most platforms are overrun with dead, dormant, and bot accounts. Organic reach continues to decline, making it harder than ever to engage followers. And in the 25 years that Side-Line has been online, we have seen platforms come and go or become irrelevant (MP3.com, MySpace, LiveJournal, and others), yet none of these platforms – old or new – have offered a convincing solution.
In 2025, things will become even more challenging. Industrial music bands will continue to face hurdles in using social media to connect with audiences and sell their music.
To overcome these challenges, we once again advise bands to adopt data-driven strategies. This approach can help reduce ad spend while significantly improving the results of your marketing efforts.
Social Media: Pay-to-Play Platforms
Social media platforms have evolved into pay-for-reach ecosystems as we pointed out in the past. Algorithms increasingly prioritize paid content and trending topics, leaving niche genres like industrial music in the shadows. Without strategic adjustments, bands and labels risk losing visibility and fan engagement entirely.
Also consider this: in 2023, bots made up 47.4% of global web traffic. This marks a 2% increase from 2022, partly due to AI models scraping the web for training content. Many users also struggle to distinguish between real and fake profiles, further complicating social media marketing.
To give you an idea:
- Instagram and Facebook: Up to 10% of Instagram’s and Facebook’s user base consists of automated social bots. These bots engage in activities like liking, following, and commenting to artificially boost engagement metrics.
- Twitter: An estimated 15% of Twitter’s users are bots, equating to around 48 million accounts. Twitter reports removing over 1 million spam bots daily to combat this issue.
Platforms like Meta are also integrating AI-generated profiles into their ecosystems to increase your time spent on the platform. These AI personas have bios and profile pictures and can generate and share content, completely blurring the lines between human and automated interactions. And a bot will not buy or stream your music (unless the bot is designed to actually stream the music, but do you want to have a bot audience as an artists?).
The main issue is even more critical – most bands and labels simply lack the data needed to make paid campaigns effective. Platforms like Facebook offer overly broad target groups, where only about 10% might be genuinely interested fans. This inefficiency leads to overspending by as much as ten times the intended budget.
Using proprietary data can solve this problem. However, many bands have failed to invest in data collection and continue to rely solely on third-party platforms for communication, music releases, and audience interaction.
Side-Line’s data-driven strategy
At Side-Line, we’ve focused on owning our data from the start. While we maintain a presence on major social media platforms, we rely primarily on our proprietary data. This approach has been key in keeping us afloat whereas many other magazines disappeared or simply have a dormant existence with little to no reach.
I give the example of Side-Line because bands and labels can adopt a similar strategy. And although I have been writing and talking quite a lot about this, it remains a problem with too many bands having no own (or too little) data.
Here’s how we do it:
1. Email newsletters
We built mailing lists early on to communicate directly with our audience. Our daily newsletter reaches over 11,000 subscribers, and the weekly edition engages over 17,000 people. In a scene as small as the industrial scene this is not a small crowd.
Don’t believe the doom messages that the e-mail is dead. It’s not.
When comparing conversion rates between email marketing and social media, email marketing consistently outperforms social media in driving conversions. Let’s have a look at a few key metrics at Side-Line.
- Click-Through Rates (CTR): Email campaigns from Side-Lne achieve an average CTR of around 4.92%, whereas social media platforms like Facebook have an average CTR as low as 0.07%.
- Return on Investment (ROI): For every Euro spent, our email marketing yields an average return of 42 Euro, equating to a 4,200% ROI. In contrast, social media marketing generates an average return of an appallingly low 2.80 Euro for every Euro spent.
Numbers don’t lie.
2. Bandcamp followers
Bandcamp remains a key platform for staying connected with music consumers. Currently, we have nearly 11,000 active followers on the Side-Line Bandcamp page. We can connect directly with these followers when we launch a new compilation. This data has been built over the past 11 years with people coming and going but with a core audience staying on board. It shows in the success of our own charity compilations which each time hit the top spots in bandcamp for weeks or even months.
On a side-note, over the years I have been approached by many bands to be signed directly to Side-Line. But apart from a few one-off releases we do not intend to be a regular record label with bands. We will on the contrary keep on focusing on our trademark compilations where we push smalland unknown bands to a larger public with several in the end landing a record deal.
The point I’m trying to make is that as a band, or label, you should heavily invest in platforms like Bandcamp where you have portable data. It doesn’t mean you should not be on other digital retail platforms, but Bandcamp really should be your first choice.
3. Push notifications
We use push notifications to alert users about new website content. With 6,000 subscribers, these alerts achieve an 80% view rate and a 5–15% click-through rate.
We look at this technology as being a valid replacement for banners. It doesn’t deliver the big traffic to the site but it does show up on the screens of the people that signed up.
4. In-house PR
Our extensive data permits us to act as our own PR agency. We communicate directly with a large audience and don’t solely rely on third parties for promotion.
As a result we are often approached by PR companies to relay their content, albeit rewritten or augmented by us.
5. Strategic ad investments
When we run ads on social media, we use our data to precisely target the audience we want to reach. This ensures maximum impact with minimal waste.
In short, if paying for reach is inevitable, do ensure that your ads are hyper-targeted to your audience. The best way to do this is to focus on retargeting people who’ve already interacted with your content or website. Personally I prioritize those who have downloaded releases (paying or free).
Without data, you are a dead duck
The strategy I have given here gives you a long-term vision, allowing you to operate independently of platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or even Google.
For many bands, labels, and magazines, data remains the weak link. Over-reliance on third-party platforms makes them vulnerable to algorithm changes and diminishing organic reach. Invest in data, and as a band or label you can take control of your future and build sustainable connections with your audience.
I don’t mean that you should quit social media, each platform does deliver your content to people who are truly interested in your music, or content. However they will never be the holy grail if you want to really take the next step.
In 2025, data is king. Without it, the game is over for real.
Since you’re here …
… we have a small favour to ask. More people are reading Side-Line Magazine than ever but advertising revenues across the media are falling fast. Unlike many news organisations, we haven’t put up a paywall – we want to keep our journalism as open as we can - and we refuse to add annoying advertising. So you can see why we need to ask for your help.
Side-Line’s independent journalism takes a lot of time, money and hard work to produce. But we do it because we want to push the artists we like and who are equally fighting to survive.
If everyone who reads our reporting, who likes it, helps fund it, our future would be much more secure. For as little as 5 US$, you can support Side-Line Magazine – and it only takes a minute. Thank you.
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