You come home from a long day at the office, fatigued and seeking entertainment. You brew some tea and kick up your legs on the couch, deciding whether or not to scroll through the TV or your phone. Ultimately, you choose your phone, but something’s off. Why does your Instagram now feel like an endless stream of commercials? Not only from the usual suspects of Google and Meta attempting to sell you Christmas gifts at every turn, but even from creators you once admired, now falling into the same trappings of advertise-speak and ‘buy-my-merch’ reels. Where you once found creativity, you now find monotony.

Social media and the internet at large are a dizzying kaleidoscope of endless ads, even from non-corporate accounts that are personally run. Scrolling has become highway driving: there will always be someone who wants to mar your view of the mountainside with an obnoxiously giant ad for a buy-one-get-one burger deal.

The culprit, of course, must be the ‘marketing campaign.’ Those accursed marketers want to sell you those burgers that are atrocious for your health. Even marketing for music and art has not escaped this cycle. They want you to spend a month’s budget on your new favorite artist’s vinyl (in every edition) and regret nothing.

But what if we redefine what a ‘marketing campaign’ looks like?

In a recent article from Rolling Stone, a head-spinning contradiction is made. Supposedly, the future of music marketing is ‘no marketing at all.’ A bit of a catch-22, but the suggestion holds water. The way forward is not necessarily ‘no marketing’—rather, a reconstruction of marketing for the Digital Age.

Let’s take Laufey for example. She’s a classical and jazz musician who rose to international stardom within the past two years, winning a Grammy for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album in 2024 for Bewitched and being nominated for the same category in the upcoming 2026 Grammy’s for A Matter of Time.

Her ‘strategy’ has never resonated as a strategy at all. Her fans can watch her on YouTube eating hot wings with Clairo, prank calling Reneé Rapp, and answering Buzzfeed’s questions while surrounded by a mound of squirming puppies. At no point does Laufey disturb your enjoyment of the video with an insistent message that you must stream her music. The music is mentioned, yes, but the videos provide entertainment in and of themselves, even if the viewer decides not to go out and buy her new album. She is simply presenting herself as a person to an audience of more people—an audience who increasingly wants their stars to simply be people, not shiny goddesses on pedestals.*

During her A Matter of Time Tour, Laufey chose one fan in the audience for each city to be the ‘Best Dressed Guest.’ The Lauver community exploded, with fans shooting videos of their spectacular clothing creations that were veritable pieces of art. Speculation would ensue for who would win in each city, but no one could ever truly predict Laufey’s final judgment. Alongside how Laufey presents herself in a grounded manner, she presents her fans in a haloed light, ever appreciative of their creativity and loyalty. Laufey has built a community that has real roots, one that cares about her as a person and a musician. In turn, she spotlights her fans’ music, art, and kind messages on her platform.

This is not to say that as an artist, you must build a community of millions of devotees in order to be successful. As Rolling Stone says, “What actually drives culture now are micro communities. Passionate pockets of people who come together around shared taste, identity and emotion…The smartest artists aren’t chasing everyone anymore. They’re creating spaces where the right people gather, talk and spread the art for them.”

What matters most is not the quantity of your fan base, but the quality. Do your listeners engage with your content? Do they diligently look forward to each release and give their opinions? Do they genuinely care about you as a person along with your music?

Musicians and artists are prime suspects to be the rewriters of the ‘marketing campaign.’ Cookie-cutter promotional messaging no longer works. Audiences crave authenticity and genuine connection, and artists are the ones who can cut through the clutter and reinvent what a strategy looks like—so that it no longer resembles a strategy at all.

Now I can’t promise that this “no marketing” anti-strategy will lead you to casually invite Lin-Manuel Miranda to your stage (as happened during Laufey’s Madison Square Garden performance, of which I will endlessly boast that I was in the room where it happened), but, for artists, nothing is impossible. Just five years ago, Laufey recorded herself playing cello on TikTok to an audience of much fewer than the ten million followers she has now. And in that moment, a few devoted fans was enough.

*A wink to the Bewitched album for all you Lauvers out there.

Click here to read the Rolling Stone article, “The Future of Music Marketing is No Marketing At All”

Written by Caitlin Moehrle, Press & Digital Assistant (New York)