President Street Discuss The Impacts Social Media Has on Their Career

As is common for many ‘up and coming’ artists these days we recently got the ‘it’s really important to up your social media game’ talk. That was the moment when we both sunk into our shoulders and did our best not to make eye contact with anyone. We couldn’t hide our embarrassment because we knew that this is our weak spot.

Now earlier this year we were on tour in the UK and we had an absolute blast mucking around with the DJs and presenters at the radio stations that we stopped in with on the way. Part of the fun was taking photos with them and also with fans at the gigs and also making little tour diary videos (mostly in the car driving to the next town). Posting those photos and sharing our experience with our fans felt really natural and fun to us and, more importantly, it felt like it was relevant and REAL.

As with all things though, our tour came to an end and we returned to our lives back in Australia. We’ve been super busy since returning from the UK and we’ve spent a bunch of time in the studio focusing on song writing. So now, once again, we were faced with that question that sends shivers down our spines “what are we going to post?”.

We are fully independent and so we wake up in the morning thinking about songwriting, storytelling, lyrics, chord progressions, guitar licks, keyboard patches, pedal boards, mood boards, photo shoots, music videos, cover art and a million other things and we LOVE it. Being able to write and play music that people want to listen to and tell stories that people connect with is simply a dream come true for us and we feel so blessed to be able to do that.

But where it gets difficult for us is to stop and think ‘hold on, we need to stage a photo of this moment for social media’. Because the truth is that these moments are usually pretty boring, we think we look pretty crap and the only way that moment would be remotely interesting to anyone else is if we stage it to have some kind of hook.

So, in order to try to find an answer to that question, we took some time to look at the feeds of a bunch of other artists’ with large followings but unfortunately we couldn’t find any magical answer there. What we saw were a lot of (very cool and empowered) underwear selfies and aspirational lifestyle shots celebrating their lives and lifestyle but this just doesn’t feel like it’s us. We’re conscious of the negative aspects of social media and we hope to be sensitive to this and just share our genuine love for creating music with our fans and be transparent, unfiltered and honest in who we are.

As part of our search, what also became clear to us is that social media is an art form in it’s own right and there are so many talented people killing it in this space. That made the question even harder to answer as we really don’t want to pretend to be anything that we’re not.

And as we work out our place in this social media world we keep coming back to the bigger question “what does social media mean for musicians?” We are not social media influencers who play a bit of music - we are musicians who love what we do and are so grateful to have such awesome channels like social media to reach new audiences and share our journey.

As for our answer to the bigger question - it’s a continuous work in progress. In the meantime, we know know that some people will tell us that we’re being naive and we should just “play the game” but unfortunately we can’t be anything we’re not, so, THIS IS US.

Much love and a couple photos along the way … Pete and Ruby