For years, the advice for musicians online has been pretty consistent: get better at social media, sharpen your hooks, add captions, cut anything that doesn’t grab attention in the first two seconds. Most of us learned that playbook and tried to follow it.
Here’s the problem. Everyone else learned the same playbook too. And so did your audience.
Creative director Chris Alba, who runs the agency The Cult Creatives, laid out a theory recently that’s worth checking out if you’re trying to figure out what to post next.
He calls it the “anti-marketing” era, borrowing the term from a comment Charlie XCX made about where content is heading. The short version: audiences are tired of polish, and the artists who lean into something rougher and more human are starting to win attention that the highly produced stuff can’t get anymore.
What “anti-marketing” actually means
This theory is not a rejection of marketing itself. It’s a rejection of feeling marketed to.
Alba’s point is that today’s audience, especially younger listeners, has grown up surrounded by content designed to sell them something. They can spot a staged “spontaneous” moment. They know when a casual story is really just a lead-in to a new single.
That doesn’t mean marketing stops working, it just means the version of marketing that feels like marketing stops working.
The flip side of that is where the opportunity is. As more of what we see online gets slicker, faster, and increasingly AI-generated, actual evidence of a real person becomes rarer, and rarer things get noticed.
A handwritten note, an awkward moment, a genuine mistake, these start to carry more weight simply because they’re hard to fake.
This isn’t new, it’s a pattern
If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Culture has swung between polished and raw for decades, and each swing shows up in music specifically.
The Beatles are maybe the cleanest example. Early on, it was matching suits, matching haircuts, tightly controlled image. By the end of the decade, it was long hair, facial hair, and Let It Be, an album recorded in a much more live, unpolished way.
Same four people, completely different moment.
You can trace the same swing elsewhere. Disco’s big production and spectacle gave way to punk’s cheap, DIY, deliberately rough aesthetic. The neon and hairspray of 80s hair metal gave way to grunge and the stripped-down, earth-toned realism of the early 90s.
Boy bands and massive, expensive-looking pop videos in the late 90s gave way to The Strokes, The White Stripes, and the whole blog-driven indie sleaze scene of the mid-2000s.
Each time, a new generation reacted against whatever the previous one had turned into a formula. It’s less a trend and more a cycle.
Why this swing feels different right now
Alba’s argument is that a few things are stacking on top of each other at the same time, and that’s what makes this particular swing sharper than the ones before it:
- AI content is everywhere, and it’s cheap. When anything can be made to look flawless, flawless stops signaling anything valuable.
- Everyone learned the same content playbook. Hooks, big captions, pattern interrupts, chasing the algorithm. If everyone’s optimizing the same way, nobody actually stands out anymore.
- The audience learned the playbook too. People can tell when something’s been engineered to look casual. That savviness changes what actually lands.
- Real evidence of a person is now worth more. The more synthetic the feed gets, the more a genuine mistake or an unscripted moment stands out.
Put together, it’s not just “authenticity is nice.” It’s that authenticity is becoming one of the only things left that AI and formula can’t easily fake.
Nine formats worth trying
Alba breaks this down into nine content styles that fit the moment, each with an older reference point behind it. You don’t need to use all nine, but they’re a good starting menu.
1. Handcrafted, anti-design graphics. Messy collage, hand-drawn art, handwritten text. The older version of this is zine culture and cut-and-paste flyers, and the point is the same: it signals nobody approved this, no committee touched it.
2. Real photos and real video. Harsh flash, red eye, a crooked frame, someone half out of shot. These cues tell the viewer the image was captured, not staged. Think disposable camera shots rather than a retouched gallery.
3. Digital artifacts. Screenshots of a text thread, a voice memo, a notes app entry, a Google search. Instead of explaining what happened, you show a piece of it and let people fill in the gaps.
4. Work in progress. The demo that didn’t make the cut, the half-finished lyric, the rehearsal where something went wrong. This pulls the audience into the process instead of only showing them the finished thing.
5. The unedited “yap” video. One camera, you talking, no big captions or cuts, closer to a FaceTime call than a produced clip. It only works if what you’re saying is actually worth hearing.
6. Real behind-the-scenes. Not the professionally shot version that pretends the camera isn’t there, but the version with the bad angle, the background noise, the moment nobody planned for.
7. Styling and environment that match your actual life. Alba uses Post Malone as an example, from platinum grillz and Louis Vuitton to pickup trucks and Budweiser boots. Neither version is more “real” by itself, the point is that what surrounds you should support the story you’re telling, not undercut it.
8. Everyday life, reality-TV style. Skip the festival and private jet clips and show something ordinary instead. This depends on where you are in your career. Bigger artists benefit from showing normal life because it contrasts with everything else people see from them. Newer artists showing an ordinary day might just blend in.
9. Community-made content. Fan videos, bootleg clips, comments, reaction posts. Letting the audience help build the story removes any doubt about whether it’s staged, and it shifts the content from being about you to being about the group around you.
Turning this into an actual plan
Nine formats is a lot to juggle, so Alba’s advice is to narrow it down.
Pick a handful that feel natural to you, then commit to three you’ll repeat. Map those three across a 30-day content calendar so you’re not reinventing the format every time you sit down to post.
After the month, look at two things: what the data says, and what actually felt good to make. Keep whichever formats did well on both counts, drop the ones that didn’t, and test again with something new in their place.
The bigger idea
None of these nine formats are brand new. Zines, home videos, and fan bootlegs have existed for decades. What’s changed is the moment they’re landing in.
Alba’s closing point is that the best new ideas rarely come from nowhere, they come from combining an old reference with what’s happening right now.
For independent musicians, that’s actually good news. This shift doesn’t require a bigger budget or better gear.
It requires being willing to post the version of your work and your life that isn’t perfect yet.