Dealing with haters & trolls as a musician

This week I wanted to talk about something bands, musicians, and creatives in general face at some point or another, and that is negative comments about your work. 

For some people, their band gets a level of notoriety that goes beyond their normal area of influence and gets exposed to a larger population. 

Maybe that’s a TV feature, or one of their songs or videos goes viral, and all of a sudden a much larger group of people are exposed to their stuff.
For most of us that sounds like a good thing!  More than anything as musicians we want to develop a fanbase and reach as many people as possible. 

The issue is that with that additional exposure you also will possibly deal with people who feel the need to be negative or critical of your work. 

This is especially the case with viral moments online. The allure of anonymity can provide a shield for some people to say hurtful things about you or what you’re doing. 

Cover Band Confidential has been fairly well received and we rarely deal with trolling or bad comments but I am fully aware that as we continue to grow we’ll get our share here.

Now in my case my band played a municipal event a few weeks back.  It was maybe the 2nd or 3rd show we’ve done this year since things started opening back up.

In prepping for these dates we have been working on some show enhancements and bringing in new personnel. 

With those changes it also brings uncertainty due to getting used to new things.  

As a creature of habit, it can be super stressful to onboard new systems and I am prone to anxiety, so this date was looming large in my head for the weeks running up to it.

The day of the show, we get set up and the show goes pretty well.  There were a few hiccups but overall we did a good job and it seemed the client and the folks we talked to after the gig were happy with the performance.

After I got home though I received an email saying we had received a new review on our Gigsalad page.
Now this raised a few red flags.

First of all, we didn’t book this event through gigsalad, and second, we haven’t paid for or used that platform in a number of years. 
That is a completely different conversation though.  Maybe we’ll do a video about those sites at some point.

Upon clicking the link, I found a scathing one-star review of our show by someone who felt compelled to share his thoughts on our show.

Ill spare you the details but in general he took issue with the fact that we use backing tracks for keyboard parts on some of our songs. 

He also insinuated that because the keys weren’t real, that we weren’t playing our instruments either.

Which would be AMAZING!

Can you imagine how much easier it would be if we didn’t have to practice these songs and just play along to a cd? 
Definitely feel like I wasted a lot of time if that was ever an option.

At any rate after having a super stressful day that review was the last thing I needed to see.

And, honestly I let it get to me pretty hard.

If you are ever in this situation, there are 3 things you need to do, or rather not do.

1. The first one is DO NOT RESPOND IN THE MOMENT

There is rarely anything to gain from responding to comments or reviews like this. 
In most cases, your emotional headspace will make your reaction worse and you will more than likely do more harm than good. 

There is usually nothing to gain from responding to those whose main goal is to make you upset.

2. The second thing is to externalize whatever it is you’re feeling about those comments.

When I saw that review, the first thing I did was send it to a group chat I have with a few musician friends who I trust and who understand how these things happen.  

It gave me a space to vent my frustration about the day and to process how I felt.  

It also gave me the benefit of outside perspective from people who have been in the same situation who could get me out of whatever internal dialog I was having.

It’s important to not dwell on negative things.  It’s not always easy to but in reality more things went right than wrong at that gig and that person’s opinion didn’t represent the hundreds of other people at that show who had a great night.
3. And lastly, let it go, or make it work for you.

Your band isn’t for everyone.  Your music isn’t for everyone.  At some point, you will run into people who simply don’t care for what you do, and that’s ok.  

Humans tend to focus more on bad things than good things
In psychology that’s referred to as negativity bias
So as a musician we can have hundreds of people tell us how great our band is but we only focus on the one person who said something bad.

Literally less than an hour after I got that review someone dm’d us and said they really enjoyed the show and had a super fun night.

Try to make sure you are paying attention to those as well.

The other part, making it work for you, is a novel idea that isn’t for everyone.
In some cases you can take those negative comments and instead of hiding them, you share them as posts or other content.
The purpose of doing that is to show your audience that these things don’t really bother you and that you have enough self-awareness or confidence to post them. 

In most cases this kind of thing will endear your audience to you even more. My new pop-punk band released a video on tiktok and someone left a mean comment so I put it in a follow up post and sang the comment over “I Miss You” By Blink-182
At the recording of this that reply has almost as many views as the original video has. 
Look, the kind of people who post negative comments are usually unhappy, jealous, or get energy out of the reaction they get for their negativity. 

Meeting those kinds of reactions with negativity is a fruitless endeavor that will not make you feel any better.
Your best strategy is to just let it go or laugh it off.

If you want a more in-depth look at this kind of thing check out episode 175 of our podcast.  We have Mike Schulte of the Pork Tornadoes as a guest and we talk about how his band’s viral cover of Tennessee Whiskey netted them over 6 million views and A LOT of haters.