“If you can live your life without an audience, you should do it.”
⬆️ That’s the voice of internet prophet Bo Burnham.
(Click the link and watch that clip, by the way. It’s worth the two minutes.)
I heard Bo deliver that line eight years ago on Netflix, at the end of his Make Happy special back in 2016. At the time, I’d just launched Two Story, so I was in the very early stages of building my own audience online, and I still harbored half-baked dreams of becoming a full-time performing artist myself.
In other words, I, like most people, wanted an audience – both to prove my self-worth and to pay my rent.
So the line caught me.
(For further context: Bo Burnham, as I’m guessing most of you know, was a child YouTube star who became a comedian who became a sort of social-commentator-poet. Most of his recent work deals with digital culture, and, specifically, with the ways we perform online to validate ourselves. I think Bo has become slightly overrated since the release of Inside, but I also think he’s a genius.)
I’ve thought about Bo’s words a lot over the past eight years. It’s one of the quotes that lives in my head forever, nestled alongside lines from Hot Rod and Harry Potter and Abraham Lincoln – you know, the stuff I’ve collected to create the personal lexicon by which I understand the world.
“If you can live your life without an audience, you should do it.”
It’s a heart-stopping line.
But is it true?
Let’s get the elephant out of the room first:
This is a music marketing newsletter written to an audience of roughly 11,000 musicians. To spell it out: I have (and am trying to build) an audience whom I regularly email with advice on how to build an audience.
So today’s newsletter is both a terrible choice of topic and a multi-layered example of irony. Score!
But despite all of that, I still think this is a quote worth dealing with and a question worth asking. Ultimately, I’ve come to pretty much the same conclusions that Bo Burnham does – although as someone far less famous and intelligent, I may have reached them with a little less cynicism.
On the plus side…
Audiences create opportunities.
We’ve got to start with that, right? I mean, if I didn’t have an audience, I wouldn’t have a business.
If your favorite artist didn’t have an audience, they probably wouldn’t have made your favorite record. (Or maybe they would have, but you probably wouldn’t have heard it.) If you happen to have a million monthly listeners on Spotify, you can make music your full-time thing. If you have a million followers on TikTok, doors will open for you that would’ve otherwise been closed.
You get it. There’s undeniable value in having a large group of people listening to you.
What, then, is Bo warning against? And why does it immediately ring so true?
Here’s what I think it comes down to:
An audience blurs your sense of self.
This, to me, is the fundamental danger. In chasing an audience, you’re chasing approval from a changing group of people by whom you can never be fully known.
It’s a chase that leads you away from yourself, and it’s an impossible thing to catch.
In the moments when you come closest to catching it – the times when you post something on social media that gets a thousand shares, or have a room full of strangers singing along to your song – you’ll find that the satisfaction is sharp but fleeting. The approval you win from an audience can only be skin deep, and momentary at that.
Because the people who sing your songs know the words, but they don’t know you.
This isn’t to say that your relationship with your audience can’t be meaningful. It can be. It can even be authentic, vulnerable, and true.
But the one thing audience approval can’t be is reciprocal. And that means it can never substitute for a deep, lasting friendship.
Here’s what I mean:
I interviewed one of my favorite artists a couple of years ago.
It was a strange experience.
There I was, a person they’d never met who had watched their interviews and recited their lyrics more times than the Pledge of Allegiance. And there they were, a real, living person on a small Zoom screen with a busy schedule and mediocre lighting.
In our thirty-minute conversation, I felt like I was talking to someone I’d known forever. They felt, I’m sure, like they were talking to poorly prepared music blog editor they’d never met.
If you’re an artist, you do need those types of relationships – connections with people you’ve never met. But those relationships can’t be the linchpin of your life.
And I think that distinction is the key.
If you want to be an artist, you need an audience. But if you want to be healthy, you can’t live for it.
If you haven’t already, go back up and listen to that clip from Bo Burnham, and pay special note to what he says about self-consciousness:
“They say it’s the ‘me’ generation. It’s not. The arrogance is taught, or it was cultivated. It’s self-conscious. That’s what it is. It’s conscious of self.”
I never use Facebook.
But every once in a while, I’ll pull up my idle Facebook page and do something utterly insane: I’ll scroll through my posts and photos and imagine what someone else would think if they were looking at my page.
This is Jon, they would think. This is what he looks like. This is his life.
This is the dark side of knowing that some audience exists: an amplified sense of self-consciousness that is the killer of inner peace.
If you can live your life without having that, you should do it.
