We’ve taken your feedback onboard about how Marrapalooza can be as positive an influence on North East music as possible and how we can keep our grassroots spirit and ensure we’re circulating money in our North East music scene, rather than paying out to large corporate entities.
Social media has serious negative social implications that are, at this point, irrefutable.
Instagram is proven to cause ill mental health
Instagram is proven to ruin attention spans
Social media is designed to addict users
Streaming platforms, such as Spotify, pay ludicrously small royalty rates to artists and design algorithmic engagement to reduce the variety you are exposed to.
The average person now spends 2-4 hours a day on social media, over years this adds up and up. Now artists feel they have to create something for Instagram every day to be relevant - working for Meta Platforms Inc instead of their art.
Additionally, these platforms now dominate marketing space and extract rent from promoters like us for your eyes and attention.
This settlement is contrary to our instinct as people who love art and music. We want to opt out as much as possible. So here’s how we’ll respond.
1.SPENDING MORE ON OUR SCENE AND LESS ON META SHAREHOLDERS
Every pound we spend promoting on instagram is a pound that could have been spent in our local scene.
As we did in 2025, we will spend significantly more time and money promoting Marrapalooza 4 by paying people to go to flyer at local gigs. We want to help our scene, not Mark Zuckerberg.
2.PRIORITISING NON SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT
Through our website and mailing list at www.marrapalooza.co.uk you will be first to know about developments in our line-up, their details and the artists we host at the festival. There will be no FOMO for not following us on instagram or Tik Tok. You will also learn about our festival by posters we put up in our local area.
You will be able to engage with and attend Marrapalooza 4: Wild and Fierce and Not Bothered without ever using a social media website. There, we will only share music.
3. WE WON’T BOOK ANYONE BASED ON THEIR SOCIAL MEDIA PRESENCE
We don’t care how many followers you have online. We don’t care if you have social media or not. We don’t care how many Spotify plays you have. If we ask bands to play or to apply to play, we won’t ask for social media accounts to prove your worth.
These are all fake metrics that are irrelevant to art and don’t even translate into real fans, anyhow.
5. WE WON’T SHARE SPOTIFY LINKS OR PLAYLISTS
Spotify has been an enormous net negative for British Music.
The royalty and streaming deals artists make from the platform are an insult. The profit Spotify makes from your work is used to fund the arms industry.
We won’t encourage the use of Spotify by sharing Spotify playlists or referencing Spotify play numbers as if this matters to why you should see a band.
6.WE WON’T REPLACE SKILLED WORK WITH AI
We won’t use AI to replace designers, artists, videographers or anything else that AI pretends it can do just as well as a talented human being. We will pay the talented people in our local area.
Marrapalooza 2025 Gallery photographs by Victoria Wai
