Meet the new generation of folk musicians: resilient, creative, authentic, and trying their best.
Young folk musicians approach their craft in many different ways. Some are carving entire new paths in the industry while others are upholding traditions rooted in the music they were raised on. All of them are trying to navigate an ever-changing industry characterized by unprecedented access to international audiences through social media and shifting listener trends.
“We’re starting at a point where the industry is constantly changing and rearranging after COVID, so I find it’s a little hard to kind of get a grasp of what’s going on a lot of times,” said Kaiday, an Ottawa musician who blends her French upbringing with folk, pop and R&B influences to create bilingual songs that feel authentic to her.
She’s in her fourth year of Carleton University’s Bachelor of Music program where she’s met a community of like-minded young adults.
Being in the music program, Kaiday and her friends regularly support each other’s shows. Recently, she’s noticed the trend of young people leaning away from shows by local artists and toward big stadium shows. For Kaiday, the main selling point for supporting local live music is the cost: a $10 to $20 cover charge to see a local show compared to $300 at Ticketmaster — and contrary to popular belief, smaller audiences don’t mean less talent, she said.
The social media grind
“People that are selling out stadium shows, like they had 1,000 followers at some point, and it doesn’t mean that their music was less good back then.” she said. “People have this false idea that just because you’re at the start or you don’t have this amount of followers, that your music is less good, but that is so not true.”
Speaking of followers, platforms like Instagram and TikTok have become unavoidable for musicians trying to reach new audiences at the start of their careers.
A Canadian example would be Winnipeg singer-songwriter Leith Ross, who blew up on TikTok during lockdown with their tender acoustic song “We’ll Never Have Sex.” They have since toured across Canada and the U.S. and announced dates for a UK/Europe tour in the new year.
Nineteen-year-old Aisha Walters is a music-lover who first discovered Leith on TikTok during the pandemic and continues to find new artists on the platform today.
“I found some really gem artists on there that are just sharing their stuff, like most of the time they haven’t even released things yet but it puts them on my radar,” said Aisha.
Trying to work around social media
While some artists say it is a useful tool, managing your social media presence can feel like a full time job with potentially little reward.
“It can feel like you’re promoting a show nonstop,” said Jaron Camp, one half of the indie folk duo York Street Thought Process. “You’re making three posts a week for three or four weeks, and it’ll still be like you best of friends that don’t even know you’re having a show because the algorithm didn’t show them.”
This never-ending content-generating cycle is what Kaiday calls “the game.”
“It’s just so draining and so unpredictable too […] it leads a lot of people to burnout because it’s like, ‘Oh I don’t want to have to do this’, but then you have to play the game,” she said.
Rachael Frankruyter is the other half of the Thought Process duo from southwestern Ontario. The pair place an importance on storytelling in their music and like to borrow techniques like improv from other genres to incorporate in their art.
They are currently trying to work around social media as the primary outreach tool through mailing lists and tried and true methods like radio.
“That still helps reach an audience in a more real way,” said Jaron.
Offline, getting recognized by a wide audience is also not easy. That’s part of the reason why 19-year-old Annie McCarthy started the YouthFolk Festival from scratch in her hometown of Guelph, ON in August.
“Having watched a lot of local bands in the community, I’ve noticed that they kind of just get the same people coming out, like family and friends,” said Annie. “So I think it’s really difficult for these bands and musicians to get a larger audience to come on down because it’s hard to get that outreach.”
The festival ran from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m and had a lineup of 10 performances by musicians between the ages of 15 to 25. All the volunteers, including tech crews, also fell into this age group. The festival was pay-what-you-can because Annie wanted to make sure it was accessible.
A folk festival to support young artists
For Annie, it was important to give youth the opportunity to try their hand at the backstage side of things because she didn’t see a lot of opportunities for young people to learn these roles. For young musicians, Annie wanted to give them the chance to learn more business-focused skills to implement their future careers.
“When you’re a musician, it’s almost like you’re your own entrepreneur. You have to know how to do a hundred and one different things in order to get yourself out there,” she said. “I think if we give people the blueprint it makes it easier for them to learn and advocate from there.”
Outside of curated events like this, Jaron and Rachael are noticing a shift in their audience’s demographic.
“Our whole life performing typically has been an older-than-us audience but I definitely feel in the last three to four years that we’ve had more young people coming out to our show,” said Jaron. He partly credits this to the rising popularity of the pop-folk genre by artists like Noah Kahan.
“I think folk music is becoming more of a thing for young people than maybe it was 10 or 20 years ago,” he said.
Country artist Naomi Bristow has stuck to her traditional country roots since she started performing at six years old and thinks it’s good for young audiences to get the chance to hear older styles of music through her covers of Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton tunes.
“Everything comes back around, comes back into trending times, right?” said Naomi. “There is a market for people to be introduced to old-time stuff and think, ‘that’s pretty cool; my grandparents used to listen to this.’”
The most rewarding part of being a folk musician for these artists is the irreplaceable feeling of the connection of live music. For Jaron and Rachael, they hope this feeling resonates with young listeners.
“When you go to these small independent shows, you can actually connect with the musicians and form a long-lasting bond, which is a really cool thing and it can help with isolation and help you feel part of something that’s bigger than you.”
Related
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.rootsmusic.ca ’
