So, couple of weeks ago, there I am having a most convivial lunch in a most agreeable eatery with a legendary manager of a legendary artist. While I’m wondering if he’ll be expecting me to pick up the bill as he orders a bottle of Pouilly-Fumé 2018, he chirps “I find your newsletter surprisingly entertaining Burrows…” oh that's nice…I think. “…and it’s a popular read you know Burrows…”
Ah, my heart swells as I try to suppress the smug smile forming on my face, “pity no fXX@$&er acts on your advice!”.
“Hey! Wait. what do you mean?” I say.
“Well, put it this way, had a meeting at the label a few days ago, they’ve got this new senior exec they just hired, who they wanted to wheel out so they could share their vision with us.”
Oh really, that's nice. So, what insightful vision for your artist did they share? I enquired. “Our strategy for your artist is GEN Z!!” he laughed.
While still perusing the wine list, he continued “…you bang on, and on all the time about how we shouldn't be targeting fans by age, yet this new numpty at the label thinks that's the basis of a groundbreaking strategy”.
Well lucky for Sound Effects, there are artists, managers and rights-holders that are listening, but kind of blows your mind doesn’t it? I mean that there’s a highly paid record exec (and I assure you, they are) dropping the term “Gen Z” as if it's a revolutionary strategy.
“...GENERATIONAL TERMS LIKE ‘MILLENNIAL’ OR ‘GEN Z’ ARE MARKETING MYTHS...””
If You Won’t Listen to Me? Listen To Mark Ritson PhD
MarketingWeek’s Mark Ritson PhD put it perfectly when he said: “Demographics alone tell us almost nothing about what customers actually want, feel or will do.”
He’s also said that “generational terms like ‘Millennial’ or ‘Gen Z’ are marketing myths that endorse marketing’s obsession with youth rather than yield real actionable insight”.
If you hear a marketer lazily lean into a binary box like Millennials or Gen Z, run a mile. The terms don’t represent meaningful psychological segments. They simply don’t. They’re just crude descriptors that hide more than they reveal. Mark writes:
“The famous generational labels describe nothing about attitudes, motivations or behavioural drivers.”
And yet in music, more than almost any other industry, we still hear executives deploying soundbites like “Our catalogue campaign must target Gen Z” as if they were strategic insight.
All nonsense. Not because these groups don’t exist (they do), but because they’re simply demographic wrappers that obscure the internal world of the people inside them: assuming the needs, emotions, identity drivers of all 16-year-olds are the same is idiotic. Let alone all 16–30-year-olds.
When an exec confidently declares the strategic answer is ‘Gen Z’, understand what they’re really telling you: they don’t have a target audience, don’t have the insight, and won’t deliver sustainable growth.
“THIS OBSESSION WITH “WHAT HAPPENED” BLINDS US TO “WHY IT HAPPENED”, AND THEREFORE WHAT TO DO NEXT.”
Why This Mistake Matters in Music
When A&R, marketing, analytics, or commercial teams lean on generational shorthand, they commit three linked sins:
1. They treat “what” data as “why” data.
A playlist stream, a dashboard segment, a DAU/MAU slice - none of these tell you why people care about your artist. But the industry acts as though they do. This obsession with “what happened” blinds us to “why it happened”, and therefore what to do next.
2. They substitute vanity metrics for strategic thinking.
Dashboard metrics tell you eyeballs and ears, not hearts and minds. They measure behaviour after the fact, not motivation before the fact. It’s regression analysis dressed up as insight. And it leads to vanilla decisions like bigger budgets for the channels that already worked, instead of deeper understanding of audiences that might never have shown up yet. And it spanks budgets!
3. They ignore attitudinal and emotional insight, the only thing that reliably predicts future growth.
Attitudinal insight isn’t fancy. It’s the disciplined effort to understand why an audience feels what it feels, what their beliefs are, how they make sense of the world, and how music fits into that. This is the stuff that unlocks new markets, new revenue streams, and new fans. Not “Gen Z loves TikTok” shite - a tautology at best, a distraction at worst.
Demographics Don’t Build Audiences. Human Truths Do
Let’s pull one quote from Mark Ritson PhD that should be on every music marketer’s wall:
“If you’re going to use segmentation, use segmentation that actually describes the drivers of behaviour…”
That’s the important bit. “Drivers of behaviour.” Not age bands. Not vanity clusters. Not y-axis slices on a reporting tool.
What actually makes someone hit Follow? What makes them spend on merch? What makes them show up to a show or a match on a Tuesday night? What makes them tell their friends “you have to listen to this artist” or “come to this”?
These questions aren’t answered by age brackets. They’re answered by emotional and attitudinal insight.
“FANS AREN’T DEFINED BY THE YEAR THEY WERE BORN. THEY’RE DEFINED BY THE LIFE THEY’RE TRYING TO BUILD…” ”
We Are Lazy. And It’s Costing Artists
This industry loves to feel busy. We have dashboards for everything: segments that slice too thin, metrics that glitter without substance, and audiences defined by what they are, not what they think. But busyness isn’t strategy. Insight is.
You can quantify behaviour all day, but if you don’t understand its drivers, you cannot craft strategy that builds lasting audience value. Fans aren’t defined by the year they were born. They’re defined by the life they’re trying to build and the experiences that matter to them. That’s where growth lies.
What We Need to Change
If we’re serious about helping established artists reach new audiences and grow real engagement, then the following must be core practice, not occasional rhetoric:
Stop using generational labels as strategic targets. They’re descriptors, not predictors.
Invest in attitudinal segmentation that gets inside the human experience. Understand motivations, fears, aspirations.
Use qualitative insight to inform quantitative measurement. Start with why, not what.
Replace vanity metrics with action-oriented signals. Metrics that link measurable behaviours to emotional drivers.
A Final Word
Mark Ritson PhD, whose work actually forces marketers to think, not just measure, summed it up succinctly:
“Marketing needs to escape its addiction to simple descriptors and embrace the complexity of human behaviour.”
And music desperately needs that escape. So does your marketing strategy.