To Post or Not To Post

Measuring The Effectiveness of Social Media Usage With the Downbeat Critics Poll

I often encounter young musicians who are puzzled by how much time and effort they should spend on social media. Some of them are led to believe that an active online presence is important or even essential to the success of their jazz career. I have always been interested but not entirely convinced by this idea. With this post I set out to measure exactly how important social media is to jazz success, using math and deductive reasoning.

To measure success, I’m going to start with a simple metric: the number of votes of the top 5 tenor saxophonists in the 2025 Downbeat Critics Poll. Fortunately, I admire all these players, and am able to dispassionately look at the data without bias. By analyzing these tallies, along with corresponding social media activity, I will come up with solid proof of whether robust posting helps these musicians gain attention and critical acclaim. These methods may then be used by young musicians to ascertain whether or not their own posting habits are too much, too little, or just right.

The top 5 tenor saxophonists in the 2025 Downbeat Critics Poll along with the number of votes they received, are:

James Brandon Lewis, 299

Charles Lloyd, 209

David Murray, 173

Joe Lovano, 164

Chris Potter, 143

By measuring the number of Instagram followers they each have, we get a slightly different order

Chris Potter, 43.6k

Charles Lloyd, 16.3k

Joe Lovano, 14k

James Brandon Lewis, 13.6k

David Murray, 4.8k

Number of followers indicates how popular they are in this particular social media ecosystem, but it does not give us a measure of how often they post to the app.

For this we need to do a little measuring.

I looked at how many original posts each artist did over the last few months. I did not include co-hosted posts, which are usually created by festivals or record labels and have the artist’s consent.

James Brandon Lewis, 31 posts in the last month

Charles Lloyd, 11 posts in the last month

David Murray, 3 posts in the last month

Joe Lovano, 1 post in the last month

Chris Potter. 1 post in the last 7 months, or 0.14 posts a month

By dividing the number of downbeat poll votes by the number of IG posts a month, we can ascertain how effective each musician’s post is at gaining a critics’ kudos.

AI-Generated image of a musician creating an Instagram post

Thus we can definitively say that each of James Brandon Lewis’s posts translated to 9.645 votes. He posted often, but ultimately this was a winning strategy. For Chris Potter, who is rarely active, each IG post translates to a whopping 1021 votes, a very efficient style of highly minimal social media usage. Tallying the rest gives us this.

Votes per IG post

James Brandon Lewis, 9.654

Charles Lloyd, 19

David Murray, 57.67

Joe Lovano, 164

Chris Potter, 1021.42

Since the downbeat poll only measures one thing, critical acclaim for the previous year, we must also look at raw popularity of their music. For this we can look at Spotify monthly listener counts. The result is in this order.

Charles Lloyd, 155,986

Joe Lovano, 105,264

Chris Potter, 28,513

James Brandon Lewis, 22,190

David Murray, 7217

Dividing these by posts we get a measure of how many monthly listeners each IG post produces.

Spotify listener per IG Post

James Brandon Lewis, 715.8

Charles Lloyd, 14,180

David Murray, 2405

Joe Lovano, 105,264

Chris Potter, 203,664

Although he ranked third in listeners, Chris Potter’s strategy of rarely posting seems to be the winning one.

I have looked at my own posting habits and determined that I have made 4 IG posts this month, which translate to 1106 monthly listeners, or 276.5 per post. If I wanted to achieve a listener count like Chris Potter, at my current rate of effectiveness, I would have to up my monthly posting rate to an exhausting 103 posts per month. A better strategy would be to make better posts. Clearly my IG is not sparking interest with the potency of Chris’s single January post.

If you are an up and coming jazz musician, you can use these tools to measure your own social media effectiveness. Remember the formulas of Spotify listeners/# of IG posts per month, and Downbeat votes/# of IG posts.

Compare yourself to the tenor giants and adjust accordingly. If you didn’t rate in the downbeat poll, fear not, for this is just one measure of success, that of critical adulation. Surely your numbers will improve over time, as critics take notice of your posts. Think of Charles Lloyd, who enjoys both critical acclaim and has a hefty number of monthly listeners. Such success in both critical and commercial terms is afforded to those who, like Lloyd, have been slowly and steadily posting since they emerged on the scene in the mid 60s. You may have only been posting for the last decade or so. Rest assured you have many thousands of posts to go.