WXTJ Writes! By Meredith Hunsader: Figuring Out Which Bands or Musicians Will Reply to Direct Messages
By Phoenix Banks
For the past two years, I have direct messaged bands and artists on Instagram to compliment their work. I figured that there was absolutely no harm in it, and it was also nice to hear back from artists that I admired so much. However, for every reply I got, there were twice as many unread messages. I began to wonder if there was a common denominator between those who replied and those who did not.
In my mind, the number of followers on an account seemed to be the most likely cause of either a reply or no reply. This came from the idea that follower count is a direct result of the band or artist’s popularity. The hypothesis was thus: If there is a correlation between a band’s Instagram follower number and whether they reply to DMs, then those with fewer followers will be more likely to reply.
I messaged 40 accounts (artists across various genres) and have recorded whether they engaged in a conversation with me, reacted to the message with a heart, or did not acknowledge my text. The results have been compiled into a scatterplot below, which visually demonstrates whether or not a band replied, with the x-axis increasing by follower count.
As one can see, the negative trend line supports my hypothesis that creators with a larger following will not reply. However, there is so much variation, and many bands with under 150k did not reply to my messages either. When I messaged an account with under 150k, I got a reply 29.6% of the time, a reaction 3.7% of the time, and no reply 66.7% of the time, as shown by the blue dots on the graph, which denote a band.
The largest band I got a reply from had 148k followers, and the smallest had 2k, creating a range of 146k. The average was 50.6k. I received reactions from three bands; one with 12k, one with 65k, and another with 495k. The latter does not follow the trend in the data and is therefore an outlier. Finally, there were many who did not reply. The lowest was 12k, and the highest was approximately 8 million. Every creator with millions was excluded from the data to preserve the visual integrity of the graph, and it should be noted that none of them viewed my message.
Based on my data analysis and personal experience, I believe that having an account with over 150k followers react or reply to your message is a very rare occurrence. I also believe that it is impossible to know whether a band or artist with under 150k followers will reply to you, though my results state they will not exactly ⅔ of the time. However, this data would need to be replicated, preferably with even more accounts and with artists from separate timeframes. The majority of the artists I messaged were post-1990s, except for one.
Despite these findings, I strongly encourage everyone to reach out to their favorite artists. Numbers can’t always determine reality, and people can be unpredictable. Who knows who might reply, and there’s absolutely no downside in trying to express your appreciation for someone’s talent!
Meredith Hunsader (she/her) is a second-year writer for WXTJ Writes! Outside of writing for Writes!, she is also a member of the Taekwondo Club and the International Relations Organization!
