Who Are You Actually Making This For? The Three Audiences Every Artist Needs to Name

At some point in every creative project, there's a moment where you make a decision based on what someone else will think. Maybe it's choosing a safer hook because you're worried a stranger won't get the experimental one. Maybe it's toning down something personal because it feels too exposed. Maybe it's adding something flashy because you can already imagine the clip performing well.

None of those instincts are wrong, exactly. But they're also not all pointing at the same person. The "someone" you're imagining when you make those calls is actually three completely different audiences, and most artists spend their careers unconsciously toggling between them without ever stopping to figure out which one they're actually trying to reach.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately — partly because I've been making some deliberate choices about direction, and partly because I've watched people I admire tie themselves in knots trying to please a crowd that was never going to be satisfied anyway.

So let's name the three.

Audience One: The Critical Eye

This is the audience that lives in your head before anyone real has seen anything. It's the composite of every gatekeeper, critic, industry professional, and respected peer whose opinion you've internalized over the years. It's the imaginary A&R rep, the music journalist, the drama school professor who told you something you never quite forgot.

The Critical Eye has high standards and specific taste. It responds to craft, to technical execution, to things that signal you know what you're doing. It's the audience you're performing for when you're trying to prove something.

Here's the tension: making work for the Critical Eye produces a certain kind of quality. It keeps you rigorous. It makes you care about the details. But it also makes you risk-averse in a very particular way — not afraid of failure, exactly, but afraid of looking like you don't know what you're doing. Those are different fears, and they produce different creative choices.

Artists who make primarily for the Critical Eye tend to produce work that's technically impressive but occasionally cold. Safe in its sophistication. You can feel the performance of competence in it, even when the competence is real.

Audience Two: The Casual Observer

This is the actual mass audience — the person who stumbles across your work without context, without investment, without any particular reason to care. In 2024, this is largely the algorithm audience: the person scrolling who gives you three seconds to make them feel something before they keep moving.

The Casual Observer is not your enemy. Reach matters. Connection at scale matters. And there's genuine craft in making something that lands with someone who doesn't know you and isn't predisposed to love you.

But here's where it gets complicated: the Casual Observer's attention is the easiest to measure and the hardest to satisfy in any lasting way. Metrics are seductive because they're quantifiable. You can watch the number go up. You can A/B test your way toward what performs. And in doing so, you can gradually drift into making work that's optimized for the first three seconds at the expense of everything that happens after.

I've seen artists completely reshape their creative identity chasing this audience. Not because they wanted to — but because the feedback loop was so immediate and so loud that it drowned out everything else. The Casual Observer doesn't mean to do this to you. They're just responding to what you're putting in front of them. But if you hand them the wheel, they will absolutely drive.

Audience Three: The One Who Gets It

This is the smallest audience and the most important one. It might be a single person — a collaborator, a longtime fan, a mentor, someone in your life who has seen all the versions of your work and understands what you're actually trying to do. Or it might be a very specific type of person: not a demographic, but a sensibility. Someone who shares your references, your obsessions, your particular way of seeing.

Making for the One Who Gets It feels different from making for the other two. There's less explaining. Less hedging. Less performing of competence or accessibility. You can be specific in a way that would alienate a broader audience and trust that this person will follow you there.

The counterintuitive thing about this audience is that work made for them tends to reach the furthest. Specificity is more magnetic than generality. When you make something that feels like it was made for one very particular person, other people sense the sincerity of it and want in. The Casual Observer is actually more likely to stop scrolling for something that feels genuinely personal than for something that was engineered to stop them.

But you have to be willing to lose people to find them. And that's where it gets hard.

The Question That Changes Everything

Most artists aren't making choices about which audience to prioritize. They're making all their choices without naming the audience at all, which means they're unconsciously serving whoever happens to feel most present in that moment — usually the Critical Eye when they're insecure, the Casual Observer when they're anxious about reach, and the One Who Gets It only when they forget to be afraid.

The shift happens when you make it explicit. Not permanent — you're allowed to change your mind, and different projects can have different answers. But for any given piece of work, being able to say "I'm making this for the One Who Gets It, and I'm willing to let the Casual Observer scroll past it" is a fundamentally different creative position than making the same choice by accident.

Here's the question I've started asking myself at decision points in my work: Whose reaction am I picturing right now, and is that actually who I want to be making this for?

Sometimes the Critical Eye is the right answer. Sometimes you're making something that needs to reach broadly and the Casual Observer deserves your attention. But knowing which one you're serving — and choosing it deliberately — changes the work in ways that are hard to explain and impossible to miss.

The Audience That Matters Most

I'll give you my honest answer, which is that the One Who Gets It is the audience I'm most interested in making work for. Not because the other two don't matter, but because work made from that place tends to be the most alive.

Rain doesn't calculate where it falls. It just falls, and what it hits, it hits completely. There's something in that I keep coming back to — the idea that the most genuine creative acts aren't aimed so much as released. Aimed at the right person, maybe. But released without flinching.

Figure out who that person is for you. Make something they'd recognize immediately. The rest has a way of working itself out.