This is a very timely thread for me. I’ve got 3 Instagram accounts, work, music and skateboarding. The work one is really just a photo album of my projects to show customers. Very little interaction one way or another and that’s fine. The skateboarding one has been amazingly supportive and generous. The most followers, loads of comments, none negative and genuinely good conversations with a real diverse group of randoms from across the globe. Lots of encouragement regardless of skill level or perceived status.
The music one just kills me every time. It seems like everyone is just too important or cool or ‘busy’ to have anything like a conversation. Endless self promotion or memes that I just don’t understand. I realise that I’m only seeing stuff i’ve chosen to follow but it’s disappointing when those same people who espouse harmony, love and understanding, tribal togetherness blah blah blah and yet can’t respond beyond a single word or flipping emoji. It all seems a bit one way. And it’s endless. I won’t mention names but you’ll all probably know the main culprits. I understand they don’t owe me anything and as they say ‘never meet your heroes’. Well, I met Mickey Rourke once. He was really lovely😂.
Anyway I took the app down off the home screen last week and am having a break from all of it. Still using Whatsapp but boy those groups can get out off hand! Ping!!
There are no bad social media, just bad users and bad content.
I grew up in a council scheme in a small town outside of Glasgow where everybody knew everybody’s business and people were always made to feel they should “know their place” - even in the 00s it was still somewhere that being accepted to go to uni was a big deal and ambitious, and nobody in our area was doing things like playing in a band or mixing records, creativity was for people who lived in bought houses. I was an outlier because I was both gay and had weird taste - when everyone was into Clubland and 50 Cent I was discovering 4AD and Villalobos. But when I went online I could read about things that nobody around me was talking about, I could even chat to people who were like me who weren’t physically around me, and for an awkward teenager that felt pretty important. I made friends on Myspace and joined music forums and I had my taste shaped in a way I wouldn’t have gotten from my real life encounters.
I do think it’s sad that to be a big deal in any kind of “creative industry” you have to be good at social media - writers have to have hot takes for Twitter, musicians have to have good Instagram content, songwriters need instant hooks for the first twenty seconds of TikTok. If you don’t have the luxury of being able to be online constantly you fall behind, and for all people talk about widening access to marginalised groups it’s ultimately a class situation, because people who have to work in service industries to pay their bills can’t “break through” with side hustles because it takes a level of time and effort that’s not affordable to them. But also: I can post a picture of my 18-month-old niece and get 100 likes, but if I post up a demo of some music I’ve been working on or a link to a DJ mix I’ll get five likes and a solitary play. If you want to go off-grid, don’t delete your social media pages: just post stuff you’ve worked on and you can guarantee nobody will engage.
Facebook music groups can be fun, and if they’re not, you turn off your notifications or leave them. I was invited to one last year and after posting a fair bit in it I got offered a slot on a local-based online radio show - that’s a door opened to me that I wouldn’t have had without social media. But also, just don’t be friends with arseholes. Sarah that you met at a party once in 2009 doesn’t need to be popping up in your timeline to talk about how masks kill, so bye Sarah. I’ve got all those gross misogyny hotbed pages like LadBible blocked from showing in my timeline. I think it can be useful to see comments and discussion from things you disagree with occasionally - I don’t want to live in an echo chamber and I think it teaches empathy to see how people disgree with you in ways that don’t make sense to you - but you can treat the comments section of anything for what it is: nutters on the internet with opinions and time to kill.
I really don’t get the pivot to video and podcasts. It’s faster and easier for me to read things than listen to someone talk, and I can listen to my own selections of music while reading. If a video is longer than five minutes I’m probably not going to watch it unless it’s something I’m really interested in, or it’s long enough to treat as a documentary to watch while eating dinner or whatever.
Youtube recommendations are great if you don’t watch rubbish. I’ve discovered so much UK garage and streetsoul from algorithmic suggestions. But I use Youtube the way other people seem to use Spotify.
I believe we are really lucky at Test Pressing as its pretty rare we get the ‘id?’ message with no gratitude whatsoever. I hear you @LazySimon - music has become the land of the humble brag and its pretty sad to see really.
We were never grateful for reviews or anything previously as they were just what happened. Someone made a record. Someone who had a channel liked that record and played it or wrote about it. And people then heard about it and bought it. Djs played it. It went from that to the humble brag and people saying ‘thanks for so and so reviewing my record’ instead of just saying ‘nice review of my record up here if you fancy reading it - its out now’ to literally now watching DJs dance for their dinner on instagram while they play records. ‘Thanks to so and so for booking me to play in Berlin’…
I just think the fact that Instagram is now a requirement (‘get a film of you djing for your insta’) for your “profile” is not great. Personally I’d rather do my radio show and put some love into that and hope that one day someone says can you come and play records in our club the way you do on the radio. That’d be ace. I’m really not sure what I am trying to say here just feels like we all need a bit of a reset from the social media game. Ramble over. Interesting thread.
Yes but I think we all literally are… We can all see it’s a problem but the other problem is it’s affecting the cultures we love. You know… Netflix watching algorithms to decide how programs are made for example. It’s nuts. Or the tik tok example above. It’s been pointed out so many times but so much music and art we love would not have been made if we based it upon stats and eyeballs. Maybe art and book publishing are to be the last homes of the interesting and other than that its down to people like us to trawl Bandcamp and find the outsiders and share with like minded people in places like this or whatever.
one of the great ironies is the more choice we have the less variety we experience. when we were spoonfed strange and wonderful telly on BBC2 BITD you were exposed to stuff you would never seek out now.
I agree with Paul’s point about humble-bragging too. it’s horrendous.
I completely forgot to add why I mentioned this. My phone never blows up. It never demands anything from me. The only notifications I get are personal email (that’ll be something household related so it’s a neeed to know) and messages from my sister. It’s bliss… And I switched off the ringer and sound years ago.
This was step zero for me. The wife and I were on a lovely island vacation and deep out in the middle of the ocean I felt a vibration in my pocket and realized crap I’ve left my blackberry in my swimsuit. EXCEPT… I scramble to check my pockets and it’s NOT there. In fact I’ve purposely left my phone in the hotel room. I do some research and find out that THOUSANDS of people experience “phantom vibrations” due to the way the phone has overstimulated their nervous system. Off go the alert and on goes my wariness about what constant connection is doing to my mind.
we watch the TOTP reruns which are currently in 1991, and I’m always struck by how diffuse the music is over 30 mins. You’ve got hair metal, early acid house crossovers, SAW pop, the birth of baggy indie stuff, and it’s all bundled together. So in those days, you had four channels and if you wanted to see Kylie lip-synch her way through a hit you also had to sit through Salt N Pepa rapping about female equality and DJ H playing weird bleepy piano house. You were exposed to everything. Now with everything being algorithmically targeted you don’t get the same sense of adventure - I might be lucky in that I never have to encounter an Ed Sheeran or Adele song in the wild, but I bet I’m missing out on lots of excellent stuff by the same moves.
Interesting in that talk about Behaviourism at the birthplace of computing. I put a talk together once about its influence on the early days of advertising. Sinister!
I also got really tired of seeing my friends’ parallel performative selves- staged vacation and nightclub pictures, captions that someone clearly took a fucking hour to write, attempts to make others envious by flaunting material goods. It made some really lovely IRL people in to heinous asshats. That’s not even to mention all of the craaaazy self snitching amongst people I grew up with who are “street pharmacists” etc. actually had to call a couple of people up and say “you know that’s evidence admissible in a court of law right?” I’d rather enjoy you as you present in the real world or just skip it all together.
how do the kids find out about the weird/left stuff now? where would it occur to them to even look? (genuine question not old man rant). obv it’s out there on NTS etc but where are the entry level signposts now for a newbie?
I’m trying to think who the young persons Weatherall or Gilles Peterson is these days. Watching my kid and his friends grow up using YouTube a a jukebox (five tabs ready to go to play the next one) was pretty interesting. My boy is 23 now. I’ll ask where he gets his music from. He’s out there doing the raves around Millwall type stuff. Be interesting to know.
they’re all too busy making TikToks about being polyamourous set to Billie Eilish I believe.
In all seriousness I think it’s just not a big deal for them. I was working with some 18 yr olds recently and they just didn’t really seem interested in music. They were also really aware of cameras being on them and being afraid of being filmed doing something silly/embarassing and “going viral.” Have you noticed that teenage boys don’t have daft haircuts, and teenage girls don’t have chunky highlights and blue eye shadow? They’re afraid to take risks. Even their bodies - the boys all go to the gym, the girls are all skinny or body-positive message embracers, you don’t really see anything else.
When I was growing up teenagers had tribes: neds, moshers, art-types, townies, etc. Now they all look the same - I couldn’t look at a 16 yr old now and tell you if they were someone who would have made fun of me in school or not, whereas when I was young it was really obvious who was and wasn’t on your “side.”
