I’m not really one for nostalgia, but the MySpace days were just a great time for indie music. The photo album, the little music player, the comment feed where you could leave little messages for people… it was all just so charming, but also fun and user-friendly.
It was also the era of blogs. Remember when “blogger” became a job? I guess the current equivalent is “influencer”, but I really appreciated blogging because it was topical but also personal. And then we got Facebook Pages, and from then things just got more difficult.
The main problem seems to be about saturation. It became so easy to have an online presence as an independent musician (which is GREAT, don’t get me wrong, I LOVE that the playing field has been levelled in such a way), that there just ended up being too many Pages being followed by too many people. And when that happens, that’s when it becomes a question of money. Not only did it become an option to pay to promote your posts, it became an option to pay to show your post to more people who already follow you. And… I don’t know… I understand it, from a “this is a capitalist society so yeah of course there’s money involved” sort of way. But I just don’t like it. In a “but I’m just trying to make music and put it out into the world” sort of way.
I’m just a small fish in a big corporate pond, I know that, and I’m not mad about it. But as a small fish, trying to just update my handful (fin-ful?) of followers just has an air of ickyness when it feels like Facebook is trying their darndest to make it more complicated in a way that only benefits, well, Facebook.
And the fact is, I just don’t have the time, energy, money, motivation, or inclination to constantly be updating multiple social media pages and making sure my profile images are the right dimensions for every network (seriously, they update their recommended image dimensions all the fudgin time!), or “optimising” my online presence… it’s annoying and confusing and time consuming and boring. I JUST WANNA MAKE MUSIC, MAN! (Please read that in the hippiest voice you can imagine) And sometimes I just wanna post about music on the internet without Big Social looking over my shoulder.
So here I am. Here we are. And here we shall be. Viva la blog.