Thanks to this thread I removed both IG and FB from my phone.
Too many ads, I couldn’t bear it anymore.
And FB really made its way into my brain, had to get out of it.
Now I’m gonna listen to Béla Bartók. Must have been decades since I last did. Thx @Scrypt!
This is beautiful poetry and I’m all for it.
I follow and enjoy your gram.
Really surprised by the hate it’s getting from some people here. I can’t even imagine making money from music without an IG page. Youtube makes sense, but that’s not too different from IG. IG can be a faster smaller version of youtube where you can share bite size pieces. I’ve met a number of really cool people on IG that I would not have met in any other way.
I’m afraid I have no advice, as I haven’t figured out a formula to produce engaging, useful, and entertaining posts under the guise of a musician. And that’s the point, right? Quality content isn’t on my radar. I couldn’t care less if a musician I dig posts a vid of getting drinks with friends or nailing a kickflip. Any social media “follow” recommendations from anyone? A few good suggestions from the community could give you a “target” and streamline your promotional workflow…
djadonis…the man, the myth, the legend…there’s a name I have seen since ableton forums many yrs ago
Before the internet and social media, big record companies called the shots. They chose who would become stars.
Now, anybody with true talent can showcase it to the world without big record companies acting as gatekeepers.
If you can’t deal with social media, hopefully you’re satisfied with limited exposure. There’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t see any point in demonizing it though.
Yeah, artists now have a mainline connection to fans, if the fans want it. Things like ‘going live’, so easy. It’s kind’ve mind boggling. But that train o thought makes me sound old. Lol. Kids are growing up with it and are highly comfortable with sharing their whole lives on it. I wouldn’t mind a little more differentiation, it’s weird being bound up on platforms that cater for everything and everyone. I just want a cool, music-focused platform. It’s surprising this isn’t a thing.
Bandcamp is supposed to be that platform. But there’s so much on that platform that should but don’t work. Tags mainly.
Tags should able you to cater to local or niche audience, instead the system discourage you from picking anything but the broadest tags.
Or maybe I just can’t figure out how they work…
I don’t know, I would rephrase it “anybody with ANY talent”. You’re literally drowning in videos of jams without any curation.
Plus, those platforms are primaraly advertisement spaces and are designed to be as addictive as possible, everything from the little red notification dots to the infinite scrolling are carefuly crafted for our lizard brains and to make us spend as much time as possible on them. That seems wrong to me.
Would you rather revert to the past? I’m ok with the present.
I agree that Instagram allows users to post short videos and that you can easily reach out to a large number of people with the right hashtags and Instagram will boost your post if a lot of people react to it with comments and likes. BUT (and this is big one) Instagram makes it almost impossible to guide the user to a page where you can actually earn something (like bandcamp, youtube or even spotify). What good does it for my “music career” that a lot of people browse through some pictures of short music clips (where audio is muted by default)?
Yeah, Bandcamp is great for music, but it has zero social interaction. So here we are, on specific brand gear forums.
I totally get your point and that’s kinda the reason I went onto Instagram in the first place. There were two problems for me. Firstly, I lack true talent and secondly, for whatever reason, putting up my shit on Instagram and hashtagging it and all that just felt silly. Maybe it’s generational, maybe it’s psychological, but the whole social media thing just makes me uncomfortable. I think the thing that makes me uncomfortable is how fake so much of it is.
Also, just posting a few videos and hoping for the best ain’t gonna connect you with a large audience, you’ll still need to get a label or promoter or some other of the new gatekeepers to let you in if you want to make an impact.
I dunno, I’m not really bothered about all the brainwashing and addiction stuff. If you’re weak enough to get addicted to looking at pictures of fake people’s abdominal muscles all day then good luck to you. I just don’t really like social media (except here), largely because I’m pretty antisocial.
There is a community tab and if you use it right you can interact with a lot of people there. Sending out relevant information about new releases, livestreams, concerts, etc is easily done.
That’s pretty cold, Imo. Are you suggesting that it’s the victim’s fault that they are hooked to these platforms? Are you leaving sole agency at the feet of the addict? I think that totally lacks compassion of different people’s mental health.
For me hashtags are like genre dividers at the record store.
Of course social media platforms are created to manipulate people’s habits, they’re big interactive adverts.
For people with mental health issues, learning disabilities and other neurological differences, social media can be incredibly damaging. As can playing video games, going to the pub, going shopping or doing any number of things which require interacting with others. As with all areas of life, people in the above categories require good quality care and intervention to help minimise potential damage.
I’ve worked with a number of people with pretty serious addictions and those addictions are pretty much always hardwired from a lifetime of abuse/neglect or mental health issues. It’s relatively unlikely that someone not already in an at risk group for addiction will suddenly become addicted to social media, in very much the same way that most people who smoke a bit of weed don’t become full blown drug addicts. There’s a very big difference between genuine addiction and crying to the world that your 16 year old is “addicted” to Instagram because you never bothered to parent them properly.
Of course I have concerns about the first group, but a lot of the noise about the evil of social media is being fuelled by the second group, who are mostly just bored/boring.
Call your band Fin and the Hashtags.
Nothing really interesting to add. My social media use comes in small bite sizes pieces. I only use facebook, but I can go days without it if say i’m on a camping trip, or just doing other things and enjoying myself, but it’s nice to catch up with things on facebook and sift through the social media casualties once in a while and see how people who I don’t speak to regularly are doing.
It’s a mixed blessing I guess if you’re a musician. You have to promote yourself and your music, promote events you’re playing at, sell your soul to the devil. Ok, well the last part is optional, but I would take some comfort if I were creating great music and not finding an audience for it just by looking at great artists from the past. A lot of the most famous greats from all the arts scraped a living and didn’t achieve greatness in their lifetimes. It isn’t a right to expect people to love your work, but who knows, maybe an algorithm from the future will single you out for praise and add you to the list of greats.
Small comfort perhaps if you depend on your art to make ends meet, but it’s always been a flaky industry. I’ve seen people who I expect to be well off selling services, like washing your laundry or cooking you a meal etc to pay their rent (true story)
Ok. Making my woman her breakfast and she checks her Instagram. They put a shortcut to Shopping where her Likes button was, and removed the show Likes button altogether
This is one pissed off lady!