Agency

I’ve been reading a lot of Ed Zitron lately. In his newsletters (and podcast!) he talks about things like enshittification, the rot economy, tech CEOs becoming isolated and weird… you know, all the things wrong with modern life, and I had a sort of brainwave this morning that it underpins something I’ve been thinking about the past year or so.

Around this time a year ago, I gave up my X account. Aside from all the moral and ethical concerns about supporting far-right weirdos and their new toys, the platform also became borderline unusable from a band perspective. If I can’t reach anyone, and I’m not exactly having a great time having to put up with porn bots and endless ‘discourse’, what’s the point in having this thing again? Whilst I admit there’s still no comparable site to move onto, I always had the nagging feeling in the back of my head, saying ‘do I even want a comparable site?’ - Bluesky’s cool, but it’s still small. Threads is… just Threads at this point - an overly sanitised, boring engagement bait mess. An experience comparable with arguing in an airport duty free shop, essentially where Linkedin ends and Facebook begins. Anyway, I digress.

The thing with big tech is, that throughout my life, and my career as a budding, never-quite-popular DIY musician, it’s been there to help for a large part of that. I can remember the days before broadband, before most social networks - I was there for the boom and bust of music blogs, I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe… etc. It was tough back then, and the internet alongside tech advances made a lot of it easier - I can download an mp3 and stick it on my iPod, that sort of thing. Now, however, I don’t think many would really go to bat for tech, or for social media for that matter.

Which brings me back to my point about X (it’s not twitter anymore lads, hasn’t been for quite some time) - you’d really, really struggle to find anyone enthusiastic about using it, or many other places like it. They suck, they’re run by hyper capitalist dorks who want to squeeze every penny out of you, and give you an experience that’s just-about-functional, but far from actually enjoyable. Because it’s easier and cheaper to do that. Facebook doesn’t need to innovate, it has half the world signed up to it, why would they bother now? It’s swimming in scams and AI generated slop, but they don’t care, why would they? They make more money than god on an hourly basis.

Anyway, I digress again. It got me thinking about my relationship with these things, and what joy, and/ or usefulness they give to me, to bands, to artists, to anyone even remotely creative. And the answer is always ‘yeah, not much as it happens’. They’re all a mess - confusing, restrictive, broken most of the time, awash with nazis the rest… the list goes on. So why do we bother? “oh well y’know… my fans are on there! I have to use it for ‘the biz’, I have to keep my numbers up!” - I hear stuff like that all the time, and have been known to utter it myself too. But thinking about it, really drilling down into it, it’s all bollocks. You don’t need these places - sure, they might make life an iota more easier, especially if you have a new record or a tour or something, but if you can’t reach anyone anyway, seriously… what’s the point?

It’s 2024 now, and as most of these social media places are either coalescing into a sludge of blind rage, abject tedium, or both, it’s becoming more and more apparent that you have agency now to go where you want and use what you like. That agency is so, so special - I remember the times before it was yanked away from most of us by social media companies - the thought of a band not having a Facebook page in 2013 was career suicide, and something that brought band managers I knew at the time out in hives. But now, you have the agency to do something about it - you don’t have to use Facebook, certainly not in the same way we used to use it. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do now. This rings true more for the DIY people reading this than it does someone on a label, being subtly prodded to help pay back that advance in any way they can, but it makes me even angrier when I see my fellow DIY-ers constantly having to play a game that’s rigged against them from the start, and not realising you don’t have to play it.

Spotify, by and large, is a colossal waste of time. Stop using it! It doesn’t pay fairly, it’s riddled with copycat AI generated garbage, and did I mention it doesn’t pay fairly? You can hop on over to Apple, Deezer, Youtube, Amazon, Tidal, etc. There are so many alternatives to spotify. Use them! Or Don’t! It’s up to you, it’s your agency. Don’t feel the need to constantly ‘be on’ or update stuff all the time - you’ve probably just as much luck hitting the jackpot from some kid using 3 seconds of your song on tiktok as you are trying to play the game with ‘the biz’.

I stopped even doing things like pre-orders, let alone pre-release singles and videos, because I could. I didn’t need to do it, so I stopped. Hell, you don’t even need to release on a Friday if you don’t want to. I think we should all get back a little bit to those wild west days of just doing whatever the fuck, instead of feeling the need to put little icons of social media companies in your banners - they couldn’t give the slightest shit about you, so why not do likewise?

I appreciate this does come across as a bit ‘old man yells at cloud’, and there’ll be nuances and all sorts of situations where this idealist claptrap just won’t fly, but for the sake of my sanity, please at least just take away the general vibe, the general feeling of this weird rant. Again, it’s 2024 - you do not need to do anything you don’t want to do. And if you are being told to do something you don’t want to do, at least question it. At least ask if there’s another way, because these fucking companies won’t last forever, but in some way, however small, your music will.