I stopped posting anything to social media the other week, more as a little experiment to myself than anything deeper, but I gotta say: absolutely nothing happened lol.
Did I feel better? I'm afraid to say, yes I did. Instantly, to be honest with you.
Now I'm not stupid. I know I can't just come off social media, especially as a DIY artist- stuff like Insta is still a big channel, but is it the be all and end all? I don't think so, funnily enough.
I don't know of a channel to reach people that's as useless as Insta. Most Meta websites are lousy these days. I've never had as many existential breakdowns and long nights of the soul as I do with Meta products. What's the real point of Instagram? Bands were told back in the early days that social media would revolutionise everything, and reaching fans had never been easier, so we jacked in everything and moved on these apps. It's been almost two decades of this shit now, and not once have I heard anyone try to stop and reconsider whether this was a good thing or not, or whether we should maybe come up with a new idea.
I'm not doing stupid fucking dances on tiktok, and my body reacts with visceral hatred everytime I see a slick 'comedy' skit on Insta reels, and I think I just reached a breaking point where I sat and thought 'what the fuck is any of this anymore?', like seriously - what's the fucking point? What is it doing? Why does it never even come close to reaching all my followers? why do I have to constantly perform for it, despite the fact it doesn't do the one thing I want it to: reach fans with news.
Meanwhile, my Bandcamp mailing list just bulldozes its way into all my fans' inboxes with non-flashy text based emails telling everyone what I'm doing or what I have coming up. No need to find funny pictures or do fucking videos of me talking, none of this 'oh you have to show your face to game the alogrithm' shite. Just 'bam - here you go, have some fucking news'. Haha.
That's not to say that all social media is bad, or that I'm jacking it all in and leaving to live in a cabin in the woods, far from it - I like stupid memes as much as the next person, but perhaps being mostly offline from it rather than constantly online is the way to go. For my own brain at least.
It's just stuff, stuff, stuff, constantly, all the time. Stop with the stuff! I'm fed up of the stuff! haha, I just want to put little tapes out and sit with them for a little while. I don't want to get lost in an endless sea of slop and 'content' - I want to just sit with things and let them sink in for a little bit. It's nice! It's lovely, just not feeling like you need to constantly do stuff all the time - I'm not a fucking youtuber, I'm a musician. I'm not getting the tiktok AI voice to narrate an unboxing video. I'm not talking into the camera with a 'whats up guys?!' - I'm going to sit in this room and make some tunes and you're going to listen to them and then decide if you want to buy them, that's it.
what. is. social. media. doing. for. me? WHAT IS IT DOING FOR ANY OF US?
Answers on a postcard lol.
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