“It’d be nice to think that Post-Nothing was inevitably too good to be ignored, but as a very untrendy band in a city with little support for live music, the odds were stacked against them. One lame show in front of the wrong crowd, the wrong choice of a single falling on the wrong set of ears, and that could’ve been it, just as they planned it. And yet, they went ahead anyway and soon found themselves playing to rooms full of people who don’t have the answers, don’t have the body they want, and have plenty of dreams that may never come true. But so what? Whether it’s a result of faith in religion, in rock’n’roll, or another human being, two completely normal people can love each other with a legendary fire and it’s no more ridiculous than two dudes pushing 30 years old from Vancouver called Japandroids making a rock record for the ages.” — Great, great, great point from Ian Cohen in his review of Japandroids’ Celebration Rock, which is streaming free all week. Everyone loves an underdog, and these guys were further under than most. That they emerged with such an exhilarating, life-affirming album is truly a thing to be celebrated.
The other day on my blog I had a strange occurrence. Something I had posted got popular in a hurry, and within a day or so I reached a milestone that, for a humble indie music writer, seemed far outside my grasp. Four years on Tumblr and it happened in a single day: 1,000 notes.
1,061, to be precise, as of this writing. Fameballs like these have a longer shelf life than the average Dashboard squib. I posted a GIF of Thom Yorke a year ago that still occasionally gets reblogged. And all of this, of course, is quite fun. Red hearts and reblogs are the twin engines of Tumblr addiction, and it’s almost impossible to post to the Dashboard and not check back a few hours moments seconds later to see whether anyone liked your work. And so to see notes in the four digits is a kind of triumph — a useful reminder that Tumblr is a broadcast platform, and that on any given day your posts here could be seen by a huge global audience.
The thing about this particular triumph, though, is that it felt kind of hollow. As with the handful of images I’ve posted that scored notes by the hundreds, I didn’t make it myself. I didn’t even add an editorial comment. A friend of mine had shared it on Facebook, and I thought it was cute. I hesitated for a moment about whether to share it, because — if I can confide in you — I’m not a big Beastie Boys fan. But the drawing was whimsical, seemed to capture a moment, and I thought people might like it. Right click-copy-paste to desktop-upload-publish; the whole process took five seconds. 1,061 notes.
In a way it can haunt you: this is what Tumblr wants from me? This is the thing of mine worth sharing? The thing I had nothing to do with? The first time a post of mine scored several hundred notes — a post that, again, I added nothing of value to — I didn’t post again for days. It was, if not depressing, disorienting.
Because it’s hard not to think, at a moment like that, of the Saturday afternoon you decided to stay inside and hammer out an earnest commentary on some musical subject, only to find after you posted it that your thoughts resonated with at best three or four other people. Sometimes when that has happened to me I’ve wished wish there was a secondary, recursive heart you could click on the Dashboard, a way of saying thank you for noticing, thank you for making me feel like this matters just a little. When I post a song and see that among hundreds of followers, just 30 went ahead and clicked “play,” I want to identify those 30 people and send them a care package. This is our lives on the Dashboard.
How to get a thousand notes? By posting something other than porn? Here’s one way. Identify a recently deceased celebrity, one who reminds you of a younger self. Find an image that pays tribute to that celebrity, and your nostalgia, simultaneously. Post it within a few minutes of learning the celebrity has passed away. Watch the notes roll in.
That’s one way of doing it, anyway. Another is to regularly remind yourself, as Jamieson did on Twitter the other day, that it’s not about the notes. Post about the subjects that interest you and, over time, you’re likely to find the best audience for whatever it is you’re writing about. A wonderful aspect of Tumblr’s indie music-writing community — the one Jamieson himself is giving shape to, through his current podcast series — is how we’re all using Tumblr in ways it wasn’t really meant to be used. Which is to say: ways that are hostile to notes.
Long, tough text posts. Threaded conversations made ugly by the way quotes look when reblogged. And opinions, always opinions, even and especially when the writer knew no notes would be forthcoming. To me this is the animating spirit of the place — this weird corner of the Internet, where the precious few people on earth who care enough about music that they try to explain why can find the precious few others willing to listen.
Notes come and go, or they never come at all. But when you go to take the measure of your own work, my guess is that you wouldn’t simply sort your posts by the number of notes they received. Tumblr is about the smaller victories — the idol who followed you back, the single red heart from the person whose work you admire, even the thing that no one loved but you. If you like everything you post, you’ve won. And so I tell myself: Put your heart into a post, and quit worrying how many hearts you get out of it.
FYI.
I’ll have much more to say about this soon, but in the meantime: Heaven is glorious, and may be the Walkmen’s best record from start to finish. Make some time for it today if you haven’t already.
(Source: pat-attack)
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maura asked: "People who read lots about music for the most part want to hear great music that they haven’t heard before..." But the thing is, there aren't enough "people who read lots about music" out there to create a market that will sustain itself. And if there's one thing I've learned from looking at music-site traffic numbers for nearly six years, it's that most people are, in fact, not curious about new music at all.
I totally agree that “people who read lots about music” can’t sustain a market by themselves. My point was that sites tend to overrate the value of music news. When I started reading Pitchfork, the AV Club and Stereogum a decade ago, it was because I wanted to discover new music and get guidance on what to listen to. I was not looking for tour dates for the Hives. And yet you read most music sites these days and it’s an endless torrent of tour dates for the Hives, and watch the Hives play Live With Regis and Kelly, and the Hives are heading back into the studio to record LP7. And you are fine to report all that stuff, but the only thing it’s going to get you are cheap pageviews that matter less and less to the advertisers that are paying your bills.
And while it may be true that a majority of people aren’t interested in new music, it’s also true that Pitchfork, Rolling Stone and a couple of others have built real businesses in serving those who do. And to me it seems telling that Pitchfork became the most influential music publication of its generation without doing any number of things it could have done to inflate traffic: breaking up reviews into multiple “pages,” posting photo slideshows, adding comments to the bottom of every review. They built a site that they themselves would like to read, and as a reader I could not be more grateful for it. I’m not alone: Stereogum has 100,000 followers on Twitter, and Pitchfork has 1.9 million.
From British artist Jon Burgerman. Find more of his work at www.jonburgerman.com.