Category: Internet

Deadspin Writers Are Back for the Super Bowl

So Dashlane asked the former writers from Deadspin to write a blog for Super Bowl Weekend.

But wait, a BLOG?!?! IN 2020?

I think we’ve had over 1,000 comments now on the site. It wasn’t supposed to go live until today, but then it got leaked last night. And after that happened, our traffic spiked so much that we had to get upgraded on WordPress to a dedicated server just so that it wouldn’t crash today.

Tom Ley, founder, CEO, and publisher of Big Cool Tom Media LLC

Just remember – all those social media posts are pointing to WEBSITES. Buy tickets, pre-order an album, read an interview, watch a video – they’re all on websites, and websites are still plenty relevant in 2020.

Social media posts come and go, QUICK. But the web sticks around forever.

And it’s just the CONTEXT of the web. When you’re scrolling on your phone it’s usually to kill some time, or unwind, zone out. Not saying these things don’t have happen when you’re sitting in front of your laptop, but serious work happens on the computer; coding, producing, editing, researching.

The Unending Scroll

Well, if this doesn’t hit between the eyes…

Each night I lay in my bed beside my boyfriend with one eye closed against the pillow, the other eye open, and wheeled down Instagram’s infinite scroll. Each morning I woke up to my phone alarm and rolled over to tap it off and, if I had time, looked at Instagram half-asleep. I easily spent an hour on it a day — in bed, on the subway, or at my desk during lunch. Compared with the hours I spent elsewhere on the internet, it felt like nothing.

DAYNA TORTORICI

Catching myself more often, though, asking myself “why?” What am I gaining? Am I learning? Growing?

It’s far easier to pass the time on Instagram that it is to write (like this), or to create music, or do 20 minutes of stretching.

Mind you I found my run coach via Instagram. I find inspiring quotes from runner friends, which gets me out the door some mornings.

It’s just wild how Instagram has become my routine, my habit, my ritual. And not just for me, for so many others, too.

Growing Things

Last year I rebooted Metal Bandcamp Gift Club. Started in 2016, it fizzled quite a bit, and by 2019, it was running on fumes.

In October, I shook the dust off, kicked the tires, and got things rolling again. While the initial idea was formed and grew quite well on Twitter, I chose to move things to an email list.

Sure, the Metal Bandcamp Gift Club Twitter account has over 500 followers, but I know every time I send out a Tweet, not everyone sees it.

My last birthday Tweet had 712 impressions and 7 link clicks. That’s a 0.9% click rate.
My last email went out to 67 subscribers and got 6 clicks. That’s a 8.9% click rate.

Think of the work I have to put into growing my audience on Twitter. If I have 1,000 followers then what? Maybe 14 clicks?

But I’ve grown the Metal Bandcamp Gift Club email list from nothing to 71 subscribers in just three months.

It’s the Seth Godin idea; people like us sign up for newsletters like this.

Not everyone wants to get an email with a link to an absolute stranger’s wishlist when it’s their birthday, and that’s okay. This isn’t for “everyone,” this is for a handful of people who understand the power of surprising and delighting people they don’t know with music on their birthday.

And right now, and into 2020 and beyond, I believe that the audience who gets what you do, who knows what you’re about, they’re going to subscribe to your thing because not subscribing is missing out, so yes, you are that special, and you absolutely matter.

While you can continue to build on social media, make sure you’re building your email list along the way. When (not if) those sites shut down, you won’t be able to export any of those fans, followers, or subscribers.

Don’t Look Back

Start today and tell a friend about a band you like.
Go to a show and get there early to watch the opener.
Click around YouTube and Vimeo for some good music videos, and share them with your friends.

A decade ago you made a blog and hoped people read it.

Now we’re all our own media outlets, so choose your programming as such.

Free Williamsburg Closing Up Shop

Founded in the late 90s on Geocities, Free Williamsburg has been through a lot. The internet, and this whole “BLOG THING” held lots of promise, but it’s hard to compete when so many eyeballs are diverted to the slot-machine allure of social media.

 A good chunk of this happened before a little old thing called social media even existed. Before Instagram, you’d go to photo sites like The Cobrasnake or Last Night’s Party, or to countless blogs like ours, to see what the cool kids were up to. Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok just weren’t a thing. Today, they’re definitely a thing. And as FREE Williamsburg has turned fifteen… eighteen… twenty… we persisted (we’re stubborn) while the cultural currency that used to be defined by websites like this one shifted to social media and corporate-backed publications.

We Had a Good Run…

I wouldn’t say my music blog of the 2000s (Buzzgrinder) had a tenth of the pull and cool vibes that Free Williamsburg held, but we were sort of in the same zip code for awhile. Literally. I lived in Brooklyn from 2005-2010, and got to my share of shows in the area, and met up with people in Williamsburg because of my music blog thing.

A shame, too. Most all of content we talk about, link to, and share on social media is from a website. The interviews, the music videos, the big articles – they all sit on a .com somewhere, which you access via a URL.

The problem is sites like Free Williamsburg compete with a zillion other sites who are publishing 80 articles a day, and have cash on hand (or rather, funding…) to promote their posts.

Hard to cut through the noise when the noise of promoted posts and harrowing click bait articles rule the social-world, but Free Williamsburg had a spectacular run.

Streaming Problems

Sorry / not sorry for pulling a majority of recent content from my social media feed:

For the streaming apologists out there, when a music industry heavyweight like (Jimmy) Iovine says the problem with streaming is that they’re ALREADY PAYING TOO MUCH for music — maybe it’s time to admit there’s a fundamental and systemic problem with the model.

Sean Cannon

Music licensing fees ain’t gonna get cheaper, and exec salaries are just going to keep going up, so yeah… not sure how this premium buffet of all you can consume music for $10/mo is going to continue.

Re: my “sorry / not sorry” from above – my pal Sean posted that Tweet on the 7th, and it’s already lost in a sea of a jillion more tweets, pics, and videos. I’m bummed that so many thoughts and good ideas and great stuff gets lost in the ether, so posts like this are just one way I try to hold onto them.

https://twitter.com/ChuckWendig/status/1212410671238975488

I spend way too much time on Instagram, and I see people devote LOTS of time into IG Stories – content that disappears in 24 hours. Some of these stories are packed with useful information, and only if you happen upon it within those 24 hours will you even see it. Then it’s gone (yeah, I know these stories can be saved as Highlights, but still).

Instagram, Twitter, all of ’em – they won’t be around forever. And sure, “but no one reads blogs anymore.” No one reads your Instagram posts, either, unless you pay to promote them to your audience (that you built).

Put that shit on your own blog, your own site. When (not if) these social media sites shit the bed, you’ll still have a place for your audience to find you.

More Blogging in 2019

I wrote 73 posts here on this blog in 2019, which is 73 times I didn’t publish something on social media. The 73 posts are here for whenever you find them, on your own time. They don’t compete with “influencers” or “trolls,” this is my space, where it’s just all me, with zero distractions, or notifications.

Today it feels like we’ll never go back to the way it was, when people read blogs. But I think we will. I don’t think the ever quickening pace of media publishing and consumption is sustainable. Heck, I remember in 2009 publishing 20+ times a day at AOL Music, because that was 20+ times a day we got to post to social media.

“HEY LOOK! SOMETHING NEW!”

But now, a decade later, it’s not just one site publishing 20 times a day, it’s 3,000 people on social media posting 20 times an hour – opinions on movies and music and politics and lunch spots and workouts.

Everyone is a Kardasian now. Animals have their own social media accounts.

That’s why I think it can return to the slow and steady blog world, when we realize we don’t need to consume 1000s of bits of content every day to feel full. Open up our bookmarks, or type a URL into the address bar, read a few sites and then go read a book, knit a sweater, or maybe cook a good meal.

Low Tech Works

Did you know there’s a whole underground pirate radio network that’s delivered via… conference call?

The shows weren’t the traditional kinds you’d find by tuning to an AM or FM band; they were operated independently from media companies by ordinary Hmong citizens, aired live all-day, every day and were free to call into for as long as you’d like. They used free conference call software to do it, a network that is still in place to this day.

Dial Up! How the Hmong diaspora uses the  world’s most boring technology to  make something weird and wonderful

(via Ben Werdmuller)