“The crux: social media has exposed us to more than we would ever know about without it, but at the expense of not really getting to know any of it. We are — thanks the spin of Earth — limited to twenty-four hours each day. The more things we have to pay attention to, the less time we can spend on each one. If you follow only a few people on Twitter, you see everything they post, you can learn about them, their interests, their personalities; when you follow 1,000 people, do you really follow anyone anymore?
As all content moves to social media, so has music, and it represents an acceleration in the evolution of the way that people consume music that is harmful for musicians.
Anyone today can create a song and broadcast it to the world. So naturally there are many more “artists” than there used to be. These artists all compete with each other, but they also compete with all of the other interesting stuff being shared on our primary consumption channels in addition to music, which taken together significantly decreases the chances that a fan will make a connection to an artist that is more than eardrum deep, even if — thanks to these same platforms — artists are technically getting heard by more and more people.
Is the trend reversible? Maybe not with the social networks as they are. The overflow of information that comes pouring into our feeds is always about what’s happening right now, and yet it takes our attention away from what we were concentrating on. The very thing that was designed to help us connect to things is new ways is stripping away our very ability to connect meaningfully with any of it.
The counter trend has already begun to rear its head: people who are passionate about certain interests — and by passionate I mean obsessive, not just passive people who say “why not?” when asked if they are into something — are finding refuge among the thousands of topic-specific social networks that are budding around the world today. The passionate people are separating the things they care about from their general social noise. They are finding more satisfaction from connecting to a community of like-minded people, no matter where they are in the world, than trying to push their interests to their physical contacts who couldn’t care less.”
