Music for a Hollow Web

Before we start talking about Bluesky for bands (as we mentioned in this blog post), we wanted to share a few things that we believe might help you understand why the internet is the way it is right now. And, why do we think it's important to talk about this? Because online communication has become the foundation of the society we currently live in and without it or without a plan B, the chaos that could break out may have very real and very physical consequences.

Not long ago, when you released an album you posted something on social media, maybe got featured in some magazine if you were lucky and people would react if the music resonated. That was back when you could still see your cousin's beach photos, your friend playing guitar and maybe an occasional Thomann ad.

Now? How to describe it… Well, it’s like the internet is going to hell, for example.

If you take a look around Reddit, in threads like r/Instagram, r/Facebook, or r/Socialmedia, you’ll see it’s not an isolated thing, not a shadowban on your account for using the wrong words (we’ll talk about censorship another time). On Reddit and other forums, there are thousands of posts of people saying the same thing over and over. (“My engagement dropped,” “My account got hacked,” “I went from thousands of plays to ten,” etc.) That’s why it’s worth checking forums now and then when you feel that there is something weird going on, to see if it’s just you or if there is something weird actually going on.

And what do the official media say about this? Well, when this weird thing started happening, the media didn’t say anything specific, maybe because they were too afraid of being canceled or losing reach or something like that, you know, not biting the hand that feeds. We’re no longer just a few tech nerds commenting on it no, imagine how bad things must be to have more and more big media talking about how the internet situation is way past just “weird”.

Articles on their own may not seem like much, but once you read a few and combine them with people venting on forums, you start feeling that yeah, there’s a serious structural problem. These are some of the symptoms being loudly whispered out there.

On one hand, Meta is flooding Facebook and Instagram with AI-generated accounts. For example, this video from The Damage Report explains it using official data from the company itself. They give the data, but I imagine most of you have already noticed the increase in AI-generated posts, bots everywhere, empty clicks, weird comments from accounts named something like @nana2542… etc.

On the other hand, it seems the algorithm no longer shows your content because it prefers AI content, and it is not just on Meta. In the article "The fight for authenticity in advertising as AI bots take over social media" Okoone calls this “AI slop,” and it ends up pushing out everything authentic, including your music. If someone has to scroll past twenty fake posts before getting to your song, they’re probably going to get lost along the way. Lovely.

This are just some examples, there are more. And this doesn’t just affect musicians, it also hits media, labels and radios that used to help spread music. If real audiences aren’t interacting because they don’t see the content or they’re overwhelmed by slop, those media lose their reach. It’s a domino effect that starts with the platforms and ends up affecting the whole chain. Your band could be featured in 40 publications but if people don’t see it, then what? We’re tired of seeing events that don’t sell out because people didn’t find out, releases that no one hears because no one saw them, magazine posts that reach almost no one… the list goes on.

So most people think about paying for promotion, but not only is it unsustainable to pay for every post, the blue checkmark “because it improves your visibility,” the PR, Spotify campaigns… paying for everything doesn’t even guarantee anything anymore.

For instance, this article in Forbes "Is Social Media Trust Eroding? Bots And Deepfakes Are Creating A Digital Wildfire" says that up to 40% of internet traffic might already not be human.

But despite all this evidence, what’s still the dominant narrative? That if we don’t have the numbers it’s because we’re not posting enough, because we’re not good enough, that we have to be active all the time, that we’re not trying hard enough. “Diversify,” say the social media gurus, “10 ways to hack the algorithm,” “How I went viral”… Whatever. They can say what they want, but numbers are numbers and facts are facts. And no, we can’t compete with robots.

So, what’s the business model here? You create the content, you pay for people to see it, the bots see the content, you train them with your content so they can learn to replicate it (we’ll talk about the copyright mess another time), the algorithm gives bots more visibility and takes it away from humans, so you have to create more content, because you’re told that’s what you have to do, and pay to have it seen… and so on forever.

So yeah, you could say we feel this whole situation is precisely about that, feeding monsters.

More and more platforms are openly saying they’re going to feed their AI´s with your stuff, and it’s curious, but the general public seems unaware (Could it be because they don’t talk about it on TV?) From Adobe to Pinterest and now even WeTransfer. Some give you the option to opt out and others flat out tell you “if you don’t like it, delete the app.” For example, Meta offers an opt-out in the EU, but it’s not clear how to do it or if it even works. Try searching for the name of any app plus “AI training” and see what comes up.

Crazy thought, what if this was always about harvesting data? What if that false sense of fame was just a mechanism to hook us with dopamine and harvest us? What if nothing’s really changing because it was always meant to be this way? Anyway, you know we’re really into sci-fi...

The point is, even though the mainstream seems to think everything is fine in this absurd situation where people are judged by numbers in a rigged system, logically, some people are starting to get tired.

According to this entry by The Guardian, a study by the British Standards Institution reveals that almost half (46%) of young people between 16 and 21 would prefer to live in a world without the internet. And this other one from Newsweek says something similar. And not just younger people, everyone seems overwhelmed and the way platforms behave only makes it worse. Social media isn’t social anymore.

All this points to something deeper than just the drop in reach on networks. What we imagine (and we’re not the only ones) is that the internet as we know it will be a completely fragmented universe in 5 years. An archipelago of communities with shared interests, and that doesn’t have to be a bad thing, just different. But now we need to start letting go of “virality” and those dopamine-driven things that have kept us hooked these past years, because these new worlds work differently.

For those who still want to stay online, one of those new worlds is Bluesky, the platform we want to talk to you about today.

(Important! No one sponsors us and we don’t make a cent from talking about Bluesky. We just want to share alternatives that might help in this chaos that is currently the internet for musicians.)

Bluesky was created by Jack Dorsey, co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, as an attempt to rethink how social networks should work on the internet. The original idea was to develop an open and decentralized protocol that would allow platforms to be built where users had more control over their experience, data, and communities becoming a social network built on the AT Protocol, which prioritizes transparency and interoperability.

For now, Bluesky seems like a pretty ethical space. There are no algorithms designed to manipulate behavior, no personalized ads. The focus is on giving users real autonomy, with options to decide how their content is moderated and what kind of feed they want to see.

How does it work and why do we like it?

You can use starter packs so you don’t have to start from scratch. These are themed lists of curated accounts made by other users, and there’s a bit of everything (music media, bands, indie radios, labels, etc.).

Bluesky lets you subscribe to personalized feeds created by other users (or by yourself). You can follow a feed with only bands, or only music media, or only posts in your language. It’s like having your own custom timeline, without anyone rearranging it for you.

Something great and important is that hashtags are the main way of discovery and organization on Bluesky. There’s no algorithm picking content for you, so if you want someone to find you, you just need to use the right tags. You can also create personalized feeds that collect posts based on hashtags. You can apply filters, block words or types of content, mute accounts… etc.

Bluesky doesn’t punish you for not posting every day. Post when you have something to say (a show date, a new song, a rehearsal room pic, or whatever you want, but not just to “maintain reach”). The format is very similar to Twitter but more relaxed. There’s less showing off and more conversation here.

Here’s a pretty decent Bluesky tutorial video to get started, in case you want to check it out.

Anyway, we know Bluesky isn’t a panacea, but it is a space where a band could build community and talk without having to behave as influencers. And we also know that right now the music community on Bluesky is still small compared to other networks, but if no one joins, it’ll never grow.

We’re already there and we encourage you to give it a try. Also, dig into everything you can about the current AI situation, how it’s being trained and how this might affect how we communicate, learn and relate to each other in general.

We’d like to add a final thought. We feel that the whole “AI is inevitable” narrative works great for those creating it, because it helps ensure minimal resistance and there’s a big investment to capitalize but, like any other technology, it can be regulated. And like anything potentially dangerous, it must be subject to safety rules. AI will be what humans want it to be, because it is a human creation trained on human data.

Any way, in future blog posts, we’ll talk about what we know so far about the Fediverse (another part of the new digital “archipelago”), what it is, how it works and which platforms are emerging in that ecosystem among other stuff.

And in the meantime, don´t forget to Dream, Create, Rebel.