Music Discourse Has Migrated to Instagram
With social media posts promoting content often attracting more attention than the content itself, what is the "real" work of a modern-day music journalist?
Before we get started, a quick scheduling update. First Floor usually publishes long-form pieces on Tuesdays and the free digest (i.e. the round-up of news, recommendations, etc.) on Thursdays, but due to some travel plans, things have shifted slightly this week and next. The essay below is going to be this week’s only piece, and it will be followed by a digest on Tuesday, June 24. First Floor’s normal, two-items-per-week publishing schedule will then resume the following Tuesday, July 1. Apologies for the disruption!
“I read your article.”
As a longtime music writer, I’ve heard some variation of that statement countless times over the course of my career. (I don’t say that with any sort of ego or braggadocio; if you write enough things for a long enough time, some of them are eventually going to land in front of people’s eyeballs.) In recent months, however, there’s been a noticeable—and rather unexpected—uptick in this sort of feedback, to an unexpected degree. Although First Floor has been growing lately, there’s been no exponential increase in the numbers, and in an era when it’s generally agreed (and often lamented) that audiences simply aren’t reading as much as they used to, it did at first seem odd that I was suddenly hearing from so many more people, many of whom were seemingly new to the newsletter.
Despite that confusion, I can’t say I wasn’t happy about the extra attention, and whether someone had pulled me aside at a show or written me an email, I did my best to thoughtfully engage. Yet as these exchanges multiplied, and I dug a little deeper into exactly what these folks were responding to, I started to realize something:
A good number of these people hadn’t actually read one of my articles, and were in fact reaching out after having come across one of First Floor’s Instagram posts. Sure, some of them had eventually clicked the proverbial “link in bio”and found a complete piece, but plenty more hadn’t. On a platform that’s purposely been designed to maximize engagement and make leaving as cumbersome as possible, it seems that an exceedingly large number of users are perfectly happy to stay where they are and simply keep on scrolling.
This isn’t a First Floor-specific phenomenon. Media outlets, themselves desperate to boost engagement by any means necessary, have definitely taken notice, which is why many of them have moved beyond merely chasing clicks, opting instead for a strategy of “meeting people where they are.” Writers, for better or (usually) worse, have also been caught up in that shift. While the website formerly known as Twitter used to be the main hub where music journalists would share their work, the steady 4chanification of that platform has completely upended the status quo, sending many scribes scrambling for greener pastures.
For some journalists, those pastures are places like Bluesky and Mastadon, but given the general public’s reluctance to adopt yet another new social media platform, it seems like most music writers have made Instagram their designated landing spot. It’s an understandable choice—and the one that most closely follows the aforementioned “meeting people where they are” strategy—but given the platform’s prioritization of images and short-form video content, it’s not the most natural home for the written word, let alone the touting of long reads. At times, the fit is downright awkward, as journalists have now found themselves in the unusual position of condensing and reconfiguring their “real” work (i.e. the presumably detailed and well thought-out articles they’ve written) into bite-sized, algorithm-friendly snippets that they hope will grab people’s attention within the context of a snappy carousel post.