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?

“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.