The Fracturing of the Music Internet

Music's online ecosystem is splintering into three distinct tiers, but it's not clear that any of them will be a reliable source for quality information.

For decades, talk of the internet was dominated by techno-optimism. Touted as an “information superhighway,” the web was supposed to be a democratizing, unifying force, a “digital town square” in which gatekeepers would be powerless, information would be plentiful and connections could easily be forged with people around the globe.

Some of those things came true. The average person now has access to more information than ever before, and many gatekeepers of old, particularly those in the traditional media, have indeed been slain. And thanks to social media, literal strangers from different corners of the planet, who almost certainly wouldn’t have crossed paths otherwise, can now link up online—or at the very least engage with one another’s content.

There are benefits to these things—many of them involve conveniences that have become so ubiquitous that we now largely take them for granted. Yet the internet these days is rarely spoken about in glowingly optimistic terms. While few people would seriously advocate for a return to offline existence, it’s clear that the mood has shifted, the bad vibes fueled not only by the fact that democracy now appears to be in active decline, but because sizable pockets of the populace are actively rooting for its demise online. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Content may be plentiful, but the context needed to decipher and interpret, let alone challenge, that content is disappearing, right along with the gatekeepers that tech enthusiasts have spent years telling the public to despise.

Those gatekeepers have been replaced, of course, but not by knowledgeable figures or the collective wisdom of the masses. The platforms and their algorithms now direct the discourse, and they’re determined to steer audiences not towards wisdom, quality and nuance, but sensationalism, outrage, vapidity and whatever else prompts our lizard brains to repeatedly smash the dopamine button. Maximizing engagement is their primary goal, and in an online environment that incentivizes extremism and feeds people a steady diet of exactly what they want—or, more accurately, whatever will hold their attention—it’s no wonder polarization and radicalization are higher than they’ve been in decades.

The internet has indeed been a unifying force. But rather than uniting people around notions of tolerance, empathy and understanding, online existence has shuttled them into a shared digital hellscape, a sort of modern-day Colosseum where the masses are presented with a seemingly endless parade of cruelty and superficial pageantry. Over time, much of the public has grown weary and bored of these offerings, but in a world where leaving that Colosseum (i.e. logging off) often feels all but impossible, those in charge of the entertainment have generally sought to appease their captive audiences by steadily ramping up the spectacle.

Although the portion of the internet devoted to music is far from being the web’s most crucial sector, it too has been affected by these changes. In the platform era, the music internet has largely been reduced into a one-size-fits-all proposition, a flattened space in which the biggest pop stars and the most experimental weirdos are forced to play by the same rules and compete for the attention of audiences made numb by algorithms and content overload. The modern-day music discourse, or what passes for it these days, mostly unfolds on social media, and while a number of familiar publications have managed to stay afloat, their power to set the cultural agenda has been severely diminished. Artists, labels, promoters and other industry figures no longer have to go to journalists to communicate with the public; they go straight to the masses via social media.

In a telling sign of just how much the landscape has changed, the professional music press now devotes much of its editorial capacity to simply reporting on (and reacting to) whatever conversations are happening online, which now routinely unfold without the media’s direct involvement. As depressing as it is to think of music journalists presenting a cobbled-together summary of tweets and Instagram stories as “news,” it’s a smart tactical maneuver—especially when their reporting is quick enough for the resulting story to get an algorithmic boost in the middle of an online scrum. Over an extended timeline, however, this approach has eroded not just the perceived utility of these platforms, but readers’ confidence in them.

For more casual readers (i.e. most of the music audience), that’s not necessarily a problem, as they’re content to passively scroll through whatever content is filtered through their feeds. But not everyone is willing to throw up their hands and declare fealty to the algorithm just yet. Music journalists and media outlets have already spent years sounding the alarm about their crumbling profession, and while that hasn’t stopped massive layoffs or prevented multiple publications from going belly up, their struggle has made it clear that whatever press that does hope to survive will likely need to embrace some sort of substantial strategic shift.

Additional resistance is also coming from a small—but not insignificant—segment of the music-loving public. Uninterested in social media antics and uninspired by the current output of the traditional music press, they crave something more substantial, and are willing to devote extra time and / or money to get it. Call them superfans or folks who just really care a lot about music, but they’re gravitating towards new ecosystems, ones that still exist online, but expressly aren’t designed to appeal to as many people as possible. And as disenchantment with the online status quo grows, their numbers are growing.

As much as online platforms continue to hem in music culture at large, there are numerous cracks in its foundation. And as more actors seek another way forward, either for their own entertainment or for their very survival in the culture, a new, multi-tiered music internet is beginning to take shape.

This assertion is not a new one, and I must admit that my thoughts on the matter have recently been heavily influenced by Spanish writer Frankie Pizá, who’s discussed the topic both in his newsletter and the Pizá i Fontanals podcast. (The most recent episode, which focused on the potential effects of AI on music culture, specifically referenced the fracturing of the online experience.) Yet while Pizá and many other cultural observers have predicted that the internet will essentially split in two, with free slop for the masses and paid-for quality content for those who can afford it, I’d like to advance an alternate theory:

The music internet is already dividing into three distinct tiers, and while that represents a more diverse online ecosystem, it’s still a long way from being healthy.