You gotta fight, for your right, to have websites

[circuitbored]

I've spent years on social media as a musician and comedian posting my work and deep thoughts into the ether. Through it I've connected at times with many, and even been booked for events and interviews, posting on social apps in many ways has mostly felt like building sand castles for me rather than building a brick house.

I can't help imagining what it would be like for respectable artists like Prince & Michael Jackson or a comedian like Dave Chapelle to rise to notoriety from scratch in the current era of social media, and it worries me greatly about how art and success is deeply controlled now by tech leadership, behind the scenes, now more than ever. I think it would be unlikely for serious musicians and artists these days to gain ground into public awareness now more than ever because of all of the social media dynamics and deep costs involved in just having our artwork heard and noticed. There is also a huge deficit in attention to the arts being experienced now as a result of a constant barrage of content of varying quality interlaced with marketing, both obvious and subtle, pelting us daily on many fronts; TV, radio, and especially on social media.

We have to realize a valuable and time saving truth about social apps. Only a few personalities at a time trend. More and more, a lot of those names trend most of the time on social media as well, so much so that even content creators are beginning to post mostly about trending topics and names just to stay relevant... Mr. Beast trends on YouTube, Bela Porch trends on TikTok, Elon trends on his own app Twitter -- These are all examples of how large platforms turn into fixed TV shows, as the only opportunity for non-celebrities becomes to talk about celebrities, or pay lots of money to break through the glass ceiling for moments at a time. Whoever dominates the front page stories on a social site is often most popular by nature, because they're the first posts anyone can click on. We've even gotten to the point where a select group of posters that people haven't even chosen to follow show up for everyone even when they aren't being followed too... That highlights that large-scale social sites really aren't the same nor equal as they were intended to be.

Prince & Dave are not social media influencers that switch from making music to selling items on TikTok Shop and then catapulting into a reality television show... It would be fascinating to see how some of the most talented artists use social media, but very unlikely to do so because a lot of the most popular people we see online now have outsourced social media management now... It's tedious and overburdening to manage social media even to people like me who only have a handful of followers, while the returns are very minute in most cases for people who don't cheat and break rules and risk getting banned on those same services.

Internet advertising is a bustling industry... If we're old enough to know how commercials went from a maximum of three x 3 minute commercial spots (max) on television and radio back in the 80s to fifteen x 3 minute commercials now on breaks, it's pretty easy to tell that the revenue is the very basis of TV channels. Marketing even crept into TV shows and movies heavily in the 90s, where an actor sitting on their porch drinking a Pepsi was not just done fore nostalgic or emotional impact. The most ironic part is that marketing costs for consumer products and services are baked into the price of pretty much everything we buy as consumers, so the more marketing is leveraged, the more things we buy naturally cost... Social Media, a relatively new invention historically introduced a new facet for marketing, as it eased from being a free service into a "pay for visibility" tool that almost everyone and anyone that wants to build a career pretty much must use now to build a name for themselves online.

I realized that after years of running this site without ads, purely funded as an out of pocket venture, that I've never thought about firewalling it with log-ins nor promoting anything. This site gets a lot of traffic... I mean a lot usually, and I have even gotten offers for the brand that would make the average person's head spin, but I've kept this site and posted to it for many years because it's special. It works a lot harder and better than social media in getting my ideas out to people, and also serves as a service that doesn't ask me to pay to boost each post I make.

There is something to be said about the value of the real/regular Internet, outside of all the social media apps... In an era where we're constantly being up-sold to pay money for each controlled ounce of opportunity, it's easy to see how the era of running our own sites was far better. With one web site, an artist can better manage their look & image, they can also see meaningful statistics on who is discovering them, they can also choose to upload more than just audio & video clips of their work, and there's a lot less sitting through and buying your own ads.

In my time on social media, I've found that still maintaining my own web sites has likely reached a lot more people than the social media accounts I run. I hope we can continue to protect those individual rights and spend more time working on our own social apps and web sites more. All of the frustrating nights up troubleshooting code errors after friends ask "why the site isn't up?", hours spent on tech support calls with hosting companies, and ages spent writing posts like this all seem to be far less taxing and more worthwhile than figuring out why none of my posts on Instagram get more than 40 views when I added all the correct hash tags.

Our right to own domains and to run our own information sites should be protected now more than ever as the stranglehold on public attention and visibility of large corporate media sites grow because it's one of the few things left that we can control and post our work on in our own format, without being sandwiched between videos of cat memes, police chase videos, and sponsored influencers selling makeup tips all vying to steal attention away from our creative work.

Moe @RUFFANDTUFF
Our Sound Is Unlike Anything Else. We Strive To Be Original.
We Work With and Publish Unique Artists That Go Against the Grain.

FOLLOW US ON:

SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/artist/1PNp925Bg8dCTiIzxY4NVc
https://open.spotify.com/artist/213dCOTf6hXx3Lqc5wE6U5
META THREADS @RUFFANDTUFFRECORDINGS
TWITTER @RUFFANDTUFF
IG @RUFFANDTUFFRECORDINGS
TIKTOK @RUFFANDTUFFRECORDINGS
YOUTUBE @RUFFANDTUFFRECORDINGS
FACEBOOK @RUFFANDTUFFRECORDINGS
BUSINESS: RUFFANDTUFFRECORDINGS@GMAIL.COM