THE SOCIAL MEDIA PROBLEM

I fucking hate social media.

There. I said it.

And yes, there’s a pretty good chance I’m going to post a link to this blog on social media.

That’s the problem.

Being an independent artist today seems to come with an unwritten requirement that you also become a content creator, advertiser, social media manager, videographer, marketing department and—God forbid—an influencer.

I don’t want to be an influencer.

I want to make music.

And somehow I’ve found myself trapped inside the exact machine I can’t stand.

Are Any of You Real?

Let’s start with the bots.

Holy shit, the bots.

They have been a constant plague on my artist accounts. Fake followers arrive in waves with strange usernames, suspiciously similar profiles and absolutely no intention of ever listening to anything I’ve created.

I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time fighting them.

I’ve blocked them. Removed them. Reported them. I finally managed to slow a lot of it down using keyword protocols and filters.

They still come.

And beyond simply being annoying, they’ve created another problem:

I don’t know what my numbers mean anymore.

I have followers.

Great.

How many are real?

How many actually listen to my music?

How many followed because they heard something and genuinely wanted to hear what I made next?

I don’t know.

And I hate having an inflated follower count because it doesn’t make me feel successful. It makes the whole thing feel fake.

A thousand bots aren’t an audience.

They’re a number.

I’d rather have fifty actual people listening than five thousand accounts that aren’t really there.

Apparently Musicians Are Content Creators Now

I didn’t get into social media because I wanted attention.

I got sucked into it because being an artist made it feel necessary.

Release a song and almost every piece of independent music marketing advice eventually starts sounding the same:

Post more.

Make Reels.

Make short-form videos.

Hook people immediately.

Keep it short.

Post consistently.

Stay visible.

Feed the algorithm.

I hate it.

I don’t want to spend my time chopping everything I create into tiny pieces designed around modern society’s increasingly short attention span.

I want to make a fucking music video.

A real one.

I want to come up with an idea, build a world around a song, find interesting locations, shoot something strange, edit it together and create something that actually belongs with the music.

That’s exciting to me.

Making another disposable fifteen-second clip because some algorithm has decided I haven’t posted enough this week isn’t.

At some point, being an independent musician quietly became being a musician plus a full-time promotional apparatus for the fact that you’re a musician.

And somewhere along the way, I started doing exactly what I hate.

I’m Part of the Problem

This is where I have to turn the criticism back on myself.

Because I spend money advertising my music.

Probably more than I should.

I promote releases. I run ads. I watch the numbers. I try different strategies. I look at engagement. I wonder why one thing worked and another didn’t.

And after all of that?

I have no fucking idea if any of it is actually working.

That’s frustrating because advertising is one of the things I hate most about social media.

I open Facebook on my personal account and the Home tab barely feels like it’s about my friends anymore.

It’s ads.

Suggested posts.

Companies.

Products.

Sponsored content.

People and businesses I never asked to follow.

Everybody wants something from me.

Everybody wants my attention.

Everybody wants to sell me something.

Then I close Facebook, switch over to Prophets of the Cosmic Darkness and give them money so I can put my own advertisement into somebody else’s feed.

The irony isn’t lost on me.

I’ve become part of the exact ecosystem that annoys the shit out of me.

I suppose there is one distinction that makes me feel slightly better about it.

I’m not really asking you to buy anything.

I’m asking you to listen.

Listening to one of my songs is free. I’m not trying to convince you that you desperately need some product I’m selling. I’m not building a lifestyle brand.

Hell, I can barely sell a shirt unless somebody in my family buys one.

I just want somebody to hear the music.

But an advertisement is still an advertisement.

I’m still competing for your attention.

I’m still feeding the machine.

And I’m still giving money to something I dislike because I’ve been convinced that’s what an independent artist is supposed to do.

Everybody Wants to Be an Influencer

Maybe this is the part of social media culture I understand the least.

It seems like everybody wants to be an influencer.

I don’t get it.

Even on my personal social media, I deliberately keep my friend count low. I don’t feel the need to add every acquaintance I’ve ever met.

Knowing somebody doesn’t automatically mean we need to observe each other’s lives forever.

And when I do scroll through social media, so much of it feels like people projecting a version of themselves rather than simply being themselves.

Look how successful I am.

Look how beautiful my life is.

Look where I’m eating.

Look where I’m traveling.

Look what I bought.

Look how interesting I am.

Look how good of a person I am.

That last one especially gets me.

You’ve probably seen the videos.

Someone performs some wonderful act of kindness for another person—and somehow there’s a camera perfectly positioned to capture the entire thing.

Maybe the act itself was genuinely good.

Maybe somebody benefited from it.

But there’s always a question in the back of my mind:

Would you still have done it if nobody were watching?

Would you have helped that person if there weren’t likes attached to it?

Would you have done something kind if nobody would ever know you did it?

When did doing something good stop being enough?

Why does everything need an audience?

The Ego Problem

I see a version of the same thing with musicians.

And it irritates the hell out of me.

There’s so much ego.

Every release is a masterpiece.

Every show is legendary.

Every new song is revolutionary.

Every photograph seems carefully constructed to communicate that this is a Very Important Artist doing Very Important Artist Things.

Maybe some of that is marketing.

I understand that you have to believe in yourself to make something and then have the nerve to put it out into the world.

I believe in my music.

I wouldn’t keep making it if I didn’t.

But confidence and narcissism aren’t the same thing.

Narcissism is deeply unattractive to me.

I don’t understand building an identity around convincing everyone else how talented, interesting, desirable or important you are.

And social media seems almost perfectly designed to reward exactly that behavior.

Look at me.

Listen to me.

Watch me.

Validate me.

Being an artist already requires asking people for their attention. That’s uncomfortable enough.

Social media takes it a step further.

It encourages you to turn yourself into the product.

That’s where I start checking out.

I don’t need you to think I’m important.

I’d rather make something that becomes important to you.

That’s a very different thing.

I want you to care about the song.

You don’t have to care about me.

Maybe I Just Like Being With My Husband

The more I think about all of this, the more I wonder if part of my hatred for social media comes from something incredibly simple.

I really enjoy just being with my husband.

That’s it.

We don’t have to be doing anything interesting.

We don’t have to be somewhere beautiful.

There doesn’t need to be a perfect dinner sitting in front of us or some spectacular sunset behind us.

We can be sitting on the couch.

Driving somewhere.

Doing shit around the house.

Making dinner.

Watching TV.

Or just existing in the same room.

I’m happy.

And nobody else needs to know that moment happened.

Maybe that’s why the constant performance of social media feels so foreign to me.

My personal social media does show my happiness with my husband. That part isn’t fake. I’m not creating an idealized relationship for people to look at.

I genuinely love being with him.

But what you see online is still only a tiny fraction of that life.

The best parts aren’t necessarily online.

They’re ours.

I don’t need strangers to validate my marriage for me to know that I’m happy.

I don’t need a photograph of every good moment.

I don’t need likes to confirm that something mattered.

Sometimes something matters precisely because it belonged only to us.

And maybe that’s what I’m struggling with when I look at social media.

Everything has to become content.

A vacation becomes content.

Dinner becomes content.

A relationship becomes content.

Kindness becomes content.

Your body becomes content.

Your sadness becomes content.

Your happiness becomes content.

And eventually you become content.

I don’t want to live that way.

I like having a life that continues after I put my phone down.

And maybe that’s also why being told that I need to constantly document myself in order to succeed as an artist feels so unnatural.

Because the happiest part of my life requires absolutely no audience at all.

So Why Am I Still Here?

Because I want people to hear my music.

That’s really the answer.

I’m not pretending Prophets of the Cosmic Darkness is some enormous operation.

I’m not pretending I’m famous.

I’m not interested in constructing some larger-than-life version of myself and selling that person to strangers.

I’m just a guy who really fucking loves making music.

And I know what music can do.

A song can become permanently attached to a period of your life.

It can make you feel understood when nobody around you seems to understand you.

It can make a horrible day slightly more bearable.

It can remind you of someone you haven’t thought about in twenty years.

It can make you dance.

It can make you cry.

It can make you feel something you can’t even properly explain.

Music has done all of those things for me.

And the possibility that something I create could someday do that for somebody else means more to me than any follower count ever will.

That’s why I’m stuck in this ridiculous cycle.

I make something I genuinely care about.

Then I have to figure out how to convince an algorithm to show it to another human being.

I spend money trying to reach people.

Bots follow me.

The follower number goes up.

Engagement doesn’t.

I question whether the advertising worked.

I question whether social media is helping at all.

Then I go back into my studio.

I make another song.

And we start again.

Maybe I Don’t Need to Win at Social Media

I genuinely don’t know whether social media is helping Prophets of the Cosmic Darkness.

I wish I did.

The inflated numbers certainly don’t help me figure it out. The engagement is often low to nonexistent. Advertising produces numbers, but numbers aren’t necessarily people who care.

And I’m starting to realize that maybe becoming good at social media was never supposed to be the goal.

I don’t want to become better at being an influencer.

I don’t want to manufacture a personality.

I don’t want to spend my creative energy figuring out how to trick somebody into not moving their thumb for another three seconds.

I’d rather make something worth stopping for.

I want to make songs.

I want to make weird music videos.

I want to create things that excite me even if they’re absolutely terrible for an algorithm.

And if one of those songs eventually reaches somebody and means something to them?

That’s real.

Give me one person who genuinely connects with a song over a thousand bots following an account.

Give me one person who puts on headphones and listens to the whole thing over ten thousand people who watched seven seconds because an algorithm put it in front of them.

Give me something real.

Maybe that’s ultimately what I hate about social media.

So much of it feels like a simulation of connection.

Followers.

Friends.

Likes.

Views.

Impressions.

Reach.

Engagement.

Numbers representing human beings without necessarily representing human connection.

And music, at its best, is the exact opposite.

It’s connection.

That's what I'm after.

Not influence.

Not an enormous follower count.

Not some carefully manufactured version of myself.

I want to make something honest, put it into the world and hope another human being finds something in it.

And then I want to put my phone down, go sit next to my husband and live a life that nobody else needs to see.

So yes.

I fucking hate social media.

I’ll probably post a link to this blog on it.