Fake Fans(www.wordsfromeliza.com)
74 pointsby performative4 hours ago4 comments
  • fwipsy3 hours ago
    Recently rereading William Gibson's "Pattern Recognition" and I'm struck by his belief that certain art or memes are objectively good and destined for virality. I think both Gibson and this author are wrong. No content is intrinsically destined for success. There are countless amazing artists, available to anyone. Any sort of quality, insight, talent, novelty are table stakes. If someone is big, they're either extremely lucky, they got in on the ground floor, or there's marketing money behind them.
  • SL612 hours ago
    It doesn't surprise me at all that this is going on. There are lots of social media fan pages that are run by real people who post real content 99% of the time but are willing to post promo material for a fee. Usually that fee is pretty high, easily $100-500 depending on the account's follower count, with different price points for how long it stays up (pay more for a permanent post, pay less and it gets deleted after X number of hours). It's really effective because those accounts already have a well-established presence and function as tastemakers.
  • cobbzilla3 hours ago
    Modern payola. Fascinating but not entirely unpredictable. I’m excited by the focus on hyper-local, authenticity is the scarce resource. Great artists are usually not the best marketers, but nothing beats “I am here, this is real”. No amount of algorithmic magic can create that experience.
    • jfengel3 hours ago
      I have found that the great artists you've heard of tend to also be great marketers, or at the very least found great marketers.

      I know quite a few extremely talented artists who could never crack the marketing, and so nobody else has ever heard of them. Even local fame requires a fair bit of hustle. Talent alone doesn't get you there.

      • cobbzilla6 minutes ago
        Could this be confirmation bias?

        Isn’t this the point of the unique & real discovery process that actual connoisseurs of an art form participate in? We find you (great artist), because you are brilliant at your art but terrible at marketing.

        Then you might become popular because 1) we (the finders, the influencers) talk about you (I mean personally here, friend to friend, in person, not social media) and 2) if your art has broad appeal, it just needed the marketing. word of mouth marketing is the most authentic kind so of course it’s being faked!

        There are many artists that I love that “no one has ever heard of” and that’s fine! At some point, some of them will make something with broad appeal and it’ll catch on.

        There’s money at stake so of course people are trying to juice the process, but that’s been going on for a very long time, hence my original reference to payola (pay to play on radio) which started in the 1930s!

        None of this payola bullshit takes anything away from the true talent producing amazing art today! It just means, as it always has, that if you want the good stuff you have to do your own research. Most are too lazy and that’s fine! They have other interests. But the art form itself does not suffer because there exist grifters who distort mass perception. Connoisseurs are less interested in mass perception.

    • girvo3 hours ago
      > Great artists are usually not the best marketers, but nothing beats “I am here, this is real”.

      Agreed 100%, which is why my local city's (Brisbane) post-rock scene of the 2000s-2010s was so important to me

      But it's also why despite being phenomenal musicians, they all worked normal jobs (even those related bands who were indie-rock enough to be played on Triple J even though they weren't) and they've all stopped playing because touring loses money.

      I will always have the music and the years of amazing experiences and the photos of the shows I took, but hyper-local means niche and niche means unsustainable, I think.

      • cobbzillaa minute ago
        Yeah art is art, it’s never paid well generally. You do it because you love it, and your audience loves it. And that is awesome.

        And the commerce is commerce, and you make money and more money means you did something good.

        And then you put the two together and it’s the same shit we’ve seen for thousands of years. tbh no surprises! This is all as expected.

        There’s still phenomenal live music in every city I’ve ever visited, to the present day. Just go out and find it, it’s not hard!

        Support live local music

  • jwpapi3 hours ago
    I’ve noticed a lot of fake Tik Tok comments recently and was wondering already..