Music community online is a story of dancers and hunchers. This week on Low Frequency, I lay out my whole theory of how this stuff works so you can decide if you want to keep reading this blog. I’m sharing some music I like at the end.

There’s a really interesting review by Alphonse Pierre in Pitchfork today of a not interesting mixtape. Valedictorian is the debut from viral rapper ian, a guy with a vibe you really need a hazmat suit to handle: the king of his frat is trading his crown for a mortarboard so he can go on to absolutely annihilate his MBA program next year but not before he runs it back one more time with the boys in Montauk.

As Pierre points out in the piece, the whole schtick is he’s that dude, but tries to sound like rappers on Atlanta trap mixtapes from the peak years of Dat Piff, an era when that free mixtape platform was breaking stars like Gucci Mane and Chief Keef, and ultimately setting off chain reactions that got us country trap, Pop Smoke, and an improbable second wave of cloud rap.

Pierre ends his review on a chilling note:

When we have access to all this media but not the history, we clear the playing field for the type of people who are for all intents and purposes the preordained winners. The Internet is so influential in music today—ian is a viral rapper—but we have such a collectively poor understanding of the history of music online and the communities who made the Internet a place for music.

It’s entirely possible that the kids listening to ian would get their minds blown by the Zaythoven-produced tracks Pierre mentions in his review, but without zines, VH1 Behind the Music, alt weeklies, record stores, etc. it’s so easy to lose track and end up with a mediocre imitation we don’t even really know is an imitation.

One relevant breadcrumb of history here: Dat Piff plugged existing regional scenes into a global audience, and showed artists they could embrace the distribution logic of file sharing and win global attention. Viral rap certainly benefits regional styles these days, but there’s seemingly an infinite amount of rap that blows up because it was made for the Internet.

But Dat Piff is just one breadcrumb in this history. Our current myopia is both the cause and the effect of looking too closely at breadcrumbs and paying no attention to the trail they form.

One possible explanation for this incomplete history is that it’s made up of two periods that overlapped around the end of this millennium’s first decade: there was a period when most music community online was formed by people who had music communities offline, and one where online communities were driving music culture. 

Let me suggest a shorthand for these two: dancing people and hunching people. The dancing people with well extended, supple spines were the punks, ravers, Deadheads, old school hip hop heads, and more who used the Internet to connect with each other nationally and internationally, growing their offline scenes in the process. The hunching people—their spine forming a C for “computer”—were the filesharing types, IRC chatters, and netlabel aficionados, who mainly took part in communities gathering around music on the Internet and did not come to it from an offline scene. 

These are not mutually exclusive groups. Dancers would for better or worse learn how to hunch over a computer (a demographic with downward trending spinal health), and, by the grace of god, some of the hunchers learned how to dance (good for the core). The richest time for music on the Internet was undoubtedly when both of those sects were working together, whether they knew it or now.

In the past, I thought what this project was going to demonstrate was that the history of music community online is really a history of filesharing. It ends up that’s half true, maybe a little less than that even.

Consider music community online as a fabric. When weaving fabric, there’s warp and weft. Warp is the thicker thread and creates structure for the thinner weft. One without the other just gives you a pile of yarn on the floor: you need warp on the loom first. Filesharing is the weft: thinner thread supported by the warp that actually creates structure in the cloth. 

So the history of filesharing is really a history of how existing offline communities figured out how to use the Internet. The warp—the supporting structural threads—was made out of culture, socializing, and organization tactics that made sense to people who came to the Internet from music communities offline, and helped them understand this strange, new network technology. 

Part of why there’s so little adequate answer to the problems of Spotify and Bandcamp or Live Nation is because the local, organic approach to community making that has defined independent music in America specifically since the early ‘80s, and basically was the key feature of music culture going much farther back than any ancestors we can trace, is just not very robust at the moment.

We’re basically on the other side of an experiment to see if music can be supported on monopoly market power and network technology alone, and I think the experiment failed. I’m really grateful for incredible pop music coming out of Latin America, Africa, Korea, and Britain because American pop music, basically the single cultural product that this system is purpose built to produce and distribute, sucks ass. Taylor Swift is probably the exact pop star for the moment, basically a monopoly in and of herself. If that sounds like a dig, it’s because you’re not a Swiftie.

Cloth woven with too much thin thread won’t hold its form very well. Maybe a loose knit is nice for a cool cardigan, but it’s not going to make for the sturdy coat that’s going to keep you warm all winter. We need to start weaving our cultural cloth for robustness and reliability, to make it something we can live in comfortably and even pass down. 

Of course, during every era of the Internet there have been Internet-native music communities or ones that couldn’t exist without specific technologies. But with really one key exception, those were always preceded by scenes that came online. That exception is a lineage that began with a filesharing community known as “The Scene,” which made a kind of sport out of leaking albums and sharing them internally during the early 2000s. When I get around to telling the story of The Scene, I’ll explain why I think that’s the real precursor to Spotify specifically, and the current state of music online today in general.

The sorry state of American music industry, music culture, and music Internet today—that could and should be a whole ‘nother post. The shorthand I’ll give is that even though online music distribution has never really developed a sound economic model, it has nevertheless managed to become the locus of the current recorded music industry. While streaming platforms can stay solvent for the time being by operating on a level of financial abstraction akin to other massive corporations, artists and basically anyone involved with the process of creating the music that hits your ears do not enjoy that luxury. The only ways to make your living off music, seemingly, is to either have your art ordained by a monopoly like Spotify or Live Nation or just get a job at one.

There’s always the question of how did we get here, and it’s not really as simple as “a big corporation came along.” Tracing that path could just help illuminate a better one forward. Just like how a music tour of Nashville is a great way to get to know that city, this music history tour will take us through all of the major moments of the Internet.

I don't think the Internet as we know it today would exist without robust music communities that brought new people online—people who did a lot of other things on the Internet besides find and talk about music. Usenet, Myspace, Napster, the Grateful Dead forums on the WELL: these are all social places in the history of the web where music was either the reason for being or a key aspect of the value those tools provided to people who did a lot of other things in those places too. There are so many more too.

Like a mirror, music communities reflected what was possible online at any given moment: what technologies were popular, what people could do with them, what new culture the affordances of those technologies helped spur among extremely active masses of users. 

But that mirror also reflects what was allowed at a given point in time: what kind of rights people had online, or what was possible at moments when the power of users was great enough that they could do something different than what corporate money or law enforcement sanctioned. 

I don't think it was a coincidence, for example, that the Arab Spring coincided with the final phase of music filesharing. Both were radical outbursts by masses of users figuring out how to use the Internet in a collective, coordinated way, before various powers figured out methods for rounding up those collectives into their sanctioned digital spaces in ways that were less threatening to a specific power structure. A lot of times, the powers that be did this by flexing the law enforcement muscle to ban those spaces outright.

Sociologist Zeynep Tufkeci, author of Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, has been arguing for the past few years that the gigantic protests spurred by social media have not often resulted in the type of change their participants sought because social media-driven calls to the streets organize people by quantity, not quality. As she put it in a New York Times column:

A very similar case should be made for music community online and offline during that same Occupy to Women’s March period—let’s say 2011 to 2017. That was an era when music blogging peaked and then began to disappear, when What.CD was an incredibly influential hub for filesharing and then taken offline, when DatPiff established the Internet as the main avenue for regional rappers to break into the mainstream, when Spotify went from novelty to basically the entire center of gravity of the recording industry.

Tufkeci’s “more like a sentence that begins with a question mark” describes those mp3 blogs and that filesharing-as-community-builder peak era really well. There was an ambient conviction—uttered by no one in particular but reasserted by many—that the Internet was going to change music forever, that the future was here. But in retrospect it feels more like that era was asking “what would music start to look like if it totally revolved around the Internet?” 

I think that in earlier days of the Internet, music culture online was enabled by music culture offline, and was only meaningful because it reflected music culture as people who weren't on the Internet understood it: the online space reflected the dynamic offline space. Major labels and influential promoters were always the vampires and slumlords of the music world, but robust grassroots scenes and a variety of independent approaches to music distribution meant that they were never all powerful. A&R efforts could vacuum up bright talent and their manufactured stars could appropriate underground aesthetics for television and arenas, but Gen X’s limitless infatuation with authenticity and selling out was a reflection of genuine conflict and friction between the people and the corporations.

When those independent ways dissolved and we began to privilege the platforms, we forfeited collective say in music culture to whoever was powerful enough to decide how music online should work. It's how we got ideas like music is only relevant if it's relevant online, what's popular can be measured by social media metrics, you have to produce music that works well on various websites. That you’re going to have to release an album more than every three or four years if you want to be relevant, perhaps once a month on Fridays.

Around the time of the 2008 financial crisis, the wisdom emerging was that since filesharing had caused a drop in album sales, the way to really make money in music was to focus on touring and selling merch. Whether real or imagined, the consensus was basically that filesharing had displaced any other kind of music distribution, and the agile way to respond was basically to look at putting out an album as something like a loss leader that created an excuse to tour. 

In the future I’ll devote a couple of posts to reflecting on old conversations about filesharing and its wider impacts. It’s a complicated thing. But what I can say pretty simply right now is that there was a general sentiment in the early 2010s that the Internet has changed everything and we need to abandon the old way of doing things, and embrace the new. And not just in music, but newspapers, vacation rentals, cinema, and lots more. 

Looking back, I think that marketing hype got us to stop taking advantage of some decently functioning if imperfect structures and institutions in our world for a few years, and that few years was just enough time to drain money from things like local newspapers, taxi cabs, and record stores in a moment post-financial crisis when it was just really hard to weather financial insecurity. 

One of the major topics that came up when I interviewed my old editor Emilie Friedlander on the Reimagining the Internet podcast was how the Internet looked like a promising place to make a living or start a business because so many job opportunities in traditional sectors vaporized in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The dancers were nervously realizing they had to get hunching if they wanted to get out of student debt or afford housing. Just like with the other sectors, the VC-funded replacements for cultural hubs weren’t installed by people who were very interested in quality and sustainability, but in short-term financial growth. Some would call those people enshittifiers.

So, much like people involved in protest and revolutionary movements, I don't think the answer today for the music industry and various music communities is to get better at using the Internet. We don’t have to figure out how to hunch harder than ever before. We’ve gotta dance again. We have to rehabilitate actual grassroots culture, offline and on.

Grassroots music culture has given us some of the richest, most exciting moments on the Internet: Deadheads at various moments, the American punk and early indie rock underground’s handbook The Mechanics Guide going online and leading to the founding of the Future of Music Coalition, two very different branches of hip hop culture being key in bringing black folks and black culture online and to a wider audience with Okay Player and Dat Piff, the sprawling networked American rave underground emerging online via Rave Archives. I’ll get into all of these and more as this blog goes on.

Along the way I’ll also touch on major network technologies that predate the Internet as we know it today as well as ones that became major parts of our online experience, and the music communities that took advantage of these to connect, sell things, and chat. ARPANET, BBS, livestreaming, peer to peer filesharing, blogging… the list goes on.

And I’m sure I’m forgetting something. Either way, stay tuned to Low Frequency. Thanks for reading. Hope you enjoy it. Tell your friends. 

More importantly, do something in your local music community! Put down the damn phone, stretch out your back, and go dance. 

What I’m listening to

Totally addicted to this Anycia album. The beats are smooth and silky, her rapping has this mesmerizing Lord Infamous quality, “huh?” is an amazing signature adlib. I think of all singles on the album my favorite is “Bad Weather” but “ATM” is probably my fave since it’s really catchy and the chorus is such a baffling taunt.

Revisiting this unreal mix of chopped and screwed 80s country John Elliott from Emeralds/Imaginary Softwoods put together

And I also had a moment this week with my favorite album: Sextant.

Edit 5/28/2024

Thanks to a thoughtful, informed reader, I’ve corrected “Fight for the Future” to “Future of Music Coalition.” I got my notes mixed up about activists working in digital music around the turn of the millennium, sorry folks. You telling me I got something wrong is always and forever welcome.