What Happens When Instagram Dies?

 

These thoughts are scattered and not well developed.  If you disagree that’s fine, start your own label. 

What Happens When Instagram Dies?

    What record of your band would exist if no one could access your Instagram account?  Music-making infrastructure revolves almost solely around social media, and the online following an artist creates around it. To do so, artists must sell themselves, their art, and, most importantly, their integrity. Having to sell yourself is intrinsic to every public facing medium, and music is no exception; neither is having to sell your art. Selling these things is a natural part of building a following and, for better or worse, making a living. When speaking of integrity, I mean the wherewithal to make whatever the fuck you want without making concessions.

     When I see bands making “guess who our drummer is!” and “bringing back thrash metal in 2025” posts on social media, I see people buying into a system which doesn’t care about them. An algorithm designed to maximize engagement using cheap shortform slop content geared more towards farming metrics and feeding algorithms, than fostering any actual relationships with listeners and fans. I see these things as concessions, things that people do to fit inside the system, whether they like it or not, without any real rate of return. 

    Knowing many groups will generate little in the way of returns on social media, I don’t understand why some bands continue to do this. Especially ones that consciously understand that but do it anyway. Shouldn’t energy be better focused on making what truly inspires you? Why bend the knee if you’re not even going to get anything out of it?  If I could have it my way, there would be a total rejection of all industry trends – social media, content farming, any sort of soul-selling drivel that one must conjure up to even be a flash in the pan. 

    I’m starting this label for many reasons. For one, I want to catalogue music that I, and whoever else is interested in working with me, find interesting. I am not interested in capturing a “sound” or starting the next bloated label with forty shit bands for every three good ones. Secondly, I want there to be a record of these bands and artists outside the digital realm. There are so many great international bands which, thanks to the internet, are easier to find and listen to than ever. That also means that they all too often get lost in a digital sea, reduced to mere grains of sand in a social media driven wasteland. I want to make physical records of these bands, that will outlive social media, the bands themselves, and hopefully me. I refer of course to alternative physical formats such as cassette tapes, Records, Compact Discs, zines, photobooks, and I might even make VHSs. These media formats exist to complement and act as an alternative to the usual digital medium. Aside from being fucking cool and collectible, these older formats provide listeners a way to physically interact with art. I want these things to serve as a glimpse into a moment in time, to give people a look into just what these bands were. I want people to get the same feeling that I get when I flip through a zine that came with the LP version of Dead Dog Summer by Policy of 3.

The third, and maybe most contrived reason, is that I want to give people a way to consume art beyond the surface level. Streaming is convenient but putting some skin in the game and physically owning something gives a new appreciation for what you’re consuming and makes you engage on a deeper level. You can listen to so much through streaming that you may be listening to nothing, and I would argue that when your library is smaller, and you begin to repeatedly listen to the same things, you gain a deeper connection. Also, I would like to actually fucking pay artists. I can’t believe I even have to say this, it is highly unethical to benefit off someone else’s work and not even pay them their fair dues. The crazy thing is that that is just one part of the awful whole too, why would you listen to a service that funds genocide and plays ads for the American gestapo. Fuck Spotify, fuck any other platform or person that does this. 

    It is easy to discount things in the name of convenience, and to say that there is no ethical consumption over capitalism, which is true for many things, but it doesn’t have to be true for everything. You can choose how you engage with music, what systems you want to feed, and what ones you want to fight. I am choosing to foster real relationships, people that make cool shit that I find interesting, and forms outside of the digital medium. You might think me stupid, an asshole, or just plain ignorant. You are entitled to those feelings, but I am choosing to build a space in which I want to exist, free from all the shit I don’t like. If you don’t like it, then don’t partake. 

-Dom from Punchplate