Stevie G: Music is more than numbers
These days, much online discussion of music revolves around numbers and analytics and streams and bots and there is less talk about the actual music.
These days the artists themselves have detailed analysis of nearly every listen at their fingertips which on the surface is a good thing for artists and labels.
Sadly, in the streaming era, the obsession with numbers has extended to music fans who endlessly argue online about how popular their favourite artist is.
It is all a bit tiresome really, and I wonder if something as abstract and subjective as artistic expression should be reduced to numbers all the time.
I’ve felt for a long time that stan culture was detrimental to discourse on music but stan culture itself is by no means a new thing either. It emerged as a phrase after the popularity of Eminem’s track Stan in the early 2000s, which depicted an obsessive fan who takes his fandom into dangerous territory.
Even before the digital era, music fans have always been willing to go to bat for their artist of choice. It was definitely more good natured back in the day. Tupac v Biggie’s rivalry was hotly debated by some, but for other fans it was more a case of schoolyard debates, and the same could be said for Oasis v Blur and other 90s musical arguments, some of which still rage today!
It was once the Beatles v the Stones but even within those two bands various fans and factions have developed and some people will still spend far too much time arguing over the various merits of Jagger v Richards or John v Paul. But usually it’s good natured debate.
However, it can get out of hand too. John Lennon was murdered by a deranged former fan, Mark Chapman, who apparently had taken his dislike of Lennon’s lyrics and lifestyle too far. Chapman remains in prison aged 70 today, but the world lost one of its greatest music talents who was aged only 40 at the time.
Is the modern day online stan obsession any worse than this? Thankfully, it mostly stays online but it has rendered music discourse on many online platforms fairly tiresome at best. Twitter was an amazing platform for music, art and culture in its early years, but as a destination for music debate it has long since disintegrated into a mess.
Obsessive fanbases of artists such as Nicki Minaj, Lady Gaga, BTS, Beyonce, Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift are endlessly arguing online, and have sometimes developed an almost pathological obsession with their favourites.
It’s moved into hip-hop and other genres too.
Drake v Kendrick is a good example, but as detailed here in recent articles, it almost seems as the future direction of hip-hop is at stake here, so sometimes debate can be interesting.
The stan nature of this is unbearable and some people will defend their favourites from literally anything. Kanye remains one of my favourite artists but some of the stuff that has come out of his mouth is indefensible, yet some will defend it incessantly. But I guess this is a reflection of these weird obsessions people have with celebrity culture as much as music and art.
Much online discussion of music revolves around numbers and analytics and streams and bots and there is less talk about the actual music these days. I’ve often likened this to the discourse around the price of vinyl records.
Discogs is an online marketplace and database for music releases which became popular in the last 20 years, and now people can get a general idea of what a record is worth within a few clicks and a few seconds. Discogs can be handy at times, but people started talking about the price of records rather than the music and many others have used these vinyl records for investment and speculation purposes rather than to play them. This has always happened in art and music to some degree, but buying multiple copies of a record to sell or to simply hoard is not exactly what great art is about really. Who cares about what it costs? Who cares about how many streams an album got? Ultimately. What does it sound like? This is why we really fall in love with music in the first place.
