Not sure what it was, but gossip, speculation, etc pretty much defined 2016. It genuinely was a year filled with Internet trolling.
From being a main theme on South Park to our current president elect.
It...was...EVERYWHERE....
Unfortunately it trickled down into the music. Now I'm not talking about the artist themselves, but their fan base.
Towards the end of 2016, well, pretty much all of 2016, there was an influx of gossip surrounding music artist. Everyone whose anyone had a headline this year and to me, in my opinion, it overshadowed their music.
Yes, I'm guilty of reading gossip blogs, but I'm genuinely one of those people that are just their for the comments. This of course leads me to the fan pages behind them.
You know what I see? Every post twisted into gossip and probably 1 song post per 20 uploads.
I remember walking to school when I was younger, hitting a main street and seeing it plastered with somebody's mixtape poster or promotional material of some sort.
But now everything is viral. If you not with the wave or just so happen to stubble upon a hashtag of a new artist, you could easily mess around and miss out.
Why is this important? It's simple, there are still people in this world that think differently, move different...simply.... are....different. And marketing campaigns overlook this audience.
That organic audience that street teams created. When artist started going viral, street teams turned into fanpages and fanpages these days might as well be gossip blogs.
When I was a kid, the poster plastered on the street, the guy passing out pluggers, and the independently own record store that played independent mixtapes while customers shopped were all apart of my exposure to the culture.
I miss that experience. The journey you had to go on before discovering your new favorite. That proud feeling from putting a friend on to your discovery.
Now, when you hear a new artist, it's nothing too special about. When they drop, pretty much everyone has already heard of them via social media. If you don't have social media, then you're always late.