WASTING TIME AT ITS FINEST

This post is a mea culpa written as self-criticism.
Honestly, I’m baffled by my own behavior.

Hours. Days. Months. Years. An absurd amount of time and energy spent creating posts for platforms that IMHO, deep down, give a fuck about music (not my music, but the music itself). There I was, playing my part through authoritative dos and don'ts and churning out images, carousels, vertical videos, captions, tags, and all the paraphernalia needed to try and grab the attention of people who, most of the time, were there for practically anything except listening to music made by real people (with the normalization of AI-generated music, the whole thing has become much more difficult).

And me? I was happily playing along with the circus act. A sort of digital court jester, working for free to feed a very well designed scheme to keep me logged as long as possible, offering up tiny doses of validation in the form of little hearts, likes, views, and numbers. And there I was, acting like an idiot, treating those numbers as if they were some kind of proof of relevance.

"How many new likes?"
"How many new followers?"
"How many views?"
"Did the algorithm give it a boost?"



As if music could be measured that way. As if a song needed to win some sort of popularity contest to have value. The most annoying part is that it took me years to realize something so obvious. It is worth noting that there are platforms dedicated solely to music, though unfortunately, they too have bought into this game of validating work through follower counts and likes. There is a well-known video platform that follows the same path. This whole shit made people latch onto the numbers instead of the content.

Fortunately, there are platforms where music is still treated as music, rather than just another excuse to generate engagement, retention, clicks, and numbers. Unfortunately, there are very few of them. And that is exactly where I need to be. Perhaps the biggest waste wasn't the time spent creating content; it was the time spent trying to please the wrong game.

I wasn't promoting my music. I was trying to please the algorithm. And there is a huge difference between the two. Now that I’ve finally realized this, it’s hard not to look back and think: "damn! how did I fall for that for so long?"

By the way: I uninstalled the apps from my phone and deactivated my accounts on those platforms (except the video one). I most likely won't be returning. No one there will care.