Danica Swanson pfp
Danica Swanson
@danicaswanson
If niche music genres ever become a thing on Farcaster beyond a handful of hardcore music nerds, let it be known that I've been a crate-digger music writer with deep roots in the dark ambient + drone scene since the 1990s. I've done custom themed playlists for meditation groups, deep dive interviews with top artists, beginners' guides, underrated albums lists for goth/industrial music blogs, mini-reviews on Bandcamp... you name it. I only stopped because there was no sustainable way to fund that work.
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BrightFutureGuy πŸŽ©β†‘β“‚οΈ pfp
BrightFutureGuy πŸŽ©β†‘β“‚οΈ
@bfg
I have to say that there's one thing I find very surprising ... and you may say it's natural, which it is ... but I have always expected and assumed that very niche communities would find a way to show reciprocity to those who put work into keeping them alive and curating "the thing", etc. You do a lot of non-mainstream stuff and you're the testament that reciprocity is not higher in niches than in general populus πŸ™„ just thinking out loud cos I have a moment between calls
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Danica Swanson pfp
Danica Swanson
@danicaswanson
Depends on what you mean by reciprocity. If you mean praise for good work, sharing it on social media, etc., there's plenty of that. But actually funding the work itself? Not so much. In the days when I was publishing a music newsletter on Substack, there was plenty of praise for my work, but very few paid subscriptions. Readers even asked me for full refunds without ever explaining why. I gave them refunds, but it really hurt. Completely demoralizing. I've earned more and been treated with more respect when I was waiting tables in a restaurant as a teenager. When I started working on a book manuscript about dark ambient music, I naively thought that having a good book proposal and a blog that was respected by the musicians and scene insiders would be sufficient to get the work funded. But publishing doesn't work that way -- especially not for writers covering underground arts, culture, and music scenes. Sorry to say it, but it's bleak.
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Danica Swanson pfp
Danica Swanson
@danicaswanson
Also... if even an artist like David Lynch can't get his projects funded, what hope is there for the rest of us? https://warpcast.com/bias/0x2dbede97
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BrightFutureGuy πŸŽ©β†‘β“‚οΈ pfp
BrightFutureGuy πŸŽ©β†‘β“‚οΈ
@bfg
yeah, as I see it ... again, there's nuance to everything, and there's no funding right for good ideas, talent, or good people. We're all (in part) playing the same (economy/attention/ROI) game, and we either play it well or not so well. Blockchain doesn't change the game, but it changes the reach and number of players that can play, and it can also abstract a lot of the backdoor politics away. I know it's not really a satisfactory answer because hopes might be different, but it seems to me that it's the fact. And the game is continuously changing for the worse ... because AI is a strong and cheap adversary in the attention (and $$ extraction) game. disclaimer: all is just my feeling and observations, I may be totally wrong πŸ€“
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