The band Muse has surrendered its Instagram and X handles to Meta after the release of its new AI agent, Muse.
The English rock band Muse has been renamed on Instagram and X from “Muse” to “museband.”
Despite the band Muse having had its Instagram account since 2012 and its X account since 2008, it has seemingly surrendered the handle to Mark Zuckerberg’s newest AI agent.
While true, they also advertised themselves on a platform most Americans use.
Say what you want about someone’s ability to not use a social media platform in the first place, but if you’re a band that depends on… people, it’s hard to just decide not to put yourself out there on a platform where so many people are.
The network effect is real. It’s where people’s friends, family, celebrities, bands, etc all are. Leaving means leaving people who are important to you.
A lot of people find it easier to leave platforms like Twitter now, because the platform is such a shell of its former self that it doesn’t even provide what many people originally came there for, but if you’re on Instagram, Facebook, etc, it still often provides people with easy communication to/from family and friends, and organizations like bands with access to an audience, promotion, visibility, etc.
Leaving the platform means leaving fans, and giving up visibility. I wish everyone could just quit Meta’s platforms and crush the company, but there’s a very simple collective action problem at play here that makes it very difficult, don’t discount that.
I think it applies differently to famous, rich, figures who already have an audience. They could loudly announce they’re leaving facebook. A chunk of their fans would follow. They’re already rich, they can tank losing some fans. It would be better for everyone to get people off Facebook platforms and onto open ones.
Some local band that’s struggling to get their first EP out I could maybe cut some slack on going to where the people are.
That’s fair. Still, I do think it’s a tad unreasonable to expect of people, when it can significantly impact their popularity and thus their income, when the actual effect of them leaving is usually that… essentially nothing happens to the company they’re leaving from.
Unfortunately, Facebook and its users likely won’t care much if someone leaves the platform, as long as they can keep scrolling. It’s gotta be on a very large scale, with a lot of people giving up portions of their audience before more people start genuinely moving to alternatives.
The person referenced successful bands that don’t need more money. That’s really no different than saying, “You can’t expect billionaires to stop being evil when it would significantly impact their income.”
The network effect works both ways. See Myspace and Friendster.
Not really, I don’t consider bands to be as parasitic as billionaires, because they at least do something to earn their money. If you’re a billionaire, you can just hire someone to take your place, leave, and profit forever, but if all the members of a band step aside to let a whole different crew of people take over, that band probably isn’t gonna have anywhere near the same following or quality as it did before.
Still, I do kind of understand the point.
MySpace is actually a great example of this, because Facebook found a way to remove switching costs for users moving to Facebook, which is why Facebook succeeded.
Facebook made a bot that would automatically scrape all your MySpace activity from friends, and forward it to Facebook.
Moving to Facebook meant not having to leave anyone behind, because you could still see everything from them and respond to them, but you got a better experience, so that’s what many people did. Eventually, the people they were getting forwarded messages from on MySpace just switched to Facebook too.
Leaving Facebook now does not carry these same benefits. There is no other app that allows you to do this without Facebook cracking down on it and severing your access. Hence, switching costs are very high.
Facebook opened the door to themselves, and then locked the door shut, leaving you only the fire escape as an exit.
Sure, like King Gizzard left spotify and put their music on bandcamp. They got some press about it. Some of my friends went to bandcamp to get their music, even. But the vast majority of people still just use spotify. People don’t care about things, especially if it would be inconvenient.
It’s still good to get people off private platforms.
tl;dr fascist bootlicker apologia
I’d hardly call explaining the network effect and collective action problem fascist apologia, but you do you.
All I’m saying is you can’t expect someone to leave behind most of their audience’s primary way of communicating with them scot-free. There are always consequences.
Let’s say they stop posting on Instagram. Out of those 2.7 million followers, only a fraction will find them on another platform, and thus they simply lose their ability to message to all the people they left behind. That hurts them.
You can still think it’s a net good for society for them to leave, or that it would meaningfully hurt Facebook (it wouldn’t unless most people also left, but again, collective action problem), but you can’t act like they don’t face consequences by doing it. It’s not “fascist bootlicker apologia” to say that leaving some of your audience behind on a platform reduces your audience.
I understand what you are writing, but I also see a very valid point of OP.
Participating on those platforms is endorsing what they stand for. This is especially bad because celebrities still using those platforms keeping other people attached to them.
Bands existed long before Facebook and people still were able to find information about them.
Today they also have their websites and can have users subscribe to their mailing lists with updates, and they would have full control of that platform so there would be no Zuckebergs changing their account name for example.
Another wall of text excusing bad behavior. Hey yo I am not gonna read entire essays about this shit in a comments thread. Pare it down a bit.
If you can’t spend a minute and a half reading, you don’t have any ground to stand on in calling my point “fascist apologia”.
Either be willing to actually assess what I’m saying on its merits, or keep just going with your gut instinct and instantly responding to anything that’s even remotely contradictory to your opinion by calling it fascist, but that doesn’t change the point being made.
If you don’t care to even read my point in the first place, I don’t care to respond further, since you’re clearly not interested in anything other than feeling self-righteous without thinking about it.
That’s strike three bud. Byebye.
Illiterate.
Lol, serious business here
Have you considered not being a lazy and low effort asshole?
Have you considered not making excuses for rich people who support fascists?
Sorry your rambling answer was too long and stupid, I didnt bother to read it.
Oh, I know this one! It’s pretending to be an idiot on purpose! You know, there’s a great website for people like you. I think it’s called fakebunch, falsebank, something like that.
Hehe. I was just mirroring you. If you think that was being a idiot, I agree with that. :)
I know I was just pretending, not sure about you though lol
The amount of vitriol you have spewed into the fediverse over your 2 months here is quite impressive for somebody with a link to their patreon in their profile. You know, theres a great phrase for people like you. I think it goes something like “you’ll catch more flies with honey than the shit coming out of your mouth”, something like that.
Skill Issue
Reading that took my wife (unbiased/unprompted observer) roughly 11 seconds, and she just got home after 36 hours in the ER in massive pain and on as much IV morphine as the hospital was allowed to administer until about 10pm last night.
Why would you make her read anything after that?
I don’t ‘make’ my wife do anything. She saw me laughing and asked.