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.
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.