Episode: 2396
Title: HPR2396: Information Underground: State of independence
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2396/hpr2396.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 02:17:46

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This is HBR episode 2,396 entitled Information Underground State of Independence.
It is hosted by Lost in Drunks and is about 43 minutes long and currently in a clean
flag.
The summary is Deep Geek Lost in Drunks and Glad to talk about the State of Independent
Art.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by An Honesthost.com.
With 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15, that's HBR15.
Better web hosting that's Honest and Fair at An Honesthost.com.
Hi everyone, you're listening to Information Underground, I'm Glad to and with me today
I have Deep Geek and Lost in Drunks.
Hi everybody.
I wanted to talk today about the State of Independent Art which last time we did a show,
we spoke a little bit about that in a way because of Lost in Drunks sort of question
of how's Independent Art taken over.
And so Art I think is important to humans.
It's a therapeutic thing, it's a cathartic thing.
It's really kind of one of those things that distinguishes us from really all the other
animals that we share the planet with.
And so it kind of, it does concern me when Art starts to get subjugated by sort of you
know the classic big impersonal corporations.
When a selection of Art gets branded as kind of a premium commodity that's going to, going
to get promoted and sold, which I think implies possibly that the other Art that doesn't
get selected is somehow less valuable, which if you look at it objectively is kind of
goes against the truth that actually Art has essentially no value or said another way
all Art has ultimate potential value given the eye of the beholder, which is really the
only way to get a true measure of any individual work of Art.
But Art and Artists exist in an economy.
We are all bound to a certain number of rules for survival.
And so I don't see the commodification of Art as necessarily a bad thing.
I'm not saying that it shouldn't ever happen.
But I do think that it's, I mean, and it's even possibly arguable that the only way
that Art can be effective is that it gets commodified because I mean part of, and I think
we were talking about this a little bit in Lost in Bronx episode, part of the effectiveness
of Art is in its sharing.
You know, we want to watch Art or experience Art and then we want to turn to someone
and talk about it.
Like that's part of the, that's part of the process.
And certainly for the Artists, that's part of the process.
Like you can make Art in the privacy of your own home.
But whether that's actually super satisfying to you before you share it, it may or may
not be.
I mean, it kind of depends on you.
But I think generally speaking, the point of Art is that yes, you shared it.
So corporations do that really well.
You know, they, they, they, one of the things that corporate sponsorship or, or, or adoption
of Art, one of the advantages is that they can, they can distribute that Art really,
really effectively because they have the money to do that.
They have, they have all these outlets through which they can, they can distribute this stuff.
And when I moved to New Zealand, I started seeing a lot of local musical acts.
I mean, I, I, I'd gone to lots of local musical acts back in the US.
But in New Zealand, I started noticing it more because here in New Zealand, there's, as
in many places, there's the predominant sort of white, British, descendant culture that
came through colonization.
And then there's the, the native culture that, that was here before the British got here.
And so I would start seeing lots of local acts.
And it was specifically just by chance, a lot of Maori artists were, were, were the people
that I was seeing.
And it kind of struck me that these artists that I was seeing, they were local acts.
And they were playing these small venues.
And a lot of people didn't really, weren't really seeking them out.
And here in New Zealand, and New Zealand is a small country, like compared to the US,
you have no idea.
It's tiny, right?
I mean, New Zealand could fit inside of probably Pennsylvania.
It's, it's not a big place.
So there, there's every opportunity to find out about local artists in your area because
it's just two little islands.
And yet people are kind of defaulting by and large to US import art, you know, the stuff
coming from the USA, which has no real cultural connection to anything happening in New Zealand.
I mean, it's, it's completely outside.
And yet that is by and large the default.
And that kind of concerned me, that right there sort of made me wonder about whether
the commodification of, of art by corporations that specialize in distribution of art, if
that was somehow possibly hurting or affecting the local art scene.
So if, if part of the process of creating and, and distributing art is actually boosted
by, by corporate involvement, what's my problem?
And, and my problem simply is that there's, there's no real cultural connection being made
between, for instance, mass-produced art from the US to, you know, anywhere else and
possibly just even within the US itself.
I, I feel like that's kind of possibly threatening a certain amount of cultural identity.
And at the end of the day, that's, that's really sort of all art is all about.
I mean, it's not, it's not food, it's not water, it's not shelter, it's not something
that we literally depend on.
But it is something that I think we, we, we need for better health because it is part
of our cultural identity.
And when we hand that cultural identity over to a corporation or to, to, to something that's
just tailored for, well, exclusively for making money, I feel like we're probably losing
a little something.
And so I started thinking about this a lot since moving to New Zealand.
And I kind of, I kind of started questioning, well, what is, what, what are the corporations
not good at?
But what do they have a hard time like what, what, what can't they take from us?
What do, what can't they do?
And I realized that one of the things that corporations cannot do effectively, like they can,
they can broadcast a message to a room full of people and, and all of those people in
that room will hear it.
That's, that's what corporations are really good at.
But what they're not good at is getting in, down in amongst the people themselves and kind
of like getting, getting between the people.
It's like those little connections, the spaces between the people.
Of course, that's things that corporations just can't, they can't do because it won't,
it doesn't pay off for them.
So in other words, the corporations kryptonite is inefficiency essentially.
And while inefficiency seems to kind of be exactly what any artist would not want, I think
culturally it has a benefit so that that local art stays somewhat local, not because it
needs to stay local, but just kind of because inherently it stays local because it's affecting
the people in that area and it's speaking to the people in that area.
And since we are in the age of the internet, I don't think that it needs to be a geographic
locality.
I think that it can be sort of like your interest groups, your like the things that, that,
that appeal to you.
And it still becomes local and it, it simply can't blow up because it, it doesn't appeal
to enough people and it's not going to become something that can be commodified and, and
distributed on a wide scale because just not enough people actually think that that speaks
to them.
It doesn't speak to them as much as, as, as something that they find, you know, appealing,
something local to their interest levels.
One of the ways that I've tried to encourage this, just for myself and I'd be interested
in hearing what you guys, how you guys manage this or if you manage this, but one of the things
that I did some time ago was I said, okay, I'm not going to listen, I'm, I'm, I'm going
to take all of my albums, all of my musical albums that I have on my hard drive.
And I'm going to, I'm going to sort them literally by, by record label and, and people
got horrified when they heard that I did this, like my brother who is a music major just
thought this was the worst thing in the world.
But I, I, I sorted them by label.
And if it wasn't an independent music label, I would not, I just decided I'm going to
put it into this folder and I'm not going to listen to it.
And that was like three years ago or four years ago.
And I haven't opened that folder in about as long.
And the, the music that, that fell under the independent label or, you know, no label
directory, just that's what I've been defaulting to.
And it's, it's really worked out for me, in fact.
And, and I think one of the things that I have found is that by restricting myself to
the independent directory, I am encouraged then to seek out more of the same, you know,
it's kind of like, well, I really like that artist.
And I see that after about two years of putting stuff out, he kind of fell off, you know,
he went to college, had to get a real job, whatever.
But, but maybe I can find something similar to that somewhere else and, and sure enough,
eventually I do.
And, and the same kind of goes for, for movies, movies, my relationship, movies is a little
bit different than my relationship to music.
So it's not, not completely analogous, but, but I, I did kind of segregate off.
Okay, well, I'm not going to listen, I'm not going to watch movies over here and I'm
going to seek out movies, you know, on YouTube or, or, wherever.
And again, the same thing goes with books, you know, like, I'll, I'll, I'll look on
Smashwords or I'll look on Lulu.com or, or, or whatever, for, for, for stuff to read
rather than defaulting to like this, the safe bet with like this one sci-fi franchise
that I may, that I might have otherwise defaulted to.
And again, that's a little bit different because you've got, you've got books from like
all stages of history.
So you can't, you know, at some point, it becomes a meaningless sort of delineation.
But so it's not a scientific process at all.
But what I've been trying to do with myself is just trying to encourage myself to seek
out the independent art out there that has no real connection to the corporate marketing
machine.
And I found that it's been really, really, really good and it's very, very fulfilling.
And the thing that, that has continued to encourage me even more is that the tools that
the internet has started providing us have really been really powerful, like patreon.com
where you can actually fund artists with micro payments, essentially, for everything that
they do.
And you're directly funding the artist.
And that kind of, that brings it back into an economy, which you can feel what, however
you want to feel about.
But I think that there's a necessity there, people, we all do exist in an economy.
So we can encourage the art and it's very direct.
And again, that's not something I don't think that corporate corporations can, can deal
with.
That kind of inefficiency, like they, they couldn't go out and try to find funding for every
artist that they want to produce because that's just not, that doesn't, it doesn't pay off
that way.
Whereas the artist, if they reach out to, to people who might like them and start getting
paid by patreon, or if they successfully kickstart and musical album because there's
enough people out there who want to hear whatever they have to offer, it's, it's like this
direct kind of truly democratic economy that's been working out really well.
That's what I've got for you really.
That's, I think, the state of independent art is, is pretty, pretty great, really, pretty
healthy.
And I think it's down to direct funding and, and better distribution.
What do you guys think?
I, I think, I think you really hit the nail on the head, I mean, I, I, I see, I see
things now that are so, that are fringe enough where they, a corporation would never, you
know, spend the development budget on it.
And you can turn around now and go out to the public and say, do you want me to do this?
But it's, it's, it's not only a matter of, of, uh, indiegogo and kickstarter and whatnot
serving to, you know, fund an album that the artist is going, wants to make.
It's also a good way to do a large market survey over what people would like to see produced.
There's an efficiency there that a corporation can't access because if you have an idea
for a show and you're not sure you're going to do it or an idea for a movie or what have
you and you go to indiegogo, you can actually say, you know, if I can make this thing live
enough to make the indiegogo thing float, I'll do it, you know, and there's an efficiency
there that something doesn't have to be done unless you know it will be well received
as opposed to just making your thing out there and sticking out there and, and causing
your fingers.
And not to be, you know, the voice of dissension here, but I don't know what the, well,
first off, indiegogo is a company.
Let's start off by saying that and others, like, um, patreon is a company.
You know, all of these, all these things are company.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I like kickstarter.
Kickstarter is too, right?
Kickstarter is a company and they're not, in other words, they're not projects in the
sense of like, you know, say a, an open source project would be.
They're actually companies and they're for profit.
Something like patreon, which I have looked into and I've, you know, I'm a content creator
myself.
So I've looked into this.
What would happen if say patreon, now I don't know what their corporate structure is.
If it is an independently owned company right now, or if it's actually been sold and, you
know, as a VC project, if it was sold to a larger company, um, I'm going to go with the idea
that it's independent right now.
As far as I understand it, I'm about three degrees separated from, from the, the owners
of patreon.
But as far as I know, unless, unless I'm not being told the whole story, yes, they are
independent.
Okay.
Well, I think we can all agree that as soon as they start showing a good profit, they
will be sold almost certainly.
Okay.
Now, if that were to have, now so long as it's independent, I will say that probably
none of what I'm about to suggest as possible is possible.
But the moment it gets sold, if it gets sold, if when it gets sold, what would stop a company
that owns something like Patreon from looking at the numbers and saying, well, we do get
a cut of everything that goes through here, you know, and they do, you know, the Patreon
gets a certain percentage of all the money that comes in because they have operating costs
and employees and all that.
What would stop some being counter in a company like that from saying, you know, these, you
know, these independent audiobooks, which is what I produce, these independent audiobooks
and I don't make any money.
People don't care about those.
We're talking nickels and dimes compared to dollars, okay, with someone doing a graphic
novel that's a big hit or someone doing music, musicians, especially doing, you know, that's
where the real money is.
We should start promoting them.
And suddenly their front page changes and they start having promoted things on the front.
Suddenly.
So now they're a label.
So now they're a label and no longer is the little guy, you know, yes, there's stuff
is still there and they can share out those links, you know, to everybody that's out there.
But suddenly these guys, we took in our last episode, we talked about the concept of curators
that these large guys, you know, like Google or other search engines, they, you know, at
some point they were trusting their algorithms to serve up the kind of thing that we're actually
looking for.
And at some point, some, what would stop a corporation from taking a product like Patreon and turning
it into something like that, where now it's no longer really what it was.
Now it's much more like Amazon.
I think that's a distinct possibility.
So I'm not saying it's going to happen or that it has happened, but I'm saying the
potential is absolutely there.
I, I assume because I guess I'm a cynic, I don't know, but I assume it's going to happen.
I think that's kind of the direction of, of all these things.
Like once the corporations see that there is a pool of money to get their hand into that,
then that's what they're going to, that's, they're going to move towards that.
But I think, and again, I think that the, the part that they can't really, I don't think
they're ever going to be able to get, to get down, they're, they're naturally drawn
to things that are, that are pooling into a big bucket of money.
And I think that the inefficiency of independent art, distribution and promotion is the thing
that the, the corporation really can't, they cannot, they, they don't want to get involved
in that side of things.
So they're only going to show, come to the party when there's a bunch of money to be made.
And so I think as the internet evolves, and I don't know, I, I still think where, I
don't think Patreon's the end game.
I, I think, and even Kickstarter, I don't think that's quite the end yet.
I think there's going to be, at some point, and the brave web browser, I don't know if
you guys have tried it, but they're kind of working towards this like really micro payments.
I think that eventually it's going to get to the point where, where you can pay directly
to the thing that you want to pay simply by visiting their website or, or, you know, whatever.
And it's just going to be kind of like, you have this fund set up for, I'm hoping that
you have this fund set up for, for contribution to the stuff that you like.
And, and it's going to be super easy for you to, to pay directly to that, to that target.
And I'm sure that some corporation is going to try to get in between you and that target.
But I think, I think the internet is moving towards direct, direct contribution.
And I think if that happens, then I think a lot of independent artists are going to be sort
of empowered.
Unless that becomes a decentralized thing, either the, you know, the organization of the content
that you're, that you're visiting, or the internet itself becomes much more decentralized
than it is right now.
There's always going to be a way for, for large corporations to gamify something like
that they're always going to be able to, to, to, you know, get, as you say, get between
you and the artist, there's always going to be a middleman for this sort of thing.
But I wanted to address another point that you brought up, because there's, there's
this is a huge topic and it's very juicy.
The idea that a large corporation, you're right, they will not approach something like
the independent artist or an even an independent art movement until his money to actually be
made.
However, there's an awful lot of money to be made in the aggregate of things, right?
So as I say, you know, Patreon might, you know, this, this future evil, but, you know,
the mirror universe of Patreon where it's evil looks at the, the small projects and
say they're not making enough money.
We're not going to promote those.
We'll promote the big ones that make a lot of money that, while that is true, I also
think they'll never get rid of the little guys because they do in aggregate make a lot
of money.
Amazon is right.
It is packed with indie writers, you know, Amazon is the biggest bookseller in the world,
not just in terms of volume, but in terms of dollars and cents, they make more money than
any other bookseller on the earth.
And they are filled with independent artists.
Are those artists easy to find?
No, because they're not being promoted.
And there's your problem and it's something that I've said as a content creator that
I've been saying for many years, your problem is not distribution anymore.
Distribution is easy.
You're fighting the great silence.
You're fighting the noise, right?
The great silence is when you throw your stuff out there and you get nothing back.
That's how I define it.
But the noise, you're lost in the roar, you know, of all this.
So the onus comes on the artist to find their audience.
They actually have to go out and find the audience themselves.
They can't just sit on the street corner with a tin cup anymore unless they're literally
doing that, you know, with a guitar sitting on a street corner, you know, in certain street
corners, that could be very lucrative, but most street corners, it is not.
And most places in the internet, if you, you know, unless you actively participate in
a great, you know, there's certain, there's a certain special sauce, you know, when it
comes to media marketing.
And suddenly, you're no longer, you're no longer an artist.
Now you have to be a media guru to your media specialist to find, you know, to start
getting these things.
Unless you happen, you know, by chance, as it always does, you know, you, you happen to
get picked up and you, you know, you become generally popular or popular within a particular
audience.
But to be fair, to be fair, that's how it is.
That's how it's been for artists, most artists, 90% of artists, that's that's the
game anyway.
Like, that's always been the game.
And it's just been that small selection of artists anyway who get promoted, you know,
the Beatles and the Marilyn Monroe's and whoever else, like, that's, that's them.
So I don't think that the state of, of having to, yeah, promote your own wares has really
changed that much.
In the old days, you couldn't promote your wares.
There really wasn't much you could do, you know, you, you really, you know, especially
say if you were a musician, if you were lucky, you could get local gigs and get an audience
and find people.
But what if your stuff really was experimental, it was really out there and you lived some
place where that was simply not popular, it was, it was just not what people were listening
to.
And you, you were never going to get popular there.
So you did have to move and you had to go where the, the quote, unquote, scene was in
order to, to participate in that.
And of course, I don't, you know, there's still, that still exists.
But I think by and large, a lot of that has been mitigated and changed through, you
know, the internet and through, you know, networked individuals to the point where if you're
producing something that isn't substantially, you know, different so that it's so bizarre,
it gets picked, you know, people notice it immediately, maybe not even for its own merits,
just because of the novelty of it.
If you aren't doing something like that, you are still dealing, you know, it is still
competition.
You're dealing for not necessarily for dollars and cents, you know, especially if you're
independent artists, odds are you're not going to get rich.
You're not necessarily competing for dollars and cents, you're competing for people's attention.
And in that regard, you, you are, you know, when it comes to competing for attention,
you are standing right next to major corporations, major, major media corporations who are doing
the exact same thing.
They are trying to find an audience.
As you say, that isn't much different than it has been at least since the internet arose.
But prior to that, you didn't really even have that sort of standing.
You didn't have that ability to try to attract your own audience and understand that the
idea of a, an art distribution company, art distribution corporations, that is an entirely
new concept within human history, you know, I mean, that, that's come about in the 20th
century.
That's a good plan, you know, or maybe the late 19th century with sheet music and stuff
like that.
And it is a modern concept.
The technology has changed a lot of these things, but it's still, you know, it can be,
as Deep Geek has mentioned in a previous episode, it can be very, very difficult to find what
you're looking for, even with all our search engines.
And even with our, you know, algorithmic curators, it can be very, very hard to find the independent
artists that you're looking for.
And I think, I think that's our biggest problem.
Discoverability is the biggest problem that an indie artist faces.
You're absolutely right about the discoverability.
You know, it's, it's always, you know, we did talk in the, in the prior episode you mentioned
about, about my newscast and, you know, I, I think I suffer a little bit from what, what
some people call language and language syndrome.
Have you heard about this term?
No.
The language syndrome was named after the language that did, um, lug radio, and he complained
about, I told you the truth about operating systems on podcasts, how can he didn't change
anything?
And it's because the viral nature of it was not expressed, the word didn't go out far
and wide enough.
It wasn't discovered enough.
And I felt the same, I felt the same way.
I felt the same way where it's like, what, only 350 listeners.
Well, in a lot of way, you know, again, as I say, I'm a content, we're all content creators.
We're creating it right now.
It isn't necessarily the size of your audience, unless you, unless you have another goal, okay?
Like art for art's sake doesn't have another goal, right?
But as Klaatu says, we live in the world, you know, commerce is important because you
got to pay the bills and you got to eat.
But art in and of itself is often, it is the end goal to produce the art, to produce
the content is the end goal.
And what other people do with that is out of the artist's hands.
So how an art, how, how the audience sees their art, consumes their art, understands their
art, how your listeners, you know, perceived your art and what they did with, you know,
with your newscast, what they did with that information, how they perceived it, whether
they agreed, disagreed, liked it, passed it on to their friends, whatever.
That is entirely out of your hands until you start getting into media and marketing, right?
Now, I think that's a very ugly turn of events for an artist, frankly.
Now Klaatu feels that it, it actually, it's nothing new and that an artist has always
kind of had to sell themselves.
And I guess that's true.
I guess that's true.
Otherwise, the starving artist, you know, you get the starving artist.
But that, the starving artist exists because artists by and large don't either don't want
to do that or don't know how to do it or are truly incapable of doing it.
And if that all feeds into discoverability because if they can't sell themselves, you
never find out about them.
And if they're no good at that, if that's just an area that they do not excel at, I don't
feel an artist should be penalized for that.
And yet they are simply by the nature of the fact that you will never hear them.
You'll never find them because they were no good at selling it.
Yeah, you absolutely want to talk it there.
Yeah, I mean, I think you're correct about, again, discoverability, but also kind of
the responsibility of the artist to have enough confidence in themselves, to want to promote
their own work.
And that the truth is that doesn't always happen.
And I don't know, you know, I don't think that there's really a solution for that to
be honest.
It's kind of like a personal battle for every artist.
But I mean, not every artist needs the audience number, you know, like I really don't, for
my, whatever I put out, I generally like my, what, I don't know what it is, but like
my ego does not require a large number of people to experience that work.
I think I'd be, I'd be hurt if zero people experienced something that I put out.
I do like to know that someone heard something or saw something, but generally speaking, I
don't go for numbers.
But then again, I'm not trying to make a living off of this anymore.
So, you know, there's, there's kind of like a trade off there.
And I know that some people do try to make a living off of this.
And that's a, that's tough.
But I mean, so is any kind of living, you know, like we all have to go to work.
We all have to do stuff that we don't want.
So it's, it's kind of, it's something.
Well, in a way, Clot 2, and people who work, you know, have careers for companies or even
working class careers, at some point, they have to ask for a job, they have to know how
to do that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, by the way, that wasn't an ego thing.
My, my, my, my thirst for numbers, but it was because I, I wanted to bring about some,
I had a feeling of going to bring about some kind of change in the world, as did Stuart
Languages with the radio.
But, you know what, David, like I think, I think what Lawson Bronx was probably saying,
or unless I imposed this, but I mean, like you don't know the 350 listeners that you had
at one point.
You don't know whether something, some story that you brought to light, utterly changed
their life forever, you know, like we don't know how our, how our art or whatever,
how our output affects people.
So you may have had like a huge impact on a small number of people, but I would have to
argue because I've been one of the people who have been impacted by small output, you
know, like, well, hacker public radio, as we're all saying, like, I mean, huge changes in
my life has come from, from stuff that probably me and like, you know, yeah, 350 or 10 other
people have even heard.
And, but that doesn't make it less important to me, the recipient.
Yeah.
You got a good point there.
You bring up hacker public radio itself, the media were, we're using to get this, to
get this out.
And that always remind me of, of, at one point, painters used to group themselves into
schools, like the Hudson Valley School, or they used to like, you know, make groups out
themselves in order to cross promote each other.
And in a way, I think hacker public radio as a network of podcast producers has that kind
of a function.
And they did that because, of course, painters and other artists in, you know, probably earlier
times, or maybe even concurrent with this concept, they had patrons, many of them had
very wealthy, either, you know, merchants or royalty or would have you that would do nothing
but pay these people to create art.
And of course, that went away with the dinosaur, you know, that, you know, that, that doesn't
really exist to any great extent anymore.
And of course, today, that would be corporations that do this, or occasionally funding grants
and things like that.
And some schools will have an artist and residents of some sort, but that, I mean, those
are, I mean, very, very rare.
But so is patronage as a whole in the past that it was always pretty rare.
And finding individual patrons now is where the content creator has their challenge, find
their audience essentially is what the issue is.
And, you know, Clat 2 mentions that, you know, again, if you intend to try to make this
you're living, you have a very tough path to travel.
You have a very difficult thing to do and you will end up inevitably if you want to make
a living with your content, you will inevitably either have to, I mean, I guess it's a matter
of perspective and, you know, just the way you want to define a thing.
But you'll either have to a, learn some new skills that you didn't expect you'd have
to, or alternatively, you'll have to learn to do something you really, really don't want
to do.
And you'll have to do it anyway.
Well, you know, if you're in the, I've said this many times, you know, I, if I wanted
to, you know, sell a lot of books or sell a lot of audiobooks or something like that,
I, there's tons of, there, there's certain types of content that always sell and they
sell well, right?
But they're not what I want to do.
So if that's what I have to produce, if that's the sort of thing I have to produce in
order to sell, in order to be an independent content producer, then I may as well just
be flipping burgers at McDonald's because I'm not going to be doing what I want to do
anyway.
And if that's the choice that the content creator, you know, has, then they really cannot
make a living at what they're doing and what they're doing will be an application.
It will never be their profession, which makes it no less valid.
It makes it no less valid, but there are suddenly some major constraints that come along
with that.
Okay.
They, the, the, the amount of content that they can produce will naturally be less.
And possibly the quality will be less because they, maybe they can't afford the right
equipment or they, or the training or, you know, they, they, or maybe they won't simply
have enough time to perfect their craft, whatever it happens to be.
In other words, you might have someone who's very, very good at what they do, but they
will never reach their peak.
They'll never reach their peak and maybe never really find their audience.
They may, you know, they may be producing quality stuff that, you know, it could possibly,
maybe it'll never be huge, but it could possibly change someone's life.
And they will never hear it because it is lost in that noise.
They cannot be discovered.
They're not found.
I think anybody, if it's, if it's a corporation or an individual, anybody that can crack
that nut that can give the, you know, a content creator the, the ability to market themselves
without becoming a market specialist, I think that will change content creation more than
anything else.
That will change independent art forever, in my opinion.
That would be fantastic.
I'd never really thought about that angle, but yeah, honestly, like, you know, DP did
a news show.
Now, the most that I can do is post on some social media site.
If you're looking for news, you've never heard, but you should be hearing, listen to
this show.
I'm going to be get, you know, who the hell would care?
That has no contact and trying to get across what we know emotionally and intellectually
that this is good for some of you people out there.
This is going to be a really good fit for you, but how do you get that across to those
people?
You know, because I can say what I just said and it will have no meaning on those people
because if someone put that in my streams, whatever social media I happen to be on, if they
put that in my stream, I won't even finish reading the posting.
I'll just go to the next one.
It is, it's meaningless to me.
You see, if I'm meaning it's to you, but it would not be meaningless to other people.
If you or on Facebook, Western Bronx, presumably I would be, you and I would be Facebook friends,
if you posted a positive status on a piece of media, I would be fascinated.
I would hunt it down if I thought it pertained to me and I would try it out and that would
be based on the strength of our friendship.
Well, that's, that's all well and good, but I understand that the people on this show
right now are kind of biased towards each other's content because we're friends.
We're friends because we like what the other person's done, right?
I sought out you guys because I had heard you guys, you know, on HPR and other places
and I sought your friendship out because I liked what I was hearing.
These were guys that were saying things that mattered that I thought was important and
then I got to know you and I liked you guys, right?
And you know, that's all well and good.
That's all well and good, but most, the vast majority of people that may be following
me on, on social media, they don't really know me from Adam.
Some of them might know that I produce content.
Most of them probably don't.
So many of them, it's an auto follow, I follow them and bank, they follow me, but they
have no idea who I am.
I tell them I like this particular, you know, podcast that's producing, you know, news
content that they almost certainly have not, they don't care, you know, it's noise.
It's all noise.
You know, there's so much of it out there, it's so difficult for the independent content
producer.
I'm using that term instead of artists because it's, it's a little, you know, it's a little
broader.
Yeah, it's a little broader.
The independent content producer is fighting all of this noise and we got these giant
corporate machines standing right next to us, produce, you know, and they got very big
microphones and they're producing an awful lot of noise and an awful lot of noise.
But there's also a legion of other independence also standing on the other shoulder, making
as much noise as they possibly can to find their audience.
And it's the people that are very good at this are the ones that get found occasionally.
Yes, there are some people that just got lucky.
They caught lightning in a bottle.
They got picked up generally by what they call influencers that is to say someone very
popular already says, oh, check this thing out.
And then, you know, it's like being, it's like having the king come down and say, I
give this my okay, I touch them on the shoulder, they have my blessing.
You can check them out.
No.
I think that crap has got to go the way of the dinosaur.
I think it's got to go away because I don't think it's, you know, there's, there are voices
so lost, we will never hear them.
And they might be the best thing.
They might change my life.
There might be somebody out there whose content is so meaningful to me.
It will change the course of my life.
I will never meet them even in this era where we supposedly all have an equal voice on
the internet.
I will never hear these people because of all that noise.
To me, that's where the challenge for independent art lies.
I 100% agree with you, but I think that the key, at least in my mind, and I could be
making this up, but the key is not to try to out, to out megaphone the corporations.
It's, the key is to make the personal connections and to start the little mesh network and, and
get the word through the mesh rather than through the broadcast.
That's, that's the key.
And it's not efficient, but I think that's the, the strength of the method is that it's
not efficient.
That, that's where like some of the Facebook, I don't know what particular social media
platform you're talking about.
I assume it's not Facebook, lots of rocks, but I'm very careful with, with, I don't do
the order follow thing, I don't, I don't let anyone just follow me either.
I, I, I choose people who have a meaning to me, they work with me, or I know them through,
through, through, through, through a fraternity, or I know them through some other way, or I,
I went to school with them at some point, something, and then I get to see just with these
people that presumably I have something in common with, are talking about, and that's
the goal.
And even then sometime talk about noise, some people are noise, some people are just repeating
what, I don't know, the democratically republican party are saying, and, you know, I, I, I
eventually mute them, I eventually, or, or, or deafened them, whatever you call it, you
know what I mean.
Yeah, I do, and what you're describing is an ideal way for social media to work.
I have, that has not been my experience, you know, that has not been my experience, mostly
because I don't really want to talk to people.
This is a personal problem I might have, and I have it in real life too.
I don't really want to talk to them.
I want to hear what they have to say, but I don't necessarily want to talk to them.
The only time I really have anything to post is when I've produced a new piece of content.
No, that's advertisement.
When I post that, it's just advertisement.
No one wants that either.
So it's a, it's a difficult, you know, thing for me personally, but that's not really
the point I'm trying to make, you know, because there are many, many people who, first off,
it's been shown at least for independent writing.
They found that there's no real correlation to having a large social media presence
with an awful lot of followers, and actually, that doesn't necessarily directly translate
into sales.
So there's an argument to be made that a large social platform is not a good basis for
an independent content creator, probably exactly what Clat 2 said, you have to find the
correct community, either you either have to find it or you have to create it around
your, around your content.
And that is the only way you're going to find true fan.
If you want to put it that way, true patrons of your art, that is not an easy thing to
do, because again, not everybody is good at that.
I am very bad at social media, and there are people that are also very bad, not because
they're like me, but because maybe they're like, as Deepkeek said, they make a lot of
noise.
All they do is shout and make a lot of noise, you know, maybe they are producing content
that would, could find a good audience, but they're making too much noise.
And they, you know, people mute them, people don't listen to them, no one takes them seriously.
In other words, they're very bad at it, just like I am in a different way, but just like
I am, they're very bad at it, and they're not finding their audience, you know, even
though they may have one, whatever content they're producing, they may, there may be an
audience for these guys, but they can't use the tools that are out there right now.
I guess ultimately, honestly, this is probably a really roundabout way of saying that I don't
think there is a level playing field.
I don't think the tools are very good for everybody anyway.
I think the tools are really good for some people, they work really well for some people,
they work increasingly better and better for major corporations, but I still think that
the indie artist is still lost, they're still alone by and large, you know, I think it's
very hard for many, many indie artists, indie content producers to find their audience.
I won't argue with that.
So I guess to sum up, here's a little story that actually stars Lost in Bronx.
I'm going to paraphrase heavily because this happened a long time ago, but I was interviewing
Lost in Bronx for my show, Ganyu World Order, found at GanyuWorldOrder.info, and as part
of my intro to Lost in Bronx, I think I was saying, you know, well, everyone knows Lost
in Bronx, and now I'm going to talk to them.
And Lost in Bronx said, clatoon, nobody knows who I am.
Like we are existing in a tiny, tiny little niche, and nobody knows who I am.
And that to me, but no, but everybody that I am talking to right now knows who Lost
in Bronx is.
And to me, that meant that everyone knew who Lost in Bronx was.
And I think there's, that's the key right there, is that there are little bubbles and there's
the audience within that bubble.
And to some degree, we can all kind of be stars within our little bubble.
It's a lot like when you go to a Linux convention and you meet someone off in the corner who's
trying to fade into the wallpaper and you go and talk to them and you guys are getting
along and it's kind of cool.
And then you discover that that person is the person who wrote that one application that
you use all day every day.
These moments of artistic genius in whatever form it takes.
And to you, that makes all the difference in the world.
So these bubbles may be a variable size, but they're super, super important.
They're important to individuals, they're important to communities.
And I think it's part of our sort of duty as, as cultural beings to promote the stuff
that we find like, you know, so that deep geek can find cool new stuff.
We should tell other people about the cool new thing that we found and promote local
and independent art that we like, because I think that's spreading a healthy culture,
a healthy human culture.
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