Wikipedia talk:No one cares about your garage band/Archives/2018/May

The Culture of Music is Changing Wikipedia Needs to Get With the Program
I agree with the general tenor of the comments here. Sure, this article's funny the way insecure young adults have a way of mirthlessly laughing at their more indiscreet peers. Every band has to start somewhere, and being signed by a major label is hardly anything like a guarantee of worth or general interest six months or a year after the fact. Bottom line is there's simply no way to abide by Wikipedia guidelines when you're dealing with stuff as subjective as art. Pages for musical artists like (e.g.) Allan Holdsworth and Kate Bush are absolutely enormous, their Talk pages stuffed with controversy out of all proportion to their influence in the wider world, because their fans happen to be extremely passionate, which, you know, is less "encyclopaedic" than not giving a hairy squirt which Wikpedia evidently confuses for some sort of Zen-like state of calm equanimity. Yet who else is going to spend the time and effort (sans compensation, of course) save those that do give a hairy squirt in some way or another. Not to sound too needlessly po-mo or anything, but "knowledge" is everywhere embodied and "unbiased" knowledge outside of a discursive framework doesn't, per se, exist.

What pushed my buttons here isn't at all Wikipedia's policy intent with this allegedly "humorous" page. I completely get it that Wikipedia isn't a free promotional service and I understand the difference between truth and verifiability (even as I have major screaming philosophical questions about it). I just really resent (as apparently a few others who've spoken up here do as well) the snickering caracature that everybody who self-promotes their own music is some pimply teenage Mommy's-basement rockstar wannabe. Yes, of course I have some original music up on YouTube which happens to be the antithesis of "hardcore." (No, of course I'd never dream of sharing the slightest word about it on Wikipedia.) But we happen to live in a world where the jazz-rock guitarist Allan Holdsworth, one of the most widely-praised musicians by his peers in any genre of music, was seriously thinking a few years ago of packing it in and getting a job in a factory because the labels and radio stations haven't a clue how to promote his music (too jazz for rock; too rock for jazz). This entire model of "verifiable" sources to "legitimate" emerging music is ever-more-quickly dying and the next generation of musicians aren't going to "first achieve notice" in commercial venues. Their first deep writeups will be on Facebook and MySpace and their first national and international exposure will be on YouTube while the commercial media outlets chase an ever-shrinking lowest common denominator. You surely have noted this trend, however nascent it may be at the moment.

Wikipedia needs to be a little more proactive about it, is all.

Snardbafulator (talk) 09:20, 8 July 2011 (UTC)


 * TLDR KDS 4444  Talk  14:23, 11 November 2015 (UTC)