mike shinoda
17:25 Wednesday, 25 May 2022
Linkin Park vocalist and keyboardist Mike Shinoda isn't a fan of the current climate within the music industry.
In a series of tweets, Shinoda said he's tired of hearing how much time and energy young musicians need to spend on generating social media content. Shinoda also posed the question of how much music someone could be making instead of "generating mind numbing 'content,'" which is a pretty fair assessment of things.
"I'm tired of hearing musicians be told they're not investing enough energy in social media content. Every artist I talk to right now has this feeling. They say they're spending way too much time making little videos to support their careers, but wish they could spend more time making and playing music.
"How is a young artist expected to put in enough time to get great at their craft when they need to feed all these content channels? The time they spent generating mind numbing 'content' might have been at the expense of the best song they never wrote."
Shinoda's thread seems to be in response to Halsey's recent claim that her label Capitol Music Groups wouldn't release her new song until she could fake a viral TikTok moment. "Everything is marketing and they do this to basically every artist these days," she wrote in her video. "I just wanna release music man. And I deserve better tbh. I'm tired." Halsey is one of several popular musicians making similar claims about investing tons of time into social media just to get their music released.
I guess on the flip side of all of this is the fact that promotion on social media and having a presence is just how things are in 2022. Though there could probably be a happier medium somewhere between the two ideas of simply releasing art and spending all your time making social media content, right?
