Using the anniversary of the start of my website as an excuse for a bit of a history lesson in websites, blogging and algorithms. I suspect this is part 1 of a series 😉
Today (April 20th) is the 28th anniversary of me starting my website:
As you can see here… though to be honest that might just indicate that that was when I added a visit counter to the front page 🫣
Back in 1998, being a bass player and bass teacher with a website was a vanishingly rare thing. I didn’t own a ‘proper’ URL for another year or so, but using the free space that came with my email account and some HTML skills learned from pre-Google websearching (probably on Altavista), I built a shop window for everything I was involved in at the time:
…Just marvel at those design skills 🤣
My first attempt at blogging was before it was called blogging, when inspired by Tony Levin’s tour diaries, I kept one of my own for the tour I did with Howard Jones in late 1999. I also started posting ‘Real Audio’ files around that time, trailing the emergence of solo material ahead of my first solo gig in Dec 1999.
The community side of things was handled by mailing lists and usenet groups – sharing links and stories on The Bottom Line, JustJazz, Churchbass, The Bruce Cockburn fan list, alt.guitar.bass and just email groups with friends. It was another year or so before Talkbass came along, similar time frame for my own mailing list and even the guestbook on my website.
Anyway, here we are 28 years later, and thanks to a lot of support from my webhost, I’ve finally regained the ability to upload photos to this site, and yesterday, before I realised today’s anniversary status, I was able to update all the pics on my site to the new photoshoot. There are still ongoing design tweaks happening, but I’m pleased to be moving again.
Why Still Have a Website?
It’s a good question in 2026. We’ve faced 15-or-so years of Tech conglomorates steering us away from ownership of our own data, of our own audience, of our own creative work towards them hosting, curating and charging for access to everything. The latest to more fully succumb to the pressure is blogging, with everyone starting ‘a Substack’. Newsflash, there’s no such thing as ‘a Substack’ – it’s a website that hosts blog posts. Stop trying to make fetch happen. But by nouning their own site, Substack have more successfully colonised blogging than the previous attempts by Medium, and before that Live Journal/Tumblr etc.
But the shift away from our own sites having traffic and sharing audiences between us was even more calculated than that – Google Reader launched in 2005, and became the market leader in RSS feed aggregators – you could subscribe to blogs, and they all appeared in your Google Reader like a chronological newspaper. No filtering that wasn’t your own (you could group things by subject), it was an amazing way to combine news from agencies, your own friend group, and specialists in your areas of interest.
In 2013, when they shut it down, it coincided with a shift to a lot of people posting shorter form text content on Facebook. Facebook pre-algorithm hoovered up a lot people’s mailing lists and readership by giving the impression of a meritocracy. There were bands with active mailing lists of thousands that moved everything to Facebook, built it into the size of audience that warranted international touring only for the first wave of algorithmic filtering to kick in and them to drop from 10s of thousands of views on every post to hundreds. Literally. Tours were canceled, careers put in jeopardy. And Google Reader shut off the market leader in self-curated blog aggregation. RSS feeds and buttons slowly began disappearing (fun fact: before I had a Twitter account I used to follow various friends’ Twitter feeds via RSS!) and various platforms came along to add algorithms and data-harvesting to the Blogosphere.
Medium did pretty well, and LinkedIn still soldiers on with bizness focused tedium, but it’s Substack that seems to have properly stuck. The advice for musicians shifted away from ‘make sure you have a website and post content there’ to ‘make sure you have an email list’, but the metrics for email open-rates have dropped dramatically over the years…
What’s rarely acknowledged in all of this is that part of the reason and motivation for many of these shifts is that the sheer volume of stuff being produced has ballooned far beyond the scale where everyone whose work warrants an audience can have one. More and more stuff fighting for our attention means less and less attention space for each post, each video… So photos and memes win because those are what we can consume in the largest numbers, that trigger the highest number of swipes and can therefor generate the highest amount of user data to be sold on to advertisers.
Those of us who were part of the great social media adventuring of the late 00s built audiences and explored the potential for community and the dissemination of art and ideas while we were unwittingly training the algorithms of the sites we thought were going to save us. For musicians, online discovery felt like the new frontier. Bandcamp gave us (and continues to give us) control over the sale of our own work, and social networks invited us to build networks and communities by talking about other people’s work, by link sharing, planning tours together, putting on shows and generally talking in a human way at digital scale. But the moment Facebook and Twitter had enough data gathered to know where the value lay, and what they could charge for access to, they closed the road and set up a tollbooth for access. Various attempts came along to build networks without that intervention, from Diaspora to app.net, Mastodon to BlueSky, with varying degrees of stickability. But in terms of global reach and influence, the VC funded, algo-driven platforms are overwhelmingly dominant, from Facebook to Spotify, Substack to Instagram and YouTube. Control over what we want to see in mainstream spaces is largely illusory.
And now on top of that those same sites are littered with AI generated posts, full of inaccuracies and outright lies, fake photos and made up histories, posted for no reason other than clicks. Not to inform, not even to build a community, just post a link to a ‘buymeacoffee’ as though typing a one line prompt into ChatGPT and posting the slop that comes out is worthy of our patronage. It’s content that serves absolutely no purpose in existing, contributes nothing, and just saps attention from things that are accurate. We’d literally just be better off sharing our Wikipedia Page of the Day.
So what do we do? I honestly don’t know. I have my own small acts of resistance. Blocking accounts that post AI slop, refusing to use it for anything (and there are a number of tasks in my life that AI would probably make easier), but also, so far, resisting the pull towards Substack, towards outsourcing the audience for my own writing. My readership here is vanishingly small compared to my social media readership. I’ve just spent an hour writing this, expecting a handful of people to read it, but those who do will be here for a reason. Not bored, not in need of distraction, not served it by an algo. Just here to find out what’s going on.
So I write with intention, create music with intention, teach with intention, and as best I can resist the pull to weaken and diminish any of those for greater reach.
I don’t know where any of this lands, whether the future is human, or whether a refusnik AI-and-algo-resistant community finally coalesces around Artisinal Digitalism – not a descent into analog nostalgia, but a commitment to disseminating work and thought and experience and wisdom through digital means. I don’t want to have to press vinyl or print a fanzine to pretend that physical containers make the work they contain more meaningful.
I just want to find a way to continue to make music and write words for people who care about them. Hopefully you’re along for the ride.
Thanks for reading. If you haven’t already, please do check out the Bandcamp subscription – it’s literally the only funding model I have for my music work: Click here to find out more.
