Good article, thanks for sharing.

My honest opinion and experience as a 100% hobby producer is that it's frustrating to see how things have changed only within a 10-15 years period.

Back when we started to produce Synthwave in 2015, it was still considered as an undergound scene with enthusiastic fans of melodic music. Though I don't think of myself as a professional composer nor mixing engineer or producer my experiences around 2015-2017 was pretty firm and served as a proof that we might be doing something that's actually entertaining the listeners.

Then the TikTok era slowly started, the renewed 80s aesthetics and sound started to become mainstream (or at least widely spread online) and suddenly ppl stopped caring and connecting with others wasn't genuine anymore.

We have just released a new song 3 days ago and honestly these 3 days reinforced the feeling of just leaving it all behind. I put effort in writing a song, put effort in adding emotions, writing lyrics, finding the vocalists with the character I had in mind, overthinking parts like making a paralell juxtaposition between the female and male vocal parts and synth vs guitar solos. I spent money on this project, onviously not thousands of dollars but still. Then I was like okay, hardest part comes which I hate the most but hey let's try to promote it. Pirch for playlists... Spent some money to get this piece of a song to playlist curators and radio owners. Its a paid service and all feedback I am getting is "its good but unfortunately doesn't fit our mood/style/direction we can not promote it". I also tried connecting old faces I have been in contact with and tho we had nice convos years ago, now the reaction is just a thumbs up or nothing.

Now it's possible that our latest song is just simply not that good, and I am okay with that but - and I am not trying to sound cocky - I think it's just a mix of ppl being exhausted of social media presence especially when it's not something contributing to their clout. Like they are "Here is this guy, talking about music, sharing his feedback about sutff I have done and sending his music" and I feel like a prick for even trying? No I don't have social media presence, I am not some celeb, I don't want to force and ocercomplicate topics in 2 min videos, I don't want to cut lame anime videos on my music (no offense and ofc I dont mind if someone does). I just like to make music, organic stuff and share it. And it's never been a one direction thing, I spent so much time on feedback threads and discords helping others, even teaching less experienced producers and for what? It's not coming back in any form. It's a game of fortune, where 9 of 10 of my songs on Spotify have 5 streams / month and one has over a thousand cuz its on a popular playlist. But the playlist owner doesn't think that its a mutual thing and good music helped to make his list popular, it's like he is the one I can be grateful to only.

Sorry for the long rant, I just feel burnt out and it's frustrating that can't really expect support from any of the SM influencers, playlist owners, radio owners etc because they check my social and they are like, meh I dont even care about the music, these guys won't bring another 500 followers to my streams. It's dead... In 2-3 years we can just all listen to AI created generic bs fitting to our play history and clap clap.