Substack
On the fan/band relationship

I just found this half written article from July 2016, I think it may have been intended to be the third “podcast” but I decided after the second one that nobody really wanted to hear my idle ramblings so it got ditched half-finished. mostly I think because it lost focus, was it really about the fan/band relationship or about fandom more broadly?

Today… it seems that you’re going to get the chance to at least read my idle ramblings. I’ve included the text of the earlier podcast (part 1) to so that it all makes a bit more sense, although it is still a disjointed mess where I shoot off at barely related tangents.

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Part 1: Being a social fan

There was a time in between Galaxie 500 splitting up (in 1991) and us getting the Internet (late 1993 or early 94 I’d guess) when I thought I was the only Galaxie 500 fan in the world. Occasionally a journalist (normally Everett True) might drop their name into an article but otherwise it was just me.

The friends I’d seen Galaxie 500 with didn’t seem all that bothered by the fact that they weren’t around any more. Of course there was Luna, but I never really knew any Luna fans either and was always surprised that there was anyone else at the Luna shows I went to.

So the Internet was a glorious revelation that not only did the people on there know of Galaxie 500, but some of them loved them as much as I did.

I’m not a social person so when after six or so months of the website someone emailed me and suggested that a mailing list for fans would be good it seemed unlikely that it would come to much, Particularly as, until I started the website I was pretty much the only fan I knew so it seemed unlikely that there were that many out there.

Despite this in the summer of 1995 I launched the Galaxie 500 Mailing List with an email that began…

“OK, it’s just the four of us”

I wrote about the Galaxie 500 Mailing List (Est. July 1995) previously:

https://aheadfullofwishes.substack.com/p/the-galaxie-500-mailing-list-est

Over the coming weeks and months things started to kick off and by the end of 1995, when the first survey was held, there were 124 subscribers.

In December of 1995 Luna played a cracking show at the Garage in Highbury & Islington support was Mojave 3 - you can hear an audio recording of this show on YouTube. At this show I met some “internet” fans in the flesh for the first time;

Lauren, who was in a band called Dart who had released a couple of fine singles and an album on Ché. She tried to talk me into introducing myself to Dean - I decided not to.

Trenton was young and enthusiastic.

I lost touch with both over the years.

I think I also met Paul at this gig (although I found something I wrote recently that suggests I first met him a bit later at a Damon & Naomi show).

So it turns out that, despite my finest efforts to be the bedroom fan, a part of being a website and mailing list co-ordinator was that it came with unwritten social responsibilities.

Get-togethers were happening, not just in London but elsewhere in the world - organised on the mailing list! People were becoming friends, and in at least one case more than friends, because of my mailing list.

Tim emailed me one day and we ended up going to a gig … that had nothing to do with Galaxie 500 at all! This was weird for me, I’m not comfortable with people, but I seemed to be comfortable with these people.

All through this the web site, and particularly the mailing list were the hub of this fandom.

The mailing list had ups and downs, the membership hovered around three or four hundred with probably only thirty or forty regularly active members - busy days could see twenty or thirty posts a day.

As the web began to rise the mailing list started to struggle.

Back in 2007 I wrote about the demise of the fan web site - this is what I had to say back then:

Being the loving parent of a fan site it saddens me to see the demise of this venerable Internet institution. The corporate/official/record company sites never really cared about the band – they mostly just cared about the latest release they had to promote. Damon and Naomi for a while had three such web sites on the go, one for each of their (then) three most recent albums (thankfully their latest web site has a little bit more of the “fan site” feel about it).

The fan site was the baby of the dedicated individual who lovingly hand-crafted huge lists of tour date archives and setlists, photos and audio, reviews and interviews painstakingly transcribed by hand from magazines and newspapers, and a discography that included the most obscure and pointless of releases just for the sake of being complete – only a real fan could possibly care that the album version of Superfreaky Memories was given away on a Mojo coverdisc…

I recently headed over to Chairkickers – the official Low site. The site had started as a fan site but the band made it the official site, that must have been such a buzz – to be recognised by the artists it so lovingly represents. For a while after the move from fan to official not a lot changed – it still had the feel of a site that was run by people who loved it and loved what it was about. Sadly that isn’t the case any more, Chairkickers today looks like a corporate site and like so many corporate sites with the change things went astray. The list of past shows, the setlists, the pictures, the band’s past, it’s history…just slipped away with it (the discography doesn’t even seem to have links for the band’s first three albums!).

Maybe it’s because the vile MySpace has become the home to the fan page (and, laughably, the corporate page as well) or maybe because Wikipedia is now host to all the facts and release information that anyone could want, or just maybe the potential fan site builders are too busy blogging. Whatever the reason it seems the days of the fan site is over and all that’s left are the few excellent sites run by the few dedicated individuals (saddoes??) that will remind the world what things were like in the days before MySpace and Wikipedia and blogs…or we can always go have a look on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine!

The end of the fan site? (Everything's Swirling - 9th May 2007)

Obviously since then MySpace has become meaningless and Facebook has become the strange mix of fan and corporate presence, and as well as Wikipedia sites like setlists.fm and Discogs have eaten into the fan site’s responsibilities, It’s worth noting that the Low web site was ressurected by Catherine who ran the site “I ran Low’s official web site from 1998 to 2005. When the site was redesigned in 2005, much of the information that I had gathered, formatted, vetted, and preserved was lost. After three years, I’ve decided that it’s time to bring it back”. I may revisit the fan web site at some point.

Meanwhile…

On the mailing list things would go quiet, sometimes for days. When bands were touring things perked up - and around Christmas things would get festive and fun. But clearly things were changing. Community, and socialising was happening elsewhere - and “single subject” mailing lists seemed to struggle.

Not just the Galaxie 500 Mailing List - but many lists I belonged to started to get quiet.

Online discussion forums and bulletin boards seemed to be working better now that people were spending more time in their browser than in their email programs (and then their email programs were in their browsers), but then they too began to struggle..

Only the bulletin boards with a borader remit like I Love Music survived.

I tried to hook into this - setting up online forums, and “social networks” but it was difficult to get the buy in, and all such efforts almost inevitably failed - not helped by the constant vigilance to deal with the spam that was less easy to control in these mediums.

I think to make these things succeed you needed a lively and social leader, and that was never going to be me!

As the web went social I tried to establish a foothold in this new world, setting up groups in Flickr and LastFM but again these never really took.

Eventually it became clear that Twitter and particularly Facebook were where fans were interacting. I set up a Facebook page that thrived - it soon had more than double the number of followers than the mailing list ever had, but it was mostly one way traffic - it wasn’t a community - it was a marketing channel.

Fans weren’t chatting. But still the online interaction of the height of the Mailing List was missing.

Part 2: On the fan/band relationship

So, creating A Head Full of Wishes had brought with it unexpected - and what I thought were frankly unwanted social responsibilities. Somehow the web site and mailing list became the hub of a community that extended beyond the Internet.

The other side of that was that at some point the site became noticed by the band.

Dean mentioned in an interview in the mailing lists early days about having signed up to the list but being troubled by the factual errors that he didn’t feel able to correct, and, in a 2018 interview, Damon confirmed that the web site had found a place in Galaxie 500’s history:

Here’s where the web – and specifically your site – enters the story. Cause Jeff Rougvie got Don Rose interested, and we managed to get everyone on our end together, and we made a contract. And then nothing happened. Cause here’s another problem with having a defunct band: there’s no urgency. No upcoming tour or recording or promo opportunity to pin it to. It’s just a project in a folder in a pile on a desk – it could happen anytime. Or never.

But then Jeff hired a young assistant – maybe she was even an intern at first? – named Andrea Troolin, and Andrea found the project in that pile and made it hers. How to rally the company behind finally doing something with it, however? Your web site! Andrea pointed to the Galaxie 500 mailing list, and the activity on it, as evidence that there was interest out there in the band and its out-of-print catalogue. Next thing you know… box set!

Damon Krukowski - Terrascopaedia #13

So what I was doing was on the band’s radar - but what I was doing was never for the band - it was always for the fans, and the reverse of Dean’s issues were that once the band were aware of the fans did that change how the fans communicate amongst themselves? Or what I chose to, or chose not to, publish on the web site?

I think in both cases it would be hard not to think that there wasn’t an impact. Obviously the web site was rarely very critical but I don’t doubt that once I knew that the band members were aware of it I was more considered in my language and my content, although subconsciously. However, on the mailing list I suspect it was more noticeable.

When Lee joined the band in 1997 there was a bit of negativity - based, in retrospect, not because of any deficiency on Lee’s part, but purely because he wasn’t Stan. But some fans vented. But as fans, that’s what the community was for - would it have happened if a band member had been on the list (or I guess rather, if we KNEW that a band member was on the list?)

I remember - and am slightly embarrassed at this - taking a particularly hard-line in a discussion not because I believed what I was saying but because I didn’t like the idea that these things shouldn’t be said for fear of offending the band. In my head I offended the band - in reality I imagine no one noticed. I still wince at the thought.

Shortly after joining the band in 2000 Britta signed up to the mailing list and became a moderately active member of the list - giving us insights and insider knowledge. She often also felt a bit like a fan - she was sort of one of us. But as a member of one of the bands we discussed did that change the dynamic? Did we tone down for fear of offence? Did we hold back?

By the time Luna split in 2005, Britta’s place on the mailing list was accepted - the list dynamic may have changed, but it had settled into what it was - it had become a prototype of fan-artist relationship in the age of social media, but that is a whole can of worms I don’t think I’m knowledgeable, or articulate enough to open - luckily it has been well analysed, albeit mostly from an artists perspective, in Nancy Baym’s Playing to The Crowd.

Obviously any relationship is two-way and the fan now can’t avoid being a more significant part of a band’s existence - what was “word of mouth” in the olden days has inevtably become a more important part of promotion now that the “mouth” reaches further than a few folk around a pub table.

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Part 3 - breaking down barriers

By 2006 MySpace had become more than a social network, but an integral part of an artist’s promotional merry-go-round - it was hard to ignore when the likes of Lily Allen and The Arctic Monkeys had found the value of connecting more directly with the fans. In early 2006 Naomi set up a MySpace page for Damon & Naomi which inspired me to write a blog post:

So Damon & Naomi have signed up with MySpace - it seems an intevitability of modern music that any (indie) band worth their salt (and a billion others not worth the time of day) have to have a page on the social networking nightmare. The site is built on false and forced friendships that would be better established in more apprpriate fora. Sign up and wait for the "girls" to invite you to look at their webcams. Enjoy the poorly laid out and ugly pages. Keep having complete strangers ask to be your "friend" without any introduction or relationship build-up.

Maybe it is a valuable tool for the struggling indie or a way to communicate with the fans for those feeling out-of-touch but I can't help feeling that this sort of fake social community built on imaginary relationships is a sad way for the Internet to be going.

I despise MySpace - Everything's Swirling, 6th February 2006

It was then decided that it would make sense to have an official Galaxie 500 one presence, since there were already a number of fake/unofficial ones.

Damon however had clearly not seen the rant when he emailed me “do you want to run an official [MySpace page]? Basically, we feel you have a ‘right of first refusal,’ as #1 fan!” (Hazel found the #1 fan comment hilarious, making references to The King of Comedy.

Since I had the “right of first refusal” I, sort of refused, linking to the above blog post and suggesting that I was maybe not best suited to the job.

I think if you don't have any problems with the current unofficial page (which I haven't managed to track down as yet) then maybe they'd do a better job of running it anyway as they have probably embraced the whole MySpace thing.

Email to Damon - 7th February 2006

Although it wasn’t just not liking MySpace there was also the crossover from being a fan which I was good at, to being an official representative of the band which was something I had no idea about.

But Damon persisted “That blog entry about MySpace is funny and not inaccurate – at the same time, it does mention that you are already a member… Sure you don’t want to take us up on the offer?”

And eventually I conceded and for a while I was Galaxie 500 on MySpace. It was a strange and mostly thankless task - there was no community, mostly users promoting themselves and rarely had any connection or knowledge of the band… but I accepted every friend request because… who was I to decide who was genuine and who wasn’t - and did I have the time (or inclination) to investigate. I was also completely reactive - there was no sign of me going out there and selling Galaxie 500. I’d reply when I could, pass on or ignore when I couldn’t.

To be honest the home page became just another outlet for A Head Full of Wishes. I’m not entirely sure what happened next - after a few years I think a MySpace redesign made it harder, and easier not to care about. Maybe I’m still officially Galaxie 500 on MySpace… but who cares about MySpace any more.

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Since this is already far too long, and is rather chaotic I’d best leave it there for now. This isn’t really ready but I@m going to post it anyway.