Art by Evan Solano
William Reed loves being a joint, it’s fantastic.
I’ve grown increasingly weary of the modern music fan. As someone who loves and produces music, I’ve watched as would-be connoisseurs have gradually become more selfish, entitled, and disinterested in the humanity of the artists they profess to love. Album rollouts are now routinely disrupted by data leaks, and the private lives of musicians (and their teams), are treated as public property. But perhaps most unsettling is the trend of fans speaking about artist metrics with the confidence of label executives. This rise of a pseudo-industry mindset has led fans to judge new releases by first-week sales, streams, and YouTube views rather than feeling, form, and quality.
Living in our current Age of Information has its benefits and its drawbacks. On the one hand, the playing field has been leveled; a wealth of industry knowledge is freely available at the tap of a finger on a smartphone screen. On the other hand, American society has responded to the influx of data by embracing anti-intellectualism. With the rise of AI, the increasing uselessness of Google search and the ubiquity of ChatGPT and Grok, it can seem like the entire state of music discourse has been flooded by erroneous and arguably preprogrammed misinformation.
It was to be somewhat expected that the casual music listener would want to know more about the music industry. The entertainment business has been historically glamorized, and with online hyperconnectivity fans started to realize that music industry executives are often just regular people like them. After all, this is a world where faking it until they “make it” is more of a rule than an exception. With the cat now fully out of its metaphorical bag, we are now living in the Age of Spectator Expertise®, or perhaps more fittingly, the Age of Access Without Credentials®, where fans no longer interact with art solely through admiration of its creative merit, but instead through a business lens, obsessing over metrics and engagement like it’s a sports stat sheet or corporate KPI dashboard as their company of one.
The most egregious music takes I’ve seen that echo this disgusting new trend have come from DJ Akademiks. I do not know him, but I think he’s extremely lame based solely on his online persona. I understand that DJ Akademiks is a caricature created by Livingston Allen for the sake of financial gain, so sure, maybe I will meet him in person one day and he turns out to be a cool, regular guy. Who knows? Unfortunately, based on the online antics alone, I believe not only has he contributed nothing of value to hip-hop culture, but he’s actually one of the key figures responsible for encouraging this bizarre, metric-based discourse that dominates modern fandom.
It’s clear that Ak is a Drake stan, and while there’s nothing inherently wrong with stanning your favorite artist, it’s obvious that he uses his platform to push narratives around Drake, and a handful of other “industry friends,” regarding dominance in the business, based solely on performance metrics. Every week, Ak posts album chart positions and first-week sales numbers to his millions of followers, usually to prop up his favorites and chastise his so-called “opps.” These posts and streams are broadcast to his “Chatty Patty Nigga” audience, but the narrative often snowballs beyond his platform.
Non-Akademiks viewers have adopted the same tactics, weaponizing data to defend or diminish their favorite and least favorite artists alike. And look, I get it: first-week sales have been a media talking point long before Akademiks was making light of the deadly realities surrounding Chicago’s drill scene. But there was a time when those numbers actually carried weight: Pre-streaming.
Before playlists, bots, and Travis Scott album bundles blurred the lines, when artists had to move actual units, pulling thousands, even millions, of people to leave their homes and buy physical media. Now? It’s more noise than signal. For the record: to all the armchair A&Rs reading this, first-week sales in the streaming era don’t matter. They’re just another marketing tool, and like clockwork, the internet’s most vocal “industry experts” keep falling for it.
The obsession with metrics has real consequences. The constant spotlight on numbers, rather than artistry, is already affecting artists in ways fans rarely acknowledge. First being Artistic Safety. Artists are increasingly discouraged from experimenting, knowing they risk public mockery if their work doesn’t generate big streams or chart placements. This obsession with “performance” stifles creativity, delays releases, and chips away at the confidence artists need to take risks, push boundaries, or simply drop something new without fear of “flopping.”
Next, Homogenization. Labels, reacting to the same data-driven culture, are incentivized to chase algorithm-friendly artists, sounds, and formulas. Riskier, genre-bending projects and potential signees get pushed aside in favor of what feels “safe.” We have music designed to hit benchmarks, not break ground. Finally, we have the Erosion of Cultural Value. Timeless music doesn’t always perform well in real time. But when numbers dominate the conversation, fans and media alike begin to misjudge what’s actually meaningful or lasting. Case in point: genre-defining projects like Madvillainy by Madlib and the late DOOM, or Barter 6 by Atlanta’s Mount Rushmore-featured Young Thug, were far from chart-toppers at release. Metrics-wise, they underperformed. Culturally? They’re canon.
But the damage isn’t limited to artists or the industry, it affects these very same fans. When listeners become armchair analysts, they start relating to music intellectually, not emotionally. Instead of asking, “How does this make me feel?” the question becomes, “How did it perform?” The numbers-first mindset turns fandom into combat. Artists are pitted against each other based on data points, not artistic merit. It’s less about discovering new music, and more about winning online arguments. Everything becomes a debate. Everything becomes content. Over time, this erodes the simple joy of being a fan, of pressing play, vibing out, and loving something just because it speaks to you.
While this metric-obsessed fan culture has its drawbacks, there’s a very clear upside… For the industry. Fans are now doing the job that used to be reserved for marketers and label execs. The same fans who once rallied behind Lil Uzi Vert during the “Free Uzi” campaign, calling out GenerationNow for allegedly trapping Lil Uzi in a bad contract (an industry tale as old as time) are now helping those very systems thrive. Fans are running free promo for major-label cash cows, defending uninspired and mid projects simply because they charted, and helping content creators who thrive off virality and uninformed hot takes stay in business.
This environment doesn’t elevate new voices. It buries them. The same fans who once championed the underground stars of the Blog Era and SoundCloud generation are now enabling a culture that overlooks the weirdos, the niche gods, the independent innovators. Music discovery is suffering. And in its place? Repackaged, recycled content sold to us as “success,” all validated by manipulated metrics and fake momentum. Maybe that’s why DJ Akademiks keeps saying there haven’t been any new “stars” in rap. Maybe the machine he helped build is now eating itself.
Since you’ve made it this far, you may be asking, “How should I interact with music?” The answer is simple: do you like the music or not? Does the music sound good to you? Okay, great! That’s it.
I am fully aware that this all could just be an AARP unc rant, as I am turning 29 in August. This may be me flexing the fact that I work in the music industry, though I am self-admittedly the littlest of lil bros, in the grand scheme of success in the music industry. However, I have a couple Billboard plaques, one being a Gold record, my family is somewhat proud of me, and I’ve been blessed to meet good people and learn valuable lessons along the way, so I’m thankful, but not yet content. As someone who deeply cares about the art, it pains me to see the direction music fandom has gone and the path it’s barrelling down. So remember: first week sales don’t matter that much, don’t be a victim of major label mass-marketing, and most importantly–unfollow DJ Akademiks.
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