Community
Online communities are digital spaces that can be used for interacting with others who share particular interests. They can potentially be an aid in the learning process and budding musicians may seek out these communities as part of an alternative to paying for traditional music education, or an additive to music education in school. I took a look at one such community on Reddit: the subreddit r/WeAreMusicMakers.
Self-described as “a place for music makers to discuss the music-making process (and a few closely related endeavors),” r/WeAreMusicMakers subreddit was created in 2018 and has 2.5 million members. It is in the top one percent of subreddit groups ranked by size. Most of the currently active members seem to be people who are interested in writing, producing, or performing music, either as a career or a serious hobby. Some are interested in releasing music as an indie artist.
There are rules regarding what can be posted in the group, which sharply limit the types of conversations that can be discussed there. Most of these rules are aimed at keeping the group on subject while also reducing or eliminating the types of questions that could be easily answered with a quick google search.
Conversation
I joined r/WeAreMusicMakers as just an observer, to start. Much of the discussions seemed to be geared towards my own demographic: the space between learning how to play music in a structured environment, and effectively being able to do something with music in the real world.
I noticed a recent post about practicing alone. It struck me as a very real and relevant question. Connecting with people can be so difficult. Fitness enthusiasts understand that getting to the gym to work out is difficult, which is one reason some people put together gyms in their homes. How much harder would you expect it to be to go out and practice effectively with other musicians? Finding people with similar skills, playing the instruments you need, interested in the same genre, with similar schedule availability can be nearly impossible, yet individuals still desire to put in the work to level up their craft. Often this means practicing alone. I once spent months trying to organize a series of jam sessions with some fellow musicians, only to have a couple of barely attended. In this group I could see the camaraderie between group members who also identified with the issue.
Reddit’s interface allows users in this group to organize posts by “Hot,” “New,” and “Top.” If “Top” is chosen, the option to choose a date range appears. In order to get a feel for the group, I chose to take a peek at the top posts from the last month.
I didn’t see a lot about music theory, which is an important aspect of understanding music. The subreddit about music theory has switched over to private in protest of some recent changes that Reddit has made. Just a few of those theory related questions seem to be spilling over into r/WeAreMusicMakers. These kinds of questions can be very helpful for musicians to be able to ask when they are attempting to learn concepts but aren’t sure exactly where to search for answers. The below user was wondering about how to classify a specific type of chord substitution, something that can be difficult to find out without just asking, since she didn’t know the right word to describe the particular concept.
Bonding and Beliefs
Perhaps the most unifying theme here is the obvious: a belief that music is important and worth pursuing. People are not questioning that in this space. They are questioning and discussing the specifics of how it should be pursued, but not the value of music in general. Learning, inspiration, and interacting with others of similar interests are listed as top benefits of online communities, in general, and this group seems to be attracting people who are looking for exactly those things as they relate to their musical pursuits.
https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/top-benefits-of-online-communities
The most active threads in the forum are the weekly feedback threads. Although self promotion is prohibited in the rules, it is permissible to post one song per week in the weekly feedback thread. I checked in on this one just 9 hours after it had been posted and there were already 95 comments.
The fact that this is the most active part of this community is unsurprising, but also telling. People want to be seen and heard. Few feel that music should be made in a vacuum. It is meant to be shared, but that can be quite challenging. The community exists because people are looking for connections with others who share their interest in making music, and also with these popular weekly threads, gives them a space to share their music. I listened to the first four or five tracks and each of them had identifiable issues that need to be fixed if they want to achieve commercial success, which is OK, because they are i process. They do not need to have achieved their end goal to use the space for interacting with others. There is value in sharing the journey. That is something that I noticed about YouTube. You can go to watch things and you can post things meant to be watch, but the in process interaction is largely missing. Perhaps Reddit is filling a slight bit of that void as it hosts a portion of the online music community.
Limitations
On the main board, though, where self promotion posts are not allowed, it seems to result in a lot of interesting discussions being deleted. I saw one where someone had posted something about their composition process including a video they had shared about it, and they asked about how others processes differ from theirs. I saw the preview in a tab I had left open, but the post was gone once I clicked on it, with a message about self promoting from the moderators.
This post looked for all the world to me like the kind of thing that would spark some good conversation, not the same as a simple self promotion of “listen to my music,” and I was disappointed to see that it wasn’t allowed. It wasn’t the kind of thing that would fit well in the weekly feedback thread, either, so I think it is probably a negative thing for the group that this particular post was removed, and I can only assume it wasn’t an isolated ocurence.
Conclusion
Reddit is something that I have been interested in checking out but had never seriously done before. In this little experiment of digging in to this particular reddit community, I was simply an observer, but I can envision myself lightly interacting with it in the near future if it can survive the changes that Reddit is going through. Unfortunately, as a tool to fill the community gap that exists in online learning, I do think the limitations on what can be posted causes this subreddit to fall short of the mark.