By: Kayla Vianna
Before the days of social media, concerts and live shows had to find other ways to promote their events — and now, it seems like that trend may be making a comeback.
Concert promotions have been shifting away from social media. People in the local Athens scene have gotten disillusioned with the algorithmization of culture and returned to the old ways of promotion. Legacy alternative media formats are growing. College students are grabbing the same alternative newspaper printed since the 90s and checking the events calendar. You can find new free zines in many coffee shops and stores with show lists and even local music reviews (and silly entries like “Sunburnt Townies Guide to AthFest”). Show flyers and posters are hung around every light post and bar downtown, and many times it’s a show I hadn’t heard about. The college radio station, WUOG, many local shows happening every top-of-the-hour and have their own concert series on air.
That isn’t to say that online promotion isn’t still happening online. ATHENSDIY.NET is a fediverse syndicated website that lists the many DIY shows happening in Athens. Even though it skews more on the Punk side of music, it often lists the more electronic music with the similar punk mentality like Rauncher and Obscurity. A prominent zine in town, Hoi Palloi, has a newsletter that offers some extra resources not in the printed version.
This shift back into “old media” could be a larger symptom of distaste toward algorithms. Many of my peers feel that social media hasn’t made us more social but instead drove us apart. The answer, we’re finding, is that a return to the “old” may just be what’s healthy in the long run.