Karli Fairbanks

Until the last year or so, I never gave a great deal of thought to social media or what that pair of words even meant, really. I used a lot of social media, presumably understanding what it was for, but didn’t spend a lot of time dissecting its greater implications beyond how I personally related to it. And typically, I’ve related to it in the simplest, most direct way possible.

AIM and mIRC were probably my earliest introduction to social media besides Makeout Club, and I’m not yet willing to admit that I know anything about that particular website. Blogspot/Blogger was a signifcant step forward. Blogspot meant you could moan about girls that didn’t like you to a – presumably – wider audience than the 4 friends that happened to be in a room with you (or alternatively, you had an audience when those 4 friends got fed up and left the room). ‘Now my friend in Oregon can read about my deep, dark emotions and I don’t have to call him and rack up a massive long-distance bill talking about those same deep, dark emotions!’. You could also encounter similarly bitter kindred spirits who could then become your ‘internet crush’.

Then came LiveJournal, which was more or less like Blogspot but you could pick who had access to your feelings and who didn’t (usually, everyone was granted access until one day you got too honest, which resulted in a friend feud or breakup, and suddenly everyone’s journals were ‘private’). Then came Myspace, which enabled you to further alienate your friends by excluding them from your highly coveted ‘Top Friends’ lineup. Added features included the ability to alienate the remaining friends by constantly bombarding them with bulletins about the 12 different places you were DJing that weekend.

Now we have Facebook and Twitter, of course, which are more or less the same thing (aside from the 140 character limitation). There are more options than previous social media incarnations, and we can now determine exactly how annoyed we’re willing to be by our remaining friends (if any are left) under the guise of ‘privacy’.

I primarily use Facebook and Twitter to keep up with people I personally know, and secondarily as an alternative way to increase the reach of this blog. I really only need to use the most basic functions of either site in order to accomplish those two tasks. But obviously you can do a great many more things than simply updating your status. I wouldn’t give most of those functions a second thought if not for the fact that in these last few years while I’ve been trying a hand at this blogging business, I end up interacting with information differently, and many of the people I end up interacting with via these sites are paid to think about how we all interact via social media platforms. Wrap your head around that one!

As a result, I’ve given a lot more thought to how and why I use certain media tools like Twitter. I’ve referenced Christopher Weingarten several times in the last weeks (am I obsessing?), but one of the issues he’s been addressing lately just so happens to be how we use and interact with social media. He uses his Twitter to issue 140 character album reviews, for example. But he also complains that Twitter removes ‘the why’ when it comes to music. He mentions the #musicmonday and #followfriday hash tags, which are used to recommend interesting music and Twitter users, respectively. Often, the tags are used and simply followed by the name of a song or the name of a blog. So Christopher’s argument is that when you do that, you’re failing to provide a compelling reason as to why anyone should follow your advice. It’s not an unreasonable argument.

What I think he fails to take into account is that you likely already have an opinion about the Twitter user’s taste before you start following them (or soon thereafter). Unless you’re simply following anyone that follows you, or are trying to get more friends than Stephen Fry. But more often than not, the individuals following you that would actually take time to listen to your recommendations have already formed an opinion about your reliability, and you are in fact helping to refine that opinion every time you make one. Even though I have a fairly broad musical taste, I think the people that actually pay attention could probably make reasonable predictions about what I might like or dislike. The people that don’t pay attention…well, why worry about them?

Look at it this way – I receive a fair number of visitors to this site per day. But out of those visitors, I know the greater percentage is likely to skim, grab mp3s and move on. This is the simple reality of the current blogosphere. But there’s a decent chunk of that audience that appears to be interested in more. They subscribe to the RSS feed, they comment on articles, enter contests, write me emails, etc. I also measure this audience through the ‘bounce rate’, one of the few metrics I keep a close eye on. It basically tells you what percentage of the people that visit your blog simply drop in and vanish, and how many dig deeper. That number has been steadily dropping (meaning fewer people making hit-and-runs), and I’d like to think that’s because they like something about the way I’m presenting the various artists to them, or otherwise feel that my taste is trustworthy. Maybe I’m being optimistic or overestimating my appeal, but I still hope that’s true.

What does any of this have to do with the artist I originally set out to share with you (and named the post after)? It just so happens that I stumbled onto her via a trusted friend’s Tweet. He didn’t provide any exposition beyond ’she’s great!’, but because I know the kind of artists he usually recommends, I didn’t need anything else. And it’s that leap of faith that led me think about how all of these elements end up working together. Would I have heard about her without the benefit of Twitter? Maybe another blog has written or is planning on doing a writeup on her, but I can only read so many blogs in a day. It’s with that realization that Twitter’s skill with brevity becomes clear and obviously beneficial.

Now that I’ve gone on forever about social media and my weird and disjointed thoughts about it, I need to say something about the wonderful Karli Fairbanks, though I think I’ve used up all my words in the preceding paragraphs. She’s described on her Myspace as folk/blues/country, though I’m not sure that tells you much of anything – and I don’t happen to think she sounds much like any of the 3 genres mentioned. I guess in some circles quiet automatically equals folk. She reminds me of Hope Sandoval in some ways, and I suppose you could call Hope a sort of alt-country chanteuse, so I imagine Karli might sit comfortably in that description as well. Her vocals have some of Laura Marling’s emotional frailty, and she benefits from the sparse production in most of her songs (some of them could have easily been made in a bedroom or bathroom). A really powerful, lovely voice.

Now, I’ll admit this song I’m sharing is a bit country, but her newer material that you can stream on her Myspace is less so. Still a lovely song, however!

Karli Fairbanks – The Same Book

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