Old School Music Community
What did we lose when Facebook killed forums?
Photo by Sean Benesh on Unsplash
(this article is adapted from an original post on Lofi Cody’s Patreon, July 14th 2025)
Do you remember the days of forums and community message boards on the internet? There are a few rare ones that still exist today but generally, forums were part of a fairly short-lived golden era of the internet. If you’re any more than a couple years younger than me, there is a good chance you missed it. Yet some of my best memories of the internet came from this era before Facebook killed Myspace and social media as we know it today began taking shape. There was a huge variety of message boards for every interest and niche you could imagine, but the best ones were centred around bands.
In band forums you knew everyone was there for one reason: you loved the same music. True there were “trolls” who lived for stirring up controversy. But there were no winds of the algorithm dragging in unwanted strangers, so you felt a closer sense of community with the people who were there. In band forums, I got to help pioneer early memes and inside jokes around my favourite artists and connect with diverse and distant people over our shared taste in music. And every so often you’d see the tag under a username “[band] member” and it felt surreal that the musicians you respected would honour you by gracing these humble message boards. Mind you, I was also a teenager. Adolescence is wild and tends to make music sound better, slushies taste better, and every song with some vaguely emotional undertones cut so much deeper.
But undoubtedly something has shifted in the way we communicate online. Social media is about you. You get a feed of content specifically and scientifically designed to keep your attention as long as possible so you watch more ads and give more revenue to tech millionaires so they can become tech billionaires. Even streaming services have taken this shape. I recently heard from some students that “the point of Spotify” is to just click a mood playlist or a daily mix and passively consume whatever the oligarchs have chosen for you.
If you’ve been following me for a while you’ve probably heard me say that my not-so-secret agenda is that I want to build community. While music should be a tool I can leverage to do this, it’s becoming more and more the case that the people who listen to my music don’t know or particularly care who I am. And if you don’t care enough to reach out on some other platform, I don’t even have the opportunity to know who you are. One of the coolest things about Bandcamp relative to Spotify or other streaming platforms is that I can see when someone buys a track. I see your username and your tiny profile picture and I can think “YES!!! WaffleIronFan93 is the coolest person ever!” And I love that because despite what the algorithms think, you are a person and not a number. And people are quite necessary for building community.
So what’s my point in all this? Well besides appealing to your innate sense of longing for simpler times viewed through rose-coloured glasses to subconsciously endear you toward me (I’ve been reading marketing books). I’m hoping I can pitch you a vision of what I’m trying to do as an individual creator and through my company Humble Beats. Let me put it in a numbered list because I have ADHD and I’m a huge sucker for lists
1. Humans are Created for Connection
Too much of the world today is designed to isolate us and have us thinking as insular individuals separate from our communities because isolated individuals need to each buy their own air fryer rather than sharing one as a community. But humans are created for connection. Call it evolutionary survival instinct or intentional design, regardless there is a reason why solitary confinement is an especially cruel punishment. We need connection. If I can accomplish anything through my music or anything else I do I hope that I can bring people together and build community.
2. Music and Art Influence our Thinking and Priorities
Sometimes the influence of art is obvious and sometimes it’s subtle, but we always become what we consume. Consuming mindlessly makes you susceptible to influence and the proposed trajectory of music creation and consumption culture these last couple of years has been towards maximal mindlessness. I hope that I can encourage people to think about what they are consuming and who is behind it. To appreciate the artists who make meaningful art and reject the mindless noise of corporate sociopaths.
3. Collaboration Encourages Ownership
Ever wonder how Ikea continues to be such a prevalent furniture manufacturer when their furniture is B-tier at best? Affordability I’m sure is part of it, but at a deeper level, Ikea plays on a truth that we feel more attachment to things we helped create. By assembling your own Kallax or Friheten you subconsciously feel a deeper ownership towards it than if it was just dropped off by some movers. My hope is that I can give you all (my friends and fans presumably) an opportunity to move beyond consumption and become a collaborator in this whole journey. Not just so that you like it more but so you can share in the joy of creating and being part of something, a community larger than yourself. We’ve seen this at some level already with Johnnie Bailey becoming a writer for the Humble Report and Chiho doing a lot of the artwork for recent Humble Beats releases and we’re actively looking to incorporate more people in this quest to make honest music and cozy communities. So if you’d like to get involved, we’d love to have you!
Ready to join the Humble family? Join the community Discord
Want more from Lofi Cody follow him on Instagram or Patreon