The band Muse has surrendered its Instagram and X handles to Meta after the release of its new AI agent, Muse.
The English rock band Muse has been renamed on Instagram and X from “Muse” to “museband.”
Despite the band Muse having had its Instagram account since 2012 and its X account since 2008, it has seemingly surrendered the handle to Mark Zuckerberg’s newest AI agent.
"Surrendered" is only applicable if the band had a choice.
Remember folks, calling out shitty wording is necessary to defeat propoganda.
I bet they got paid, but don’t want to disclose that. I hope it was enough to be worth it, and would be hilarious if they announced leaving the platform after the checks clear, but they probably won’t.
They had a choice. They chose to advertise themselves on the "Grandma's Racist Rants And Old White Guys With Sunglasses Who Hate Poor People" platform. Color me shocked that it's turning out to have been a bad choice.
I absolutely hate that so many people still use these shit platforms run my the worst people on the planet. That said, if you are famous, there is a dilemma where, if you refuse to use these platforms, someone will make a fake account that purports to be you.
Not just famous. There are impersonators everywhere, low effort and cost and you probably won't be punished for it. It's the next level of spam.
They've had their accounts since 08 and 12. Its harder for a band of their size and fame to just leave these platforms than it is for a regular person, and most regular people still go on Instagram at least if not Twitter as well.
Bullshit. They are the ones that can trailblaze that is exactly what Reznor and Bowie among many many others did. They don't want to, that's fine. This is what happens though, subjected to the whims of the platform owner.
You say "hard" like it's a thing they are in some way bein restrained from doing. I mean, by anything other than their own greed.
I squat my name on Twitter because I don't want it taken. I don't use the platform except to log in periodically to keep it active.
I would be pissed if it were taken from me.
Does that make me greedy?
Sounds reasonable if you give a shit about what people who still use Xitter think. Doesn't sound anything like what Muse and artists like them do though.
No, but what you describe doesn't generalize to the real situation we're talking about here.
It's not that I care what people on that platform think. It's that I care what shows up in search engines and whether my brand is diluted by people other than me.
And that is exactly the same thing at stake for bands and the like.
Headlines don't get unprinted. If Muse quit Facebook or Instagram, especially after already having a presence there, it would be trivial for someone to swipe their brand identity and start posting horrible shit to generate headlines. And that is a bell that can't be unrung, in addition to having material cost to address if and when it happens.
And I haven't even mentioned the network effect.
Brand management is really difficult and even more delicate. Maintaining a token presence on some of the most popular platforms in the world is a no-brainer for anyone who cares about their brand.
I think it's fair to ask extremely popular, highly visible bands and such to take a stand and loudly quit these platforms.
I don't think it's fair to expect it of them.
So get an actually original brand name and sue people who fuck with you.
And it would be equally trivial for anyone to communicate to the world that they do not use facebook or insta, and that if anyone shows up there under the brand name they're a fake. It's not a parking lot. They're not in your space. If they impersonate you that's, again, something you could take them to court over. At no point are you required to support a pro-fascist platform by showing up to make sure nobody pretends to be you in a place nobody who cares about you should ever go. Holy shit, how is this hard to grasp.
My brand is completely unique. That doesn't mean I have the time or money to sue every schmuck who decides to impersonate me on whatever platform.
It is patently ridiculous to say "leave the most popular platform, which many, many users use as their only social platform, and communicate the fact that anyone on there isn't you via less popular platforms". You do understand the flaw in that logic, right?
As I said before, it is reasonable to ask this of highly successful people but it's not reasonable to expect it, IMO. Especially not when their economic success isn't just lining their own pockets but also feeding the families of every person who works for them.
You are trying to turn a complex, interconnected decision tree into something one-dimensional. It's always tempting to reduce these things to a single axis but it is rarely appropriate
I think it would work better in reverse. If ordinary people left Twitter and meta in droves, the brands would follow. Most people haven't. The ones with bluesky accounts, the main viable alternative, are way fewer.
I created a Twitter account back when it first came out. Never posted. Never used it. But every month I get emails about someone trying to sign into my account. I dont want a bot or something worse impersonating me.
There are multiple people I follow who announced they were quitting Twitter for good and moving to other platforms. Their viewership and followers declined a huge amount.
People also have spent decades on these platforms and have memories and links and photos saved that can't be exported. Even when they can be, its a whole process most people are not that computer literate.
I completely agree that people should stop using these platforms. I think most people here do too. But expecting it to be easy and fast is a lot.
I don't expect that. I just expect a band that got rich making anti-establishment, anti-fascist music to eat shit when they turn out to be hypocrites.
While true, they also advertised themselves on a platform most Americans use.
Say what you want about someone's ability to not use a social media platform in the first place, but if you're a band that depends on... people, it's hard to just decide not to put yourself out there on a platform where so many people are.
The network effect is real. It's where people's friends, family, celebrities, bands, etc all are. Leaving means leaving people who are important to you.
A lot of people find it easier to leave platforms like Twitter now, because the platform is such a shell of its former self that it doesn't even provide what many people originally came there for, but if you're on Instagram, Facebook, etc, it still often provides people with easy communication to/from family and friends, and organizations like bands with access to an audience, promotion, visibility, etc.
Leaving the platform means leaving fans, and giving up visibility. I wish everyone could just quit Meta's platforms and crush the company, but there's a very simple collective action problem at play here that makes it very difficult, don't discount that.
I think it applies differently to famous, rich, figures who already have an audience. They could loudly announce they're leaving facebook. A chunk of their fans would follow. They're already rich, they can tank losing some fans. It would be better for everyone to get people off Facebook platforms and onto open ones.
Some local band that's struggling to get their first EP out I could maybe cut some slack on going to where the people are.
That's fair. Still, I do think it's a tad unreasonable to expect of people, when it can significantly impact their popularity and thus their income, when the actual effect of them leaving is usually that... essentially nothing happens to the company they're leaving from.
Unfortunately, Facebook and its users likely won't care much if someone leaves the platform, as long as they can keep scrolling. It's gotta be on a very large scale, with a lot of people giving up portions of their audience before more people start genuinely moving to alternatives.
Sure, like King Gizzard left spotify and put their music on bandcamp. They got some press about it. Some of my friends went to bandcamp to get their music, even. But the vast majority of people still just use spotify. People don't care about things, especially if it would be inconvenient.
It's still good to get people off private platforms.
tl;dr fascist bootlicker apologia
I'd hardly call explaining the network effect and collective action problem fascist apologia, but you do you.
All I'm saying is you can't expect someone to leave behind most of their audience's primary way of communicating with them scot-free. There are always consequences.
Let's say they stop posting on Instagram. Out of those 2.7 million followers, only a fraction will find them on another platform, and thus they simply lose their ability to message to all the people they left behind. That hurts them.
You can still think it's a net good for society for them to leave, or that it would meaningfully hurt Facebook (it wouldn't unless most people also left, but again, collective action problem), but you can't act like they don't face consequences by doing it. It's not "fascist bootlicker apologia" to say that leaving some of your audience behind on a platform reduces your audience.
Another wall of text excusing bad behavior. Hey yo I am not gonna read entire essays about this shit in a comments thread. Pare it down a bit.
If you can't spend a minute and a half reading, you don't have any ground to stand on in calling my point "fascist apologia".
Either be willing to actually assess what I'm saying on its merits, or keep just going with your gut instinct and instantly responding to anything that's even remotely contradictory to your opinion by calling it fascist, but that doesn't change the point being made.
If you don't care to even read my point in the first place, I don't care to respond further, since you're clearly not interested in anything other than feeling self-righteous without thinking about it.
That's strike three bud. Byebye.
Have you considered not being a lazy and low effort asshole?
Have you considered not making excuses for rich people who support fascists?
Sorry your rambling answer was too long and stupid, I didnt bother to read it.
Oh, I know this one! It's pretending to be an idiot on purpose! You know, there's a great website for people like you. I think it's called fakebunch, falsebank, something like that.
The amount of vitriol you have spewed into the fediverse over your 2 months here is quite impressive for somebody with a link to their patreon in their profile. You know, theres a great phrase for people like you. I think it goes something like "you'll catch more flies with honey than the shit coming out of your mouth", something like that.
Yeah, it's because I stand up for what I believe in no matter whether money is involved. You could learn a thing from my example and stop making excuses for rich people who support fascists.
Note to self: the best way to fight fascism is to talk shit at my target audience.
You could learn a thing or two from every other poster here and stop making excuses for your own own vitriolic rhetoric fetching you negative feedback.
Skill Issue
Reading that took my wife (unbiased/unprompted observer) roughly 11 seconds, and she just got home after 36 hours in the ER in massive pain and on as much IV morphine as the hospital was allowed to administer until about 10pm last night.
after being in the industry for a quartercentury, they prolly belong to that grandma old guy w sunglasses group themselves haha.