In the first of a new monthly essay series on music, we explore how messageboards became a meeting point for 00s music fans – and how, after being killed off by social media, they might rise again
Back in the 00s, I ran an online music forum, most of whose regulars were bored office workers. Once, we made a sketchy calculation, based on rates of posting and average wages, of how much the site had cost the UK economy in terms of time wasted arguing about Daft Punk, Outkast, Britney and more. We estimated that around £1.7m of productivity had been gloriously frittered.
Music attracts conversation like a magnet pulls iron filings, and the form that talk takes changes according to where music lovers hang out with one another. Milk bars in the 50s; “head shops”, fuggy student digs and record stores in the 60s and 70s; fanzines in the 80s and 90s. These days, the word gets spread via memes, like those earnest pleas for 10 Facebook friends to share their favourite teenage albums. And in the early 00s, there were music forums: Drowned in Sound, my own I Love Music, Barbelith, Dissensus, Hipinion and dozens of others, fierce little enclaves of snark, in-jokes and bubbling enthusiasm.
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