I came to last.fm believing in kinship, that shared sound could make strangers legible to one another. I sent careful messages to people whose libraries mirrored mine, thinking resonance might bridge the distance.

Most never answered. A few flickered in, then drifted out again. I reread my own words, searching for the moment I misstepped.

The platform promised community, but what it rewarded was self-curation. Scrobbles became performance. Taste became currency. Devotion became another way to arrange the self for view.

I didn’t leave in anger. Just tiredness. You can only speak into silence for so long before your breath begins to sound foolish, even to you.

There is a particular grief in watching “community” curdle into content.

Forums became engagement loops. Discords filled with motion but not presence. Timelines flattened passion into brand identity and made recommendation feel indistinguishable from self-advertisement. The language of enthusiasm stayed intact, but the conditions that once made enthusiasm feel human kept thinning out underneath it.

People say they love music without ever really listening to it. Not with the body. Not with the kind of attention that risks being changed. Songs became evidence of taste before they could remain encounters. Discovery became quicker, broader, more efficient, and far less intimate.

I do not mourn some perfect past. I know older spaces had their own failures, exclusions, and performances. But I do mourn what felt possible: the idea that shared listening might create actual nearness, that taste might open into conversation instead of branding, that sincerity could appear without immediately being flattened into posture.

I don’t mourn what never existed.

I mourn what felt possible.

I deleted accounts the way other people delete text messages: compulsively, hoping removal could undo exposure.

The pattern was always the same. I would write something passionate, detailed, too much. Hours later the shame would arrive. Why did I say that? Who asked for a paragraph? Why do I always sound like more than the room can hold?

My mind does not work in neat portions. It pours when it should measure. It fixates when it should move on. It re-examines every word for proof I failed some invisible test.

So I would delete the comment. Then the account. Then start over with a new name, convinced this version of me might finally learn to be brief. Palatable. Normal.

Each new account was a prayer: maybe this version of me will finally belong.

They never did. Because the problem was never only the name. It was a platform that mistakes enthusiasm for performance, depth for disorder, and visible feeling for instability.

I wasn’t unstable. I was trying to exist in spaces that could not hold sincerity without trying to brand it.

See also: The Name That Stays →