Inside the TikTok shoegaze revival

0:22Hey, pals. It's Andrea and Emily with The Culture Journalist. and we are back with our first free episode of the year. So there's been a few things we weren't expecting to put on our 2024 bingo cards, but here we are. One, of course, is Anna Wintour laying off most of Pitchfork's staff and merging it with GQ. You can count on us addressing all that in a future episode. The other is a little bit more benevolent, but nonetheless bizarre, which is that shoegaze, you know, that moody 90s genre characterized by reverbed out guitars and mumbly vocals, has suddenly become massively popular. So I first heard about this while prepping for a recent interview I did with Slow Dive for KCRW.

1:10Slow Dive is, of course, the UK quintet that's considered to be one of the architects of the shoegaze genre in the early 90s. And they've been one of my all-time favorite bands since high school. So as it turns out, Slow Dive is more popular than ever. Their new record, which is called Everything is Alive, has scored the band their first top 10 on Billboard's album sales chart. And they're just overall selling the most albums of their career. Much of that can be attributed to something even more unlikely for a band that's been around for more or less 35 years. They've gone viral on TikTok. Slow Dive got me feeling like.

1:56Which you know I have to ask them about. None of us are personally on TikTok, but I think the thing that we quite like about it is that it's a format that's totally organic. You don't have to get involved. And I think if we did get involved and we started popping up with official Slow Dive TikTok, it wouldn't have the same appeal that it does. Then in mid-December, the music journalist Eli Ennis dropped a gigantic piece of reporting on Stereogum that confirmed that the TikTok effect was real. While hanging out on Spotify one day, he discovered that a handful of shoegaze-inspired artists he had never heard of before, with names like Wisp, Flying Fish, Quantic, and Sign Crush's Motorist, all lowercase, were racking up millions of streams on the app.

2:40What's more, these artists, who are typically in their teens and early 20s and making these tracks in their bedrooms using digital audio production workstations were getting even more attention on TikTok, and sometimes being offered major label deals off the back of a single song. So the article, which is called TikTok Has Made Shoegaze Bigger Than Ever, raised a lot of heady questions that we couldn't wait to dig into, especially as people who grew up listening to this stuff. What is it about shoegaze, a sound that originated over four decades ago, that's speaking so much to kids in their teens and early 20s now?

3:18How are platforms like TikTok changing the nature of what a career in music looks like, or what it means to be a fan, or even the sonic elements of a genre like shoegaze that get emphasized or de-emphasized? And finally, what do we gain and lose in a world where music dreams are made and dashed based on inscrutable recommendation algorithms, far removed from the physical scenes and communities that traditionally incubated these subcultural sounds. Eli was kind enough to come on the show and tell us about what he learned while reporting on the scene and talking to players like Wisp, Quantic, Sign Crushers Motorist, and one of my personal favorites, Jane Remover, though she's sort of adjacent to all this.

3:59For additional perspective, we also brought on the culture journalist's very own Ben Newman, who in addition to being our new audio editor... Welcome, Ben! also happens to be the drummer in a little band called Dive, which you probably know in the context of an earlier wave of bands processing shoegaze influences in the 2010s. We'll be right back with Eli and Ben to get into the gays of it all just after the break.

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5:07Hey, guys, we are back with Eli Ennis, who wrote the Stereo Game piece. And we also have special guest and culture journalist, pod editor and drummer of Dive, Ben Newman. Guys, thanks for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. I'm stoked. Yeah, I'm excited to be here. So, Eli, how did you end up coming across and reporting this story? And can you summarize exactly what it is that you found out? Yeah, so I think it was like the end of last summer, summer 2023. I was just kind of puttering around on Spotify. I think I was listening to Sign Crush's Motorist, which is one of the bands I mentioned in the article and just like was astounded by the number of streams that they had being just like a pretty lo-fi, like slowcore artist.

5:53I ended up seeing some, you know, sort of in the fans also like tab. There were other artists mentioned that I hadn't heard of before. And I remember clicking through some of them and I think it ended up being bands like Flying Fish, Wisp, Quanak, the artists I'd eventually write about. And I was like sitting on my couch next to my girlfriend, just like freaking out to her, just like, what are these artists who have hundreds of thousands of streams on these like lo-fi shoegaze songs that I've never heard of before? Because I'm not really active on TikTok. I'm not a TikToker. I go on there for research purposes and for fun every now and then.

6:28But I came across this through Spotify and I was just so floored by the numbers these artists were pulling. And I was just like, TikTok must be involved somehow was my first instinct. So I looked into it a little bit. Yeah, I saw that these songs by these artists who were very, very young and very new, clearly were trending on the app. And there was a ton of videos made with their sounds. The craziest thing was there was these bands, these artists who were bringing in more streams than like very, very established shoegaze bands. And I hadn't seen a single article in any of them. So I was like, all right, I want to write this.

7:03And I pitched Erigum. thankfully they were into it and I ended up speaking with several of the artists who had a real big moment on TikTok in 2023. I spoke with Wisp, Quantic, and Sign Crush's Motorist and then also Jane Remover who's kind of adjacent to that scene sonically. Got some of their each of their individual stories which had some overlap they were also different in their own ways and kind of illuminated how and why TikTok is such a fertile ground for shoegaze right now in an unexpected way. Did you know when you're going into the story or when you're pitching it that like even older bands like Slow Dive or Duster were also blowing up?

7:45Or was that something that you also kind of discovered through your reporting and those incredible numbers that you got from Spotify? I knew that they were having like a moment like Slow Dive. I was aware of like the last year in slow dives sort of like upswing with gen z listeners and i was also aware that duster were very popular but i i mean it kind of just like continues to stagger i like how popular duster are and like through through reporting i definitely was like i saw the full scope of the popularity i feel like of slow dive and duster and also deftones and it was just like wow this is crazy yeah i interviewed slow dive recently and in sort of the like press notes that was sent over to me, like one of the things that they sort of were touting was how their fan base, especially around their new record, was akin to that of Phoebe Bridgers and Faye Webster and Claude, which just like totally, totally blew my mind.

8:40Who knew? Can you break down who some of these central players are in this TikTok-fueled shoegaze scene, the ones that aren't the old guard that's also blowing up on TikTok? And how do their career trajectories differ from those original shoegaze bands or subsequent waves of artists that we've seen sort of mining the sonic vocabulary that have come out of more underground and DIY scenes. Yeah, for sure. So the three major shoegaze ones that I centered in the piece were Quantic, just kind of a weird name, a Q-U-A-N-N-N-I-C, Wisp, and Flying Fish. All lowercase? Sorry. All lowercase. All lowercase.

9:19And then also sign crushes motorist also all lowercase i spoke with him as well i believe he's irish um an irish 18 year old who makes slow core but it's kind of we'll probably get into it but it's of a piece so with this whole thing so these three are teenagers flying fish was in high is literally still in high school i believe he's like 15 or 16 years old and they've each had singles that have blown up on tiktok in 2023 so quonic just to give i'll give a brief rundown of each of these like quonic had been putting out music in sort of the digicore sphere around 2020, 2021, when they were literally in high school, they kind of shifted to making more rock music, they put on an album that had some shoegaze on it late 2022.

10:00Suddenly, a few months later, one song off of it just started taking off on TikTok randomly. They didn't really have a presence on the app, they weren't really paying attention to TikTok too much. And suddenly they had a song that was a genuine hit. Now it's charting in the Billboard hard rock chart competing with, you know, stained songs and stuff. It's insane. It's super big. The other two, Wisp and Flying Fish, who are kind of, you know, artists with comparable breakout singles last year, actually began by uploading their music directly to TikTok, which I think is somewhat crucial to understanding their popularity, though it doesn't paint the whole picture because there's a lot of popularity off the app.

10:35But Wisp was like an 18 year old freshman in college who started making shoegaze on her phone. I believe she was just using like a digital audio workshop on her phone, like a very basic one. It was essentially like a beat, like a shoegaze style instrumental and just sang over it, uploaded a snippet to TikTok and the algorithm kind of just boosted it. She was not an artist previously. She had no platform really. Suddenly people were listening to the snippet she had posted. Suddenly it was like millions of people were listening to it. So she decided to put it out as a full song on DSPs, on Spotify and whatnot, and it started taking off.

11:11And soon enough, she signed to a major label before she'd even released a second song or even picked up a guitar. And Flying Fish is a similar story in that, you know, he was a 15 year old. So I didn't get to speak with him. But he did like one interview with a YouTuber that I was listening to where I believe he was like in school, like between classes, messing around on his iPad or something, or his phone and threw up an instrumental that sounded a lot like Duster, kind of like shoegaze with a bit of a slowcore vibe. And it was the same thing, put a snippet on TikTok, suddenly it was like going viral, ended up putting out a few more tracks.

11:44And then these songs all have millions and millions of streams now and proliferate all over TikTok and over into the Spotify algorithm as well, which is obviously a lot different than pretty much completely different than the trajectory that any shoegaze band of the last 35 years has taken. I don't think there's ever been a shoegaze band who has gotten both to the scale of popularity that these artists have off of one song, let alone gotten as popular in the digital metric sense in such a short amount of time, nor are there shoegaze bands who've gotten this popular without actually playing guitar, where Flying Fish was using MIDI instruments while making his, he was assembling sounds in a digital audio workshop.

12:28Everything about this feels very, very unprecedented. And then even unprecedented for the older artists who started the shoegaze movement, right? Like this amount of attention. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Andrew, you spoke to Slow Dive, and I'm sure you heard it from them. Like they're more popular than they've ever been. Their most recent record just sold the most that they've ever sold, I believe. They're streaming more than they ever have, like sort of breaking records for the popularity that a shoegaze band has received on New Music Friday, according to some Spotify data I got. like it's just more eyes on shoegaze than there ever have been i mean it's never a one-to-one because the initial shoegaze boom in the early 90s of course preceded the internet there was bands in the uk that had kind of runaway singles on uk radio and like there was definitely hype around shoegaze but like i think i can definitively say based on what we're seeing that like shoegaze is more popular now than it has ever been there's more opportunity for artists and bands to find you know viral success even commercial success than there ever has been in shoegaze as far as I could tell which is crazy to think about too because when you think about the slow dives or the my bloody valentines of the world when they first emerged to not only did they not enjoy this like level of like insane breakout success but they a lot of them were actually just like totally like panned by the press and people kind of didn't like find them until later and then it was kind of considered more of like cult followings even yeah wasn't the shoegaze thing even like the name like kind of a derogatory term like making fun of them yeah it definitely it was kind of sending a lot of the covers they did get you know there were some journalists who did like them but shoegaze was it was a sort of a flash in the pan trend and then it's carried on for for 30 years it's like a niche sub-genre that you know has some cultural cachet and there's a certain like I feel like a bohemian vibe to most of the people who like shoegaze like it's never really had much of a brushing with the mainstream but it's interesting to see like these artists now who are essentially like operating in a mainstream rock lane almost playing this type of shoegaze music that other bands have been making for years that have never even come close to achieving this and just be just to add one more thing about the artists I spoke with because I do think this is very important.

14:55None of these kids were trying to become popular. Like there was absolutely no ambition among these kids to become viral shoegaze TikTok artists or to even become like commercially successful musicians. Like I said, the two of these kids were just literally messing around for fun and happened to stumble into some internet virality. Quantic was just trying to make records and kind of be an internet age artist and express themselves they weren't trying to make shoegaze that was going to be popular no one could have predicted that so i do think that there as much as this kind of trend can be credited to sort of weird byzantine algorithms in some ways like i do think there's definitely an organic element to the audience that these songs and these artists are finding because it's not like the major labels are constructing this in any real way right and some of them in your piece you wrote are even kind of like resistant to like the major label attention that they've been getting right yeah it seemed like only wisp she signed to a major label and she seemed pretty comfortable with that decision but like the other ones didn't really seem interested specifically sign crushes motorist who's pretty much second to duster like the biggest slow core artist on the internet right now he has literally like 10 other projects that he makes music under that all have a lot of streaming attention as well on Spotify.

16:19And he's just telling me there's A &Rs at every major label hounding him. And he's like, nah, I don't need him. He was incredibly chill about it, especially for an 18-year-old, the way he spoke to me. That was a really funny part of the article to me. And I thought that was really smart too, because he was right. He doesn't need them to take a piece of his income. And I just feel like if that had happened to me and people in my generation would be like, yes, a record deal. That's what I've always wanted. But he was just like, no, I mean, I've already got everything I need. The music is out there.

16:52which is so funny because i feel like there's this cliche that was probably invented by millennials that like gen z are even more likely to sell out than they are or something but i actually think that's not true yeah if anything they seem like more skeptical more ambivalent a lot of the younger artists i've spoken to across genre lines but specifically these these shoegazers because again like there's a lot of eyes on shoegaze right now there's a lot of people who don't really understand what the genre is who are interacting with it for the first time these kids who are making these particular ones i interviewed who happen to be making this music Like we're just fans of the genre for several years.

17:25They love My Bloody Valentine as much as anyone else. And also many of the other contemporary bands who are doing great things, but just have not achieved the same level of internet virality. And like, they're just one of them, you know, like it almost like it could happen to anyone and it just happened to happen to these kids, you know. Well, this kind of brings me to our next question, which is like, this story, it really struck a nerve on the music internet. Can you tell us a little bit about the sort of feedback you got and like why you think the term shoegaze has become such a loaded or even divisive word in music circles?

18:01And I also invite everybody else to chime in on this because I'm curious about it. Yeah, it definitely it seemed to this article paired with also Philip Sherburn at Pittsburgh wrote an article about shoegaze published the week before mine. I think kind of contributed as well. But there was definitely a lot of discourse about the visibility of shoegaze right now. people talking about being co-opted you know because wisp signed to a major label like the major label kind of question got brought up and because that's unprecedented but regardless the response to my particular article i was happy was mostly positive to like my writing no one really seemed to have any substantive critiques about what i presented but yeah i i think the word shoegaze definitely got brought up like there i saw people sort of critiquing the word itself and whether it should or should not be applied to the specific sound that some of these artists are based on the music they're making.

18:53And I do think that, like we were saying, it's always been a divisive term. And I think, in particular, this was a term that was created by journalists and sort of in a top down way, it was semi derogatory at first. And, you know, it just kind of stuck over the years as like a shorthand to describe a particular strain of rock music. And over the years, that strain has become more diverse and kind of has filled out a little bit with different sounds. I mean, you can pretty much pick any subgenre in music history and has a similar course. Inevitably, people are going to disagree on the parameters of that term.

19:26And some people embrace it, others bristle at it. And given that this is a subgenre and a subculture that's always been very, very underground. And so he's had a very, or at least for as long as I've been listening to Shoegaze for well over a decade like a very intense fandom of people who are i don't know protective of the genre they have and they like they like their shoegaze a certain way and there's a whole nerdy sort of geeky element to the genre based on all the pedals and the effects and things that are used so like all of that is pretty incongruent with one artist randomly signing to a major label off of a tiktok song that earns 30 million streams in the time frame of a year like all of that just it leaves a bad taste in someone's mouth.

20:09And I kind of understand that. I think the article kind of just made people argue about shoegaze some more. And I think there's a lot of things that are worth discussing. And I think there's some people are just being a little pedantic, but it was cool to see so many people talking about shoegaze. Most of it I thought was relatively productive. Yeah, it's kind of like the proof of there is something in the zeitgeist about shoegaze. I got sent this article by several different people. And I mean, that's obviously partially because I'm in a band that people call shoegaze. But - Yeah. How did your band react to this?

20:46I mean, to be honest, they were like, this is our moment. It seems like a good thing for us if younger kids are starting to get into this type of music. So it was really exciting. And then And also interesting because I think people just really like to talk about slicing sub-genres up into little tiny slices. Eli, as I'm sure you know, through writing about metal and stuff, there's so many sub-genres. And it's just fun to have super specific terms. And it was interesting because I had never heard of any of these bands, really. I had heard of Wisp, but I didn't realize it was part of this kind of TikTok revival thing.

21:31So yeah, I mean, I think there's just like something in the culture at the moment where people are really resonating with shoegaze. And then I think people's response to the article kind of proves that. Has Dive actually, have you guys like reefed any benefits of it? Have you seen it sort of spilling over to your stuff? No. I mean, we, like our label sent us the article. Like, I think that people are kind of like, how can we make this do something for us? Which, you know, who knows? And the way that we've kind of always approached it. I mean, we always thought it was like weird and funny that we got called shoegaze and never really identified with that term too much, even though we're all fans of the genre.

22:14And that was kind of why we made Deceiver is we were like, all right, let's make a shoegaze album since people keep calling us that anyway. So we're just, you know, we just do what we do. And hopefully the TikTok kids will like it. But I mean, I don't know what else we could do. it's also really funny because i you know my response to seeing it was like this is so weird because i feel like there was smaller sort of shoegaze having a moment moment like 10 years ago or like around like the beginning of the 2010s and my instinct is to think oh these young kids they probably don't have like as much context about this music whereas my generation of bands like you know dive and nothing which are you know two of my favorites they had more of a historical understanding of this stuff but then i also remember wait a second like that wasn't even our generation's music that was like us listening to what was cool to like the generation before or like a couple generations before anyway right yeah we're definitely like second wave shoegaze i would say and then this what we're experiencing right now is probably like third wave or something i'd say this is almost fourth but yeah i that's just me being a dork because there was also like early 2000s a little bit i don't know yeah there's definitely stuff happening the 2000s were overall though like pretty low in the shoegaze meter like there was not a whole lot of note happening i feel like and then there's absolutely that revival in the early 2010s dive is certainly a part of and nothing and i think that that has a huge role in what we're seeing on tiktok now i think like if that didn't happen if bands like nothing and were didn't reach a audience in the early 2010s and kind of stick around throughout the decade and that sort of very americanized grungy heavy shoegaze sound which dive damn near perfected on deceiver i'm being honest with that that record rules like if that stuff didn't exist there would be no WISP and Quantic wouldn't have sounded the way Quantic sounds.

24:23And those kids pretty much said as much to me. So that's all part of this thing that's happening right now.

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25:05I want to get clear on something, though. Like, what actually is shoegaze? Or are these artists actually playing shoegaze? How does the genre as it first emerged differ from this new wave of shoegaze that is calling itself the same thing? I'm not a genre purist, but I'm just curious, like, what would someone who is a genre purist say? okay i'll start to me the classical you know maybe like pre-tik-tok wave of shoegaze is it's music that features a lot of a lot of reverb distortion very guitar forward very kind of words like atmospheric and cinematic come to mind it's it's overwhelmingly loud and vocals are generally like pretty far back in the mix and originally its name was coined as we mentioned earlier by UK music journalists I think in the I want to say late 80s or early 90s to describe what the bands looked like on stage which because of their heavy use of effects pedals they were always looking down at their feet and hence shoegaze.

26:15Would you guys agree or disagree with that? Is it at least like the original, to me, kind of pure definition of it? Absolutely. I think that's absolutely the definition. Yeah, I think so. I mean, to me, as you touched on in the article, it kind of bleeds into these other genres like dream pop and slowcore and stuff. Yeah, the original kind of classical shoegaze was super loud and heavy, but then there's also an element to it that's like really pretty and melodic and so I think different bands take different parts of that which is why the the definition gets kind of nebulous is because you could take just the heavy part or just the pretty part or just the synthy part or just using you know reverb and delay and distortion there's a lot of different things that you can do with with all those ingredients yeah like is the Cocteau Twins shoegaze or just shoegaze adjacent say shoegaze influence like the sort of the text for shoegaze but probably adjacent yeah adjacent even proto maybe i'd say so yeah what's interesting about this i think is like if you look at what many shoegaze purists would consider the three foundational shoegaze bands my bloody valentine slow dive and ride those three bands are actually pretty different sounding if you really ab them like my bloody valentine are like a weird art rock band who don't really sound like anyone else slow dive are so pretty and they have such a melodic element to their sound and ride were playing music that was often you know it was a lot faster than slow dive it had a lot of treble it just like had a lot of different sonic textures even though they all used the sort of reverb through distortion and the reverb vocals and the smeary guitar riffs there's a pretty pluralistic genre even from the start so i think it's hard to be a true purist about this because once you get to just like the second record that so many of those bands made and like sort of the immediate bands that came right after those iconic mbv and slow dive records like you get stuff like katherine wheel and swerve driver who start bringing in a lot more traditional rock elements into the sound and i think most people would say those are also iconic foundational shoegaze bands and then you know bands like nothing in the 2010s who were mining from that kind of took that just one step further and now you have an artist like wisp who is taking that sound even one step further than that.

28:35I think the umbrella has definitely widened, but it's always been a little less specific than I think some genre purists like to think it is. I was just going to say, I think it's interesting how also bands like Hum or Deftones are now kind of retroactively being shoegazified. I think at the time they were just like rock bands. What about an attitude or like a perspective? Yeah, I was going to say in my gut, when I think about shoegaze it's almost kind of like it's corny as hell but like it's kind of a mood you know yeah for sure especially like slow dive i think is like a super moody band i hate to use the word like sad or like melancholy but you know that's always when i have listened to slow dive i'm kind of looking for a little twinge of sadness yeah like big catharsis energy there's also like a romantic element to it i think like a sensual element to some of it and like sadness and dramatic catharsis and sensuality.

29:36I mean, what more could a TikToker want, really? Yeah, vibes. It's original vibes. Eli, how would you say that this new wave of it differs from what we were just talking about, sonically or content-wise as well? I think, and it's hard to pinpoint exactly because I think that these artists who happen to find the popularity that they have, Some of them are in slightly different lanes, but overall, I think it's a lot more lo-fi at the moment, which is interesting because I think just five years ago, Shoegaze was more hi-fi than it ever has been in a lot of ways. I think just the sort of homemade nature of the drums often being not real you know the sort of digital drums that Quantic used that Wisp used the Flying Fish used I think Sinecrest's Motorist as well gives sort of like a more brittle quality to the music you know you could play it loud but it already sounds like it's clipped when you're listening to it with at a low volume with headphones on and i think like it's more like chord based rather than sort of the artful guitar squalls of my bloody valentine that you typically think of but i think the vocals are very very similar i think the vocals stay very true to the initial incarnation in terms of being you know deeper in the mix like you said andrea and like also just sort of hushed and balmy and like the same effects whether they're digital or analog it's an overused phrase but like the whole you know it if you hear it thing like I do think that like there's a sort of quintessential quality to shoegaze that even if you want to get really really granular and call something like what Wisp is making slightly different like there's still like enough of a commonality I feel like in the overall presentation that it feels a piece of the initial thing so how how would you say that TikTok which is the platform that's chiefly responsible for this resurgence then is influencing the sound of shoegaze or as the sound that you just described itself like are there elements of this music that maybe get amplified by the platform or its algorithm or maybe get diminished this was an interesting question i had to think about it for a while i think that some of the things that get amplified are what i've noticed through scrolling through i'd scroll through a lot of shoegaze tiktok videos to write this article where like the drop quote-unquote in the saw and the sort of part where the the tension gets released is is kind of like the part that anyone wants for any tiktok video they're making for a lot of tiktok videos they use music like tension and releases kind of a good quality to seek and those elements like the explosion of distortion seem to be used a lot in the app because you can like have a video that starts off with not a lot of movement and then something happens and the shoegaze drop happens and everything explodes all at once.

32:33I think those elements are being amplified. I don't know if that's necessarily encouraging artists to make shoegaze that has more pronounced drops. But if you look at some of the songs that are resonating, like Quanix Life Imitates Life, the song that they had go really viral has like these really screamy, sort of gnashing breakdowns in it that get used on TikTok and are definitely pretty prominent. With this sort of like wave crashing, like sliding down the scale or like these kind of very almost like sculptural moments. Yeah, absolutely. But I also think it's like the culture of TikTok at the moment, I think is like it's not like the technology, but the actual culture on the app.

33:17And it being the hangout for Gen Z kids right now, like the prevalence of Deftones who are just so big right now with young people. and the shoegazy elements that band has, has had a direct influence on the sound of the shoegaze that these kids are making. The popularity of Duster on that app, who Duster have some songs that are also used in a lot of TikTok videos to make them moodier. They make moody songs. They have songs with some drops in them. And just the sheer popularity of Duster and the presence that they have and the way they're kind of bleeding over into the shoegaze scene, their influence has been bleeding over into shoegaze for several years now.

33:55but I think like those two artists and Beach House I mentioned as well like just the prettiness of that band and they've always kind of dabbled in shoegaze like kids finding those bands through TikTok are having an influence on the sound of shoegaze at the moment I think absolutely I think it's also because it's just it's very like cinematic music and obviously it goes quite well like with videos and moods and these sort of like like a drop is kind of like a perfect setting to a bite-sized emotion or feeling or bit that you're trying to use to like grab people or communicate with people on this platform.

34:29But it's funny because like we had Sean Rinaldo on the pod like a couple episodes back and he was talking about like what's going on in electronic music and there was like a same thing going on I guess according to slightly different platform mechanics where like the live stream DJ video a la Boiler Room had become such a important like milestone for DJs, you know, being in a room and DJing and then having like the crowd go wild with the drop had begun impacting how DJs constructed their sets. Whereas before they might have had like several minutes past before a drop, the expectation from the crowd would be for it to happen like a couple times per minute or something, or like at least once a minute.