Why Did I Make My Own Website in 2026?
Ok, so why would someone bother making a website when there are already so many places online to establish your identity? So first of all, I'm an artist and feel like a website is an essential tool in showing what I do. If I meet someone and they say "send me your instagram", and I do that... Yeah, there's nothing really wrong with it per se, but there's no telling what they might see there. Maybe I just posted a story of some food I just ate, or a trip I took. That stuff really isn't my art so it can be a bad representation of me as an artist. On top of that, when you're on a platform, the platform owner has all this incentive to bombard the viewer with a ton of "other" things that it's algorithm thinks they'll find interesting. I want someone to checkout my artwork then 2 seconds later, I'm competing with someone doing parkour on top of the Eiffel Tower or something. On top of that, even if the viewer stays on my page, there's all this ephemeral stuff like videos of the process and other random stuff mixed onto the same timeline as the finished pieces, and you can only 'pin' one post. So the things you really wanna exhibit get pushed back and lose visibility. Not the ideal place to have your art viewed tbh.
As far as streaming platforms, you basically have all the other same issues as with social media except on top of everything, getting plays and views is next to impossible without you driving your own traffic there. You can post a song on Soundcloud and it'll literally sit there with zero plays. It didn't used to be like that, but I guess there's a lot of competition now. So to get seen, you have to pay to play. Now here's my thing... I'm not naive. I know that's how the game works, but if I've got to pay to get visibility on someone else's platform and still fight their algorithm, I might as well just put those resources into getting traffic to my own site where I have ultimate control over how my art is consumed.
Then there's the infinitesimally small payouts you get from streaming AFTER you have to pay quite a bit just to even get your songs up there in the first place... But that's another topic for another post.
Aside from all that, I just think it's cool. I come from an era when the internet was really a fun, interesting, unpredictable place. Then over time it basically just became the biggest ad revenue generator in the history of mankind. It's kinda boring now tbh. Idk, I just miss the days when you could randomly find cool stuff in cyberspace and it wasn't all curated for you by an artificial planet-sized brain with the sole purpose of manipulating your emotions so it could sell you stuff. You think I'm joking but I'm not. I wish I was.
Anyway, there's probably more I could say but I'll go ahead and end the rant right here. Thanks for checking out the site and I really appreciate you sticking through this post and reading til the end. Keep checking back! I'm gonna make this site into something really cool.