Thirty-two-year-old Yooti Bhansali, a freelance writer-editor, likes music. This is quite evident if you follow her on Twitter, where, when not making jokes or pointed observations about her professional and personal life, she shares what she’s listening to.
This wasn’t the case two years ago. At the time, her music discovery had stagnated. She was listening to the same songs over and over again, finding comfort in familiarity. This was the same person who listened to an “insane amount of music”, by her own admission.
Then, she started getting more active on social media. As she followed and interacted with new people on Twitter, her penchant for discovering new and, often obscure, music returned. Now, one of the high points of her day is the discovery of a new track — which could have anything between 9,000 and 900,000 views on YouTube — which she then loops continuously until the melody line burrows into her brain.
A few weeks ago, she decided to turn her abandoned music blog, Song Story Short, which had gotten too tedious to update, into a weekly music newsletter. Not only have people been quick to sign up, but she has also started receiving feedback about it. This ranges from long, heartfelt emails about how a particular song she recommended helped someone through a bad day at work to unsolicited (but not unhelpful) advice about how she could perhaps format her newsletters better.
Aside from providing us with a steady stream of jokes, banter, cultural media, political arm-wrestling, bickering, and finger pointing, social media can help us tap into dormant abilities we aren’t even aware can be of real use to someone else. For Bhansali, something as commonplace and everyday as listening to music at home or with friends and sharing some of that online, has now become something of a skill. We live in a time where there is an overwhelming glut of avenues to discover music than any other time since the invention of recorded music, which makes it both easier than ever, as well as harder than ever. It’s something many people could do, theoretically, yet few take the trouble to.
In social terms, what timelines have done to our lives is provide us with a constant, mobile feedback chamber, one that exists publicly and is accessible to us at any time (provided you’re connected to the Internet — which I’ll admit is not a given if you happen to be a Vodafone customer). When we post about things we love — be it music, cinema, books, poetry, stand-up comedy — we open up a facet of our personalities to the people who follow us, some of whom could be rank strangers.
We may not possess what the world deems actual talent, but slowly, over time, some of us develop a sense of curation — what we refer to as ‘good taste’ — and that becomes valuable, for it helps people find the shiny needle they didn’t know they needed in the midst of an ever-growing haystack.
Bhansali is yet to send out her third newsletter, but there are already 123 people out there (at the time of writing this column) who are interested in what she curates. She says she’d have gladly done it even for 20 people, because it makes her happy.
