Underground artist? Here's where you need to be posting.
What if? Myspace but in a post-COVID world? That's SpaceHey. The userbase definitely skews younger, but those who are active here are active here mainly. Blogs, forums, custom pages, esoteric HTML, and a whole lot of elbow grease. It's a weekend project to get set up here, but cultivating a following here could be a strong play. Myspace was known for its massive catalogue of underground artists. Perhaps SpaceHey can carry that legacy, but only if artists join up. Bonus: Archive.org has a huge catalogue of ancient and semi-lost Myspace tracks. See for yourself what the peak of social media was before Facebook started uploading the RFK brainworm directly into your parents' brains.
Newgrounds has seen a large revival, in part due to a heavy focus on modernizing the entire experience, and by modernizing? I mean simply improving functionality on all fronts. It's like the opposite of enshittification. Oh yeah, AI slop is outright banned, so that's one big reason a motherfucker wants to be seen on that site, right? I mean, how dogshit is it to appear in a feed and be squished in between two images with that uncanny AI sheen? Don't devalue your own product. Newgrounds has no resolution compression, encourages curation, intentionality, and is used by those in the industry to scout others. Already on Newgrounds? We're looking for a 'scout' to help keep us in the loop—link us to the hot pieces. We also drop occasional tracks, art, and other works by artists in the magazine, so give us a follow.
3. HOUDINI Magazine
That's right. Us, the big dogs in the underground. We're pivoting our Patreon to push powerful culture for the impoverished. That's right—it's a buck to sub to the mag on Patreon, and we're looking to drop albums by bands that fuck with us. A zine with a burned CD-r taped to it, made digital. It's mutual aid in the depression age. Non-algorithmic, our readers, your music, and the growth loop it causes. Shoot us an email: hedorahmusic@gmail.com.
Internet forum? Really? Yes. Very much yes. Freakscene is new to the block, and yes, big dog, this summer, the block is hot. Forums are dead until they aren't, and this seems like a place you'd wanna be establishing a name on early. It really is those things that makes you go, "How can I support this shit, fr?" Yeah, we fuck with the entire concept of Freakscene—use the internet as a tool to grow the local. It's a forum intentionally designed for those trying their damnest to keep the slopmasters from converting every essence of the human experience into a dataset to be fed to their anime-themed daemons. It's a space to link up with other like-minded real heads in real space, via cyberspace.
Notice lack of social media? Not telling you shouldn't be pushing power by gyrating for a TikTok clip, but you don't have to—and the more of us that seek alternatives, the stronger those alternatives become. Are you an artist or a content creator? Are you a TikToker or a guitarist? Are you a painter or a painting-reveal clip maker? You must decide. We did. We at HOUDINI Magazine see ourselves as the prototype, the tip of the spear. Maybe that spear can pierce some of the social media bloat. Maybe that spear can push through the noise and be a signal. These sites? These are armories. This is a call to war for every band, every artist, who's goddamn tired of being told how they can minmax the blackbox of 9/11 screams of dead and dying fucking algorithms. Hit the armory. Grab a spear and get to piercing.