Everyone's a Tastemaker Now and Somehow Nothing Tastes Like Anything

I want to tell you about the last time a piece of music genuinely blindsided me. Not pleasantly surprised me — blindsided me. The kind of moment where you stop what you're doing, look around like someone else must have felt that too, and immediately want to tell three specific people.

It's been a minute. And I don't think that's entirely my fault.

The Democratization We Asked For

For most of the 20th century, culture had gatekeepers. Some of them were brilliant. A lot of them were insufferable. Rolling Stone critics decided what mattered in rock. A handful of New York gallery owners decided what was art. Radio program directors decided what you heard on your commute. The system was elitist, frequently racist, often wrong, and deeply frustrating if you were making work that didn't fit the approved mold.

So when the internet started dismantling all of that, it felt like justice. Blogs gave unknown writers a platform. YouTube gave musicians a stage with no bouncer. Twitter gave everyone — the fan, the artist, the casual listener — the same megaphone. The gates came down and we all cheered.

And here's the thing: a lot of genuinely great stuff happened because of it. Artists who never would have gotten a major label meeting built massive audiences on their own terms. Critics from communities that had been historically excluded from mainstream cultural discourse finally had platforms. The conversation got wider and more interesting.

But something else happened too, something nobody really planned for.

When Everything Is a Hot Take, Nothing Lands

The problem with giving everyone a microphone is that the room gets very, very loud. And when everything is being talked about at maximum volume all the time, the signal-to-noise ratio collapses.

Think about the last album release cycle you watched play out on social media. Within 24 hours of dropping, there were thousands of takes — praise, criticism, discourse about the discourse, memes about the discourse about the discourse. By 72 hours, the conversation had already moved on to something else. The album wasn't even done being listened to before it had been fully processed, packaged, and filed away.

There's no room for a slow burn anymore. No space for something to find its audience over months or years. The cultural metabolism is so fast that anything that doesn't register immediately gets buried. And that speed doesn't just affect how we talk about art — it affects how art gets made.

When musicians, filmmakers, and visual artists know their work will be hot-take'd within hours of release, they start designing for that reality. Things get louder, more immediately legible, engineered for the first 15 seconds of attention. The stuff that rewards patience — the records that take four listens to crack open, the films that linger in your chest for days — those are increasingly hard to make and even harder to market.

The Death of the Secret

Here's what I actually miss, and I'll be honest about how slightly embarrassing it is to admit: I miss the feeling of knowing something other people didn't know yet.

Not in a gatekeeping way. Not in an I liked them before they were cool superiority complex kind of way. But in the way that sharing a discovery with someone felt like handing them a gift. The mix CD with no tracklist. The basement show where 40 people watched something that would matter to thousands later. The blog post that sent you down a three-hour rabbit hole into a sound you'd never encountered.

That feeling — the electricity of being in on something — was a huge part of what made culture feel alive. It created communities around shared discovery. It gave fandoms an origin story. It made the art feel like it belonged to you in some specific way, not because you owned it, but because you found it.

Now, by the time you hear about something, it's already been a trend, peaked, been declared overrated, and spawned a nostalgia cycle. The internet collapses the timeline so completely that there's no room for the secret to exist. Everything is simultaneously everywhere and therefore nowhere in particular.

The New Underground

But here's where it gets interesting: people are hungry for that feeling again, and they're building structures to chase it.

Look at what's happening in Discord servers dedicated to niche music genres. Or the vinyl listening clubs popping up in cities across the country — events where phones go away and people just sit with an album together. Or the resurgence of zine culture, of handmade newsletters sent to small lists of subscribers who opted in specifically because they trusted one person's curation.

These aren't nostalgia projects. They're responses to a specific kind of exhaustion. People who grew up entirely online are actively seeking out spaces where the signal is curated, the community is small, and the discovery feels earned rather than served up.

Even on the platforms themselves, there's a telling shift. The accounts with the most genuine influence right now often aren't the biggest ones — they're the ones with a specific, trusted point of view. The person who only posts about Brazilian funk and knows everything about it. The film account that only covers East Asian cinema from the 1980s. Hyper-specificity is becoming its own form of authority, a different kind of gatekeeping that's opt-in rather than imposed.

Curation Is Still an Art

Here's the argument I want to make, and I'll make it plainly: the problem was never that gatekeeping existed. The problem was who got to be the gatekeeper, and who got left out.

The answer to a bad curator isn't no curation. It's better, more diverse, more accountable curation. The answer to a critic who doesn't represent your experience isn't the abolition of criticism — it's making room for critics who do.

When everyone is a tastemaker, taste itself starts to feel meaningless. Not because the opinions are bad, but because there's no way to know whose perspective to trust, whose ears have been trained in a particular way, who has the context to tell you why something matters beyond the fact that it got three million views in a weekend.

The streaming age gave us access. What we're still figuring out is how to give access meaning — how to make the discovery feel like discovery again, rather than just content delivery.

The Vibe Is Out There

I don't think we can or should go back. The old gatekeepers weren't the answer. But the current free-for-all isn't working either, at least not for people who care about culture as more than background noise.

What we can do is be more intentional. Seek out curators with a genuine point of view, not just a large following. Share things with specificity — not just "this is good" but why it matters, what it connects to, what it might open up. Build the kind of small, trusted recommendation networks that make discovery feel personal again.

Because the music is still out there. The art is still being made. The films that will rearrange how you see things are still getting released, often quietly, often without a massive rollout.

The thrill isn't dead. It just needs a little more effort to find. And honestly? That effort might be part of what makes it worth finding.