Welcome to the Week About You

Hey readers –

Usually, this is the place where an editor's letter opens with some hard-hitting facts to drive home an important point about the issue at hand. When I last wrote one of these, we were gearing up to push the conversation on mental health in the music industry beyond just that – "chat" – and into action.

But now, I come to you with something different: we're going to make this week on Noisey UK about you. As in you, the fan and consumer of music. Traditionally in the music press, we spend most of our time speaking to the artists you love, to find out what makes their work sound so magical, what they're going to do next and – every now and then, in our First Dates interview series – who they nervously slobbered with their first kiss. When not speaking to people in bands or rappers or singers, we're otherwise chatting to people in "the business" about how it works or asking a smart person to clear up a confusing issue for us.

In all of this, I realised we weren't hearing enough from the group that powers the engine driving this business: fans. Global music revenue went up by almost 6 percent in 2016, to about £11 billion ($15.7 billion), according to the BPI's report on the state of the British industry. That means a shit-ton of people are buying and streaming music, and doesn't even factor in how many of you are paying to see your faves play live. Fans – and "stans", their super-fan cousins – have quietly transformed over the past decade, as the internet has shaken up the business model that used to sit rock-solid at the foundation of modern music. It's obvious: social media now directly connects (or seems to connect) fans with their idols, in a way that would've seemed ridiculous to musicians about 40 years ago. This opens up artists to the other lane on a two-way street that used to be invisible, letting regular Joes praise, creepily objectify, support, rage and ask stupid questions in real-time, on a device that buzzes in your back pocket. At the same time, fans have come to feel more intimately linked to the people they admire than a fan club mail service would have allowed for a couple of decades ago.

This week, we're going to explore not only what it means to be a fan but how music lovers learn to not take themselves too seriously, come to terms with loving a band everyone else hates and reflect on the very real and personal ways music may have changed – or saved – their lives. We'll be hearing from teen girls, some of the most derided fans in pop and rock history who are actually some of the most important tastemakers we have. Without teen girls, who might the Beatles or Elvis have become, for example? We'll also be diving back through the tangles of a major 00s rock band's fan forum site, remembering how the hell we got to a place where every musician's fandom has its own term or nickname and hearing from the Noisey UK staff about the acts they love who you might not expect. You'll be able to find all of that content here, so keep checking back.

Really, this is about swivelling the spotlight over from the stage to the people who look up towards it, screaming or singing along and pouring their energy into supporting someone whose music speaks to them. Don't worry, we'll be back to speaking to the minds behind the music soon. For now, this is about you.

Tshepo Mokoena
Noisey UK editor

You can find Tshepo on Twitter.