ABC News has reported that Facebook is doing away with its Fan status. From now on, instead of agonizing over whether or not to “Become a fan” of the umpteenth band or club or organization or page, you can simply “Like” something instead.
For artists, clubs, and organizations, that one mouse-click amounts to the same thing: a fan added to your page. For the site’s users, it either means less clutter or more space for Farmville updates.
Smaller, lesser known bands and artists everywhere are probably rejoicing.
Facebook’s fan designation was a good idea in theory. It gave users the opportunity to affiliate themselves with things and even to make that fandom part of their identity.
The problem with the designation was that it only benefited larger brands, bands, and companies on the site. In an era when everybody’s tastes are incredibly varied, when everybody “listens to everything”, identifying oneself with one, or even a handful of individual artists was a strange thing to do, a limiting, confining choice almost as much as it was a badge of allegiance. Few people list all of their favorite bands in the Favorite Music section of their profiles for the same reason.
When people did choose to identify themselves as fans of a particular artist, the artists often tended to be well-known; if you had to align yourself with something, it was best for it to be as innocuous as possible. Teens place more value on the social cache associated with liking certain bands than on the actual music, for example, and so even if they liked a smaller artist, they’d keep it to themselves. That might sound pretty teenage, but it turns out this pattern of aligning oneself with group thinking about social authority continues throughout life.
But if you can “like” a band just as easily as the fact that your 9 year old cousin’s going to Six Flags for the first time, then why not? Now that Facebook users no longer have to worry about these special designations, every artist should see the number of Facebook fans they have go up. And that’s something we’re a big fan of.
Max Willens is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in XLR8R, Paper Magazine, Death + Taxes, Electronic Beats, HOOP, and The Village Voice. He lives in Brooklyn. Max currently serves as WAMM’s primary editor.
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