Just recently, we sat down for a chat with Anna Cara, the 22-year-old Newcastle native who rose from obscurity to land one of the more vaunted guitar gigs in rock – backing the King of Shock himself, Alice Cooper.
How’d that happen, exactly? Well, her bandmate, Tommy Henriksen, found Cara via social media, and was blown away by what he heard.
This is far from an isolated case, too. The bass prowess rising star Becky Baldwin showcased on Instagram landed her a gig with Mercyful Fate in 2022 (she just played bass on Tony Iommi’s new solo album, too, btw). No less than the Beach Boys found their latest member on Instagram. Gone are the days when you needed to mail a cassette tape to the fan club of a big artist in order to get their attention.
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Social media’s supposed to be the great equalizer, in a way. Anyone and everyone, theoretically, can get their Warholian 15 minutes of fame. Isn’t it a blessing that some of the traditional guardrails – connections, record labels, cigar-chomping managers – have been lowered?
Then again, social media’s dark side has also left its mark on the guitar corner of the world.
There’s the comparison thing. You know what I mean – feeling bad and envious because that one snooty person from school is at a palatial villa in Greece for the summer, and somehow they’re also impossibly jacked, now? It extends to guitar, too.
Last year, Sophie Lloyd – herself a huge presence on guitar social media – said that that very fixation on everyone else’s playing sapped all the joy out of her own. “I kept comparing myself to others and it just stopped being fun,” she said.
Instagram algorithms are designed to reward our ever-shorter attention spans. Too many guitarists have told us that when they scroll, they see players who are capable of tasteful, melodic, and slow-building playing focusing instead on moving across the fretboard like Lewis Hamilton. With so little time to grab someone’s eyes and so many others to compete with, who can blame them?
Then there’s the darker side of things – Instagram guitar giants using their platform to pass off the compositions of other players with fewer followers as their own, and hucksters using AI to steal the compositions and identities of other guitarists to gain followers and even scam people, to name just two recent examples.
So, in totality, do you think social media has been a positive or negative force for the guitar and its players? Has its playing field equalization outweighed the darker psychological effects and thievery?
Let us know in the comments below.
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