The Personality Tax

The German act Sachsentrance started making reels this year, and did something unusual: they explained why, in public, without pretending to enjoy it.

Their reasoning, paraphrased from the German: people ask why they don't just play music. It no longer works that way. They are dependent on what the platforms choose to distribute, which affects how many people come, which affects the fee, which affects their livelihood.

That is a clean, unsentimental description of a chain that most artists experience and few state out loud.

The journalist Cristalyne collected this in the seventh issue of her newsletter Criscene, under a question she borrows from a @savetheplanetsociety gallery:

Since when did doing your job stop being enough?

The thing that actually changed

It is worth being precise about the shift, because "DJs have to do social media now" has been true for a decade and is not news.

What Cristalyne identifies is narrower. Posting images or video of your set has stopped being sufficient. As every platform drifts toward TikTok, what gets distributed is video that sharpens a personal brand with actual content — and audiences have visibly lost patience with flat promo, the clip of the drop, the poster with a caption. Promotion now has to travel by way of something with substance in it.

So the demand is no longer for documentation. It is for a presence: a face, a voice, an opinion, delivered to camera at regular intervals.

Why that is a tax and not just a chore

Cristalyne draws the comparison with her own trade. In journalism, talking to a camera is a foreseeable facet of the job — unwelcome to some, but within the description. For a DJ, unless the plan is to become a star DJ, it is not.

Which produces the problem plainly: people with a less camera-ready personality have a markedly harder time. And it bites hardest at the level where visibility stops being about picking up a few gigs and starts being how rent gets paid.

This is a different complaint from the ones I have made here about metrics and burnout. Those are about how attention is counted and what chasing it costs. This is about who the arrangement quietly favours: the extroverted, the quick, the naturally performative. Some exceptional DJs are none of those things, and a distribution system that grades temperament will lose them without ever registering that it did.

The case for not being seen

It is worth conceding the demand before arguing with it. People do want to be close to the artists they care about. That wish is real, not manufactured, and dismissing it as vanity misses what it actually is — an attempt to hold on to something that moved you.

But it is worth asking where the wish comes from, because it is not native to this music. Wanting proximity to the person, the face, the voice, the daily routine, the opinions, is a value imported from pop culture. Dance music spent decades building the opposite: white labels with nothing on them, Underground Resistance in masks, records that turned up with no name attached and had to survive on their own. The camera stickers at the door of half the clubs in Berlin are the same instinct written as house rules.

That tradition was never shyness. Withholding is a technique.

A record you cannot attribute has to do all its work unaided, and the listener fills the space around it themselves — with a reading, a memory, a guess about what it was for. That space is where interpretation happens, and interpretation is most of what gives music weight over years rather than weeks. Explain everything and there is nothing left for anyone to bring.

So the aesthetic objection is not that talking to a camera is undignified. It is that every explanation of a track is one fewer thing a listener gets to decide, and the tension that made the thing worth returning to gets spent on information.

That is the second objection, and I think it is the sharper one. Face, voice, thinking, the inside of a working week: this is the material a real listener genuinely wants, and it is being scattered across a feed as unpaid promotional labour for an audience mostly composed of people who will never buy anything. Meanwhile the records, which took years of work, are the part with a price on them.

As marketing it is the wrong way round. Proximity belongs where a relationship already exists — a subscription, a mailing list, a supporter tier, something the person opted into — and the music belongs where it can travel. Giving the intimate half away to a platform in exchange for reach is not a promotional strategy so much as a rate of exchange nobody negotiated.

The part that is not fatalism

It would be easy to stop there and call it a trap, and I don't think that is where Cristalyne leaves it either. The pressure is real, and the degree of exposure to it is still a variable.

Geert Lovink's Platform Brutality argues that the platforms have moved past being a distraction into something that actively harms, and situates them inside technofeudalism — a small number of owners collecting rent from everyone obliged to build on their ground. That is a good description of the trap. Matt Bluemink's The Future is Not Lost pushes the other way, arguing that futures are still made, and that music and technology are where the making happens. Both were written by people looking at the same landscape.

Read together, they suggest the useful question is not whether to escape the attention economy — nobody does — but how much of your living is exposed to distribution decisions you have no say in.

Every reduction is available and unglamorous. A mailing list reaches everyone who asked for it, in full, with no ranking layer in between. A feed does the same for anyone who prefers reading. Selling records directly means a purchase rather than an impression. Radio still exists. The room itself still works, and a night that people tell each other about propagates through a channel no company operates.

The honest limit: none of these replaces social platforms, Substack has its own recommendation machinery, and choosing to spend less time performing to camera costs reach, immediately and measurably. Anyone claiming otherwise is selling something. The realistic aim is proportion — making sure the part of your livelihood that depends on one company's distribution logic is smaller than the part that doesn't.

The clearest example of this is Cristalyne herself. Her writing about the pressure to perform arrives through a newsletter, to people who chose to receive it, in sentences that would make a terrible reel.

Worth subscribing to

I want to recommend Criscene properly rather than in passing. Cristalyne writes about news and debates in club culture at a level of care the subject rarely gets, in German, at criscene.substack.com.

One detail from the post makes the case better than any praise. She mentions that this development reminded her of something she believed she had read at the end of Taylor Lorenz's Extremely Online — that content creation would become useful in every profession. Then she went back through the book, could not find the passage, and said so, in public, in the caption. She published the correction alongside the thought rather than quietly keeping the more impressive-sounding version.

That habit is rarer than good writing and considerably more valuable.

Source: Cristalyne (@_cristalyne), posted 11 February 2026, excerpting the seventh issue of her newsletter Criscene. The quoted line is one she credits to a @savetheplanetsociety gallery. Her post is in German; the Sachsentrance passage is paraphrased in translation here rather than quoted.