I was reflecting this morning on the lie #music #streaming told those of us who love listening to music, but aren't musicians ourselves. We were told that it would give us access to more varieties of music, and spontaneously introduce us to stuff we might love. Yet, I found more #indie music by mistake on file sharing back in the day than I ever find on Apple Music or Spotify. This is a good example: as a silly teenager, I searched for "pretty girls", and found this song amongst the porn. It says it's buy "The Capricorns". It's not on any of the music streaming services. There is a compressed copy on YouTube, but it only has 200 views. None of the streaming sites would ever have recommended this to me. I don't know who's singing, or anything about the band or song. Odds are I never will. And I kind of treasure that. #AltText was over 1500 characters. It is in this thread. I did my best, but I don't know how to describe music!

I just realized there's an unexplored niche in the non-animated streaming scene. On one side, there are completely innocent streamers who just do their normal stuff, chatting, discussing world events, ranting, or doing entertainment stuff.

On the other side we have adult streamers who just do porn to earn quick cash.

But there's an unexplored middle ground in which female streamers are getting to push the boundaries to see how far they can do without getting banned; and I don't mean almost showing nudes like in the recent Twitch scandal. I mean scantily clad girls showing off their cleavage while they're chatting or dancing. Then there's other streamers who just record themselves sleeping.

Sleeping! 😱🫣 Remember that short one shot anime that got thousands of sales? Sleeping with Hinako. Yeah it was about an anime girl who just recorded herself sleeping. That was the whole point.

I feel that between porn and normal streaming there's a void where viewers could get more intimacy with streamers, who will become their own kind of celebrity by blurring the lines between reality and fiction, between public image and sexual intimacy.

And it's... just intimacy.

Picture this.

A girl who streams in underwear, while still leaving something to the imagination, where she streams herself eating, talks about stuff, and could occasionally stream herself getting off to porn she's watching, but only for a limited time - or blurring herself. Then she goes to the bathroom, switches to the bathroom camera and goes behind the fogged window to shower herself.

Now imagine the shower window isn't fogged but allows the shadow of her nude body to be shown; a silhouette that shows but still doesn't fully satisfy the viewer.

Like a perverted version of a reality show that gives viewers almost (JUST almost) everything they've dreamed of.

This abandonment of privacy, becoming a reality microcelebrity in order to gain an audience and the illusion of intimacy, that's what the unexplored niche of streaming is about.

I'm not sure it's a good thing, but I can totally see it happening in the near future. Is this where we're headed? 🤔

#streaming #NSFW #Prediction #musings