LSMedia or Liverpool student media at liverpoolstudentmedia.com is a brand new website launched by the University of Liverpool's students to promote and support talented Liverpool student's creative written, visual or radio content.

 Now that essay deadlines are due in we’ve all been procrastinating hard, making our way through large box sets of American sitcoms, organising clothes by colour in our wardrobes and spending ridiculous amounts of time on everybody’s favourite timewaster, Facebook.

Now, I realise that you’ve really got to put the effort in on Facebook to whittle away the hours, Farmville, Mafia Wars and Restaurant City are all great ways pretend that you’re doing something productive, but over the past few months I’ve noticed more and more of my friends are becoming fans of things.

It seemed to start at normal, nice things. ‘Joe Turner has become a fan of Muse’. This is good, I think to myself, if Muse has a new single coming out or there’s a tour coming up Joe can get updates from this Muse fan page. It’s a good way to keep up with the music he likes, as he might not want to check their website every day on a whim that something may have been updated. Fair enough, this seems to make sense.

‘Charlotte Stephens has become a fan of The Raz’. Again, I kind of see the logic here. If there is a big Raz night coming up. It’s possible that they’re getting a special guest DJ in one night, and then this fan page is a good way to keep updated on that. Or maybe if she meets somebody at the club in an outrageous, drunken state that, god forbid, she wants to see again, they may also be a fan, so won’t spend the rest of her days thinking about what could have been. Once again, this makes some sense.

However, beyond this it is just ludicrous! ‘Jason Peters has become a fan of double knotting shoe laces’, ‘Daniel Kaminski has become a fan of sitting on the back seat of the bus’, ‘Catherine Taylor has become a fan of wiping her arse standing up’… the list of these ridiculously banal “quirks” that people cannot wait to share the world is something that I, nor anybody else, wants to know about. I honestly do not care at all if you only every wear a suit at weddings, or you always pretend to be on the phone when a Big Issue seller walks your way. This whole becoming a fan of something is utterly pointless outside of the lines of wanting to keep up with celebrity and popular culture, and we have the cool and casual Twitter to do that with.

You may think I’m being a bit of a git with this, “It isn’t a big deal, Andy. The whole fan thing is just a bit of fun”. Well, yes, I guess it is. And I would have kept this tiny little annoyance to myself if I hadn’t clicked onto Facebook today to see that two of my friends have become a fan of “I knew that song before it was popular”.

I KNEW THAT SONG BEFORE IT WAS POPULAR?! Jesus Jeffing Christ! Does it really matter? Over one million people have joined this fan page to show off to their friends that their music taste is somehow better than anyone else’s because they “discovered” a band or a song a little bit before somebody else they know. To me this is essentially masturbation; just taking pleasuring themselves because they think by them hearing a track before it hit a major radio station it somehow makes them better. These are the same people who say, “Arctic Monkeys were only good when they did their demos” and “Kings of Leon has sold out, they’re way too commercial”. Taking great achievements away from great artists on a pretentious, rebellious route, which is more well travelled than you’d think.

The wall posts on this page are full of people complaining about songs they once liked being churned into chunks of commercialised crap. This is a totally stupid stand to make! It’s still the same song, the same production; the only thing that has changed is that more people have now heard it. If they liked the song before, then surely it is quite a good song, and well deserves to be MORE popular (by people hearing and liking it in the first place it is instantly popular). They’re essentially slagging people off for having the same music taste as them, because they didn‘t pick up on the song in time. “These fools are listening to a song I downloaded three weeks ago, its shit now! I’m listening to some cool unsigned bands that know that music is really about the passion, man. Not being played on Radio 1.” Idiots!

Isn’t popularity, in a sense, what a band is usually after from day one? Yes, maybe they don’t want to have the ball and chain of a major record label attached to them, but they are surely likely to want to be popular enough to have people come to their shows and appreciate their music. Having someone like and enjoy your music is one of the most satisfying feelings as a musician, and these people who are raging to each other about keeping “good” music under the radar and outside of commerce are being way too pompous and don’t deserve to call themselves music fans.

Andy Clark