Some off the cuff thoughts, for no real reason, about "the state" of internet-based music writing, and the industry in general:
At some point, maybe around 2007, a huge part of music writing became about discovery. In addition to writing about songs, day-to-day music writing was also an act of armchair A&Ring
If you could find a new band before someone else, and that band got popular, it was easy to feel like you had a hand in that — even if you didn’t, or if it was going to happen anyway.
It became common practice to offer premieres of songs, which allowed publications to stamp some small, false level of ownership on new bands, the payoff, presumably, was clicks on the song.
This reached its apex pretty quickly, and suddenly thousands of songs by relatively unknown artists were being “premiered” every day. It still happens, though it’s nowhere near as bad as it used to be.
This was pretty exhausting! Imagine being a young writer and your job is to write thousands of words a day on bands who were still trying to figure out what they wanted to be.
Then imagine that many of those bands got fed up with these surface blog posts, and as a reaction, decided that they would be anonymous, and offer as little information as possible in an effort to combat the empty hype cycle.
All of a sudden, writers were writing way too many blog posts a day about music they couldn’t possibly get enough information about. Everyone got exhausted. Suddenly it became a lot easier to just write about the “sure things.”
Writing about Beyonce guarantees clicks, but there’s also a wealth of information about her out there, so it feels possible to do. Young, inexperienced writers can actually do research, and that’s huge.
It’s also essential because music press has gotten itself into such a bizarre state that access is a constant all or nothing negotiation. Everyone (understandably!) wants a profile, or a magazine cover, or a feature.
None of those things are easy to get! They take a lot of time and money and effort and reporting skills, which young writers often lack, because they came up, or are coming up, in a time when the only time an artist will talk to them is if they’re writing a feature
which they never get to write, because features get assigned to writers who have experience writing features.
We have effectively erased the middle ground. An artist is either so famous that they won’t do any press in favor of their own narrative (see: just about every artist-controlled documentary that’s come out in the last few years), or they're too small to get a profile
Artists that exist in the unfathomably huge middle space between super famous and unknown do little bits of press. Maybe they spend a day doing a series of manufactured experiences with a litany of writers: lunches, dinners, drinks, aimless walks…
Good work comes from that, but it starts to feel the same. It’s hard to be insightful about your own work when you know you’re going to have to talk about your own work for like 7-10 hours in a row.
All this adds up to a perception that music press isn’t important, or that it’s not necessary. But it is!
Good music writing is essential to our understanding of music. The old model, where musicians are inherently skeptical of music writers because of…I don’t know? Lester Bangs interviewing Lou Reed or whatever? should be abandoned.
If we’re to believe that the music industry is hurting, then we need to believe that we’re all in this together. It’s true, there’s too much music, and it’s all immediately available.
That’s not changing. It’s probably going to be go further in that direction. We, as editors, writers, musicians, publicists, managers, should be asking how we can navigate this new world.
I don’t really have the answers, but I know that assuming that the old model still applies doesn’t work. It’s broken. What do we do now?
