Let's pull out one particular quote from the previous post.

Do you look for famous writers for your website?
Not really because we can't afford to pay them. Also I'm not sure many writers are particularly "famous" beyond a niche of fellow writers and die-hard music journalism enthusiasts. We paid Everett True to write for us for a bit last year but somewhat surprisingly he garnered the same amount of views as someone submitting their first article about the same acts, which is sad but sadly true - however, to be fair, I doubt the format of our website particularly helps. 

I guess it's worth noting that many of our writers have garnered notoriety and followings (former Editor Mike Diver and current reviews editor Andrzej Lukowski especially), as well as gone on to bigger things i.e. NME features editor James Jam, Metal Hammer features editor Terry Bezer and various others started out contributing to DiS. We've had various musicians write for us too and will continue to do so as it's loads more interesting than reading their responses to the same ol' questions.

FAQs: Music Journalism, Critics, DiS' role, Taste-Making, New Music, Old Media, 2.0 woe...

Reprinted once more from Sean in Sound's Posterous

FAQs: Music Journalism, Critics, DiS' role, Taste-Making, New Music, Old Media, 2.0 woe...

As per my previous post on old media vs new media, here's my response to some questions from Anna Nikolarakis...

Do you think music journalism has changed in the past 50 years, why do you think this may be?
The passion and purpose for many is still the same, if not evolved a little in terms of the focus and the understanding of the possibilities of 'rock-writing'. More generally, as an 'art-form' it's very different. There have obviously been massive industry and technological shifts since the early critics started penning their passionate analysis in the few publications that existed. It's kinda funny how there's not that much difference between the writing in Bomp! to what's on Stereogum or some of the essays in Loops or by folks like Simon Reynolds and Laura Barton in the Guardian to the writing in Creem and Sounds. 

For me, the biggest change is from a world of a few notable 'authorities' waxing lyrical on records you had to purchase to be able to hear, to a slew of sound-bitten snot-balls in Q and tabloids which passes as 'journalism', seemingly with the simple mission of encouraging those people who buy 5 CDs a year to maybe buy one that isn't Coldplay, Girls Aloud, Madonna, Dido or U2. Maybe this writing has always existed, I don't know, I was only born in '82.

The sheer volume of music 'journalism' is obviously the biggest sea change, with a lot of 'writing' replaced by have-a-go hobbyists, who - much like the slurry of undeveloped bands lacking in virtuosity clogging up the interwebz - have little 'art' in their 'criticism'-cum-one-sentence-recommendation. This once would have been in fanzines, read by a few people who understood it was a small cog, whereas people have no grasp of how big or small most blogs (the modern fanzine) are. That said, there's still a lot of good writing about (the annual Da Capo collections compile an awful lot of it!) but the clutter of 'opinions' has diminished the impact of the lucky few who honed their craft to inform us. 

What inspired you to become a journalist?
Probably a mixture of being told to "bore off" by kids at school who didn't know who the bands were I was banging on about, let alone why I had all these theories about why they were historically important. This passionate outpouring met the web and my weekly mixture of awe and disdain came rattling out over ICQ whenever music mags inevitably slagged off bands I loved.

A more covert influence was post-school TV. I'm pretty sure nearly every show from Clarissa Explains it All to Sweet Valley High had kids dreaming of becoming journalists/writers. Plus I was working in a record store, promoting gigs and couldn't afford to buy a Reading ticket and I read in one of the piles of magazines beside my bed that journalists got free tickets, so it seemed like something tangible to tell my careers advisor, rather than 'I wanna test computer games' or 'be Richard Branson'... I didn't really wait for anyone to say I could be a 'journalist' and when I was 16 I became one of those have-a-go-hobbyists cluttering up the internetz with terrible spelling and atrocious grammar in my fortnightly email blog (some of which was just pasted from instant messenger conversations), which grew to be DiS.

To be honest and being a little pedantic, I'm not really and never really wanted to be a fact-chasing "journalist" and I'm more of a 'critic', more interested in sifting out the best music, offering opinions on why something is gash and exploring concepts 'n ideas.

Did any ‘personality’ music journalists inspire you and who?
Swells (Steven Wells) was hugely inspirational. I often massively disagreed with his reviews but the pummelling of shock 'n awe imagery and the ridiculously aggressive tone was inspiring. I'd never read rants like that, it felt like a pop-up book, the Viz and this otherworldly articulation of half-formed thoughts in my head. I realised after his death that I probably read a lot of his stuff in football mags at a formative age (when I was about 8 I bought pretty much every football mag). I met him when I was writing for Bang magazine and he pretty much lived up to the persona you read on the page....

Someone (extremely generous) mentioned my first bits of erratic writing were a bit like Lester Bangs, so I bought his collections just as I was starting my email blog back in '98 (worth noting another friend said the jumbled imagery "read like a Jackson Pollock" and I still can't tell if that was meant to be an insult). From there I read a lot of Nick Kent, Everett True and various others, who were massively inspiring. More recently I've been inspired, and at the same time feel utterly inferior by how incredibly high the bar is set by Charlie Brooker and Chuck Klosterman. I also quite recently discovered the Richard Meltzer collection, I'd recommend 'A Whore Like the Rest' to anyone who wants to be a music writer.

Do you look for famous writers for your website?
Not really because we can't afford to pay them. Also I'm not sure many writers are particularly "famous" beyond a niche of fellow writers and die-hard music journalism enthusiasts. We paid Everett True to write for us for a bit last year but somewhat surprisingly he garnered the same amount of views as someone submitting their first article about the same acts, which is sad but sadly true - however, to be fair, I doubt the format of our website particularly helps. 

I guess it's worth noting that many of our writers have garnered notoriety and followings (former Editor Mike Diver and current reviews editor Andrzej Lukowski especially), as well as gone on to bigger things i.e. NME features editor James Jam, Metal Hammer features editor Terry Bezer and various others started out contributing to DiS. We've had various musicians write for us too and will continue to do so as it's loads more interesting than reading their responses to the same ol' questions.

Do you think reputation and branding has a lot to do with the success of a website or magazine/paper?
I think reputation comes from many factors but the main ones are relevance, reliability and more importantly, the length of time something has existed (and been relevant to people's tastes and reliable at sorting the wheat from the chaff). So much media comes and goes but 10 years on and just as the internet is coming of age, we're finally shutting up a lot of the 'you're just a glorified fanzine' doubters from further up the food chain and becoming a more established part of the media landscape. Plus being around that long also means you have a good Google pagerank and an archive of content which picks up traffic - I'm not sure how we would survive as a semi-professional operation without that if we launched today. Then again, I'm not sure if I launched a site today it'd be much like DiS currently is and am massively rethinking things at present.

I guess "success" is hard to define as there's now sites from Resident Advisor to Gorilla vs Bear, which offer a awful lot of high quality but super-niche media which successfully delivers what its audience wants. Their audiences are probably as big as they could be without compromising what they do. In the same way a lot of cult bands are as big as they are, I'm not sure there are really many publications which could hugely expand their circulation beyond the numbers they currently get, without radical and innovative shifts in the service they provide.

Over the past few years, one of the major factors in terms of a drop in readership across the board is people's access to music on services like MySpace mixed with the ridiculous volume of music coverage both online and in every publication from The Sun to Glamour, all of which reduces the need to buy a publication or visit the website of a 'brand' that specialises in music editorial, especially in terms of informing your purchases. Most people (rather than die-hard music enthusiasts, who crave comprehensive coverage and are never satisfied) want the ready-meal summary and/or to listen to and explore music for themselves (which has led to a lot of people being trapped in their own niches, never challenged or forced to invest time in understanding music beyond a shallow gut reaction to it/its aesthetic). I'm not sure anyone trusts or respects a "top-down" music media brand as much as they once did and increasingly people are living in a pick'n'mix mess of media and individual pundits, as well as fellow web users.

I believe media's biggest challenge going forward is to collectively grow the audience that cares about opinions and thoughtful explorations of music, rather than go further and further down niches of music that's irrelevant to the average music fan but pleasing to the hardcore vocal minority. There's also this issue of music fans becoming entrenched in a middle-of-the-road status quo for their individual tastes, which is incredibly disturbing, especially given herd mentalities and musical palettes which could become increasingly bland because of the lack of sounds and ideas which challenge people......but that's another topic altogether.

What do you think about the quality of music journalism today?
For every great piece there are 10k shit bits spewed onto the web. Wading for greatness isn't as fun or feasible as it once was and I agree with a lot of Andrew Keen's Cult of the Amateur book (although I'm well aware of the hypocrisy because of how I started out but at the same time readers opting to side-stepping the professionals won't know what they've lost 'til its gone. Plus I think a lot of the amateurs are those clueless corps trying to be 'new media' and failing, leaving a lot of damage in their wake...). The great bits by experts are probably as good, if not better than they have ever been (a slight caveat, as I'm concerned that it's hard to tell whether I'm more interested in active opinions or more able to comprehend writing than I used to be) but it's still rare to read something amazing which isn't by a professional journalist or that is in a popular music-only publication, mostly because these specialist titles circulation's and revenues aren't big enough to get a Sacha Frere-Jones (New Yorker) or pay (even if it's just in terms of audience reach) Douglas Coupland to natter with Morrissey like the Observer can. 

Authority and context for opinions is hard to come by and I think increasingly people hone in on individual contributors or blogs run by 1 or 2 people, rather than a wafty spread of conflicting opinions from a corralled collective, especially as there are technologies like HypeM, WeareHunted and last.fm which can democratically aggregate recommendation or hyper-personalize it like Amazon does.

A lot of the best music writing isn't in music mags. I really love the writing in The New Yorker, New York Times, Guardian, Sunday Times but also non-music mags like Wired and Huck magazine, which is run by the people behind Little White Lies and is a magazine that specialises in surf and skate culture, and a lot of their approach is much more like travel writing, which I really like. NME's upped its game since Krissi's started editing it with contributions from various (former) DiS staff members and the guys from theQuietus.com which I helped launch on BSKYB's dime that has some of the best writing on the web. And as I said earlier the annual Da Capo Best Music Writing collections are brilliant, the piece about Lil Wayne from Oxford American journal which I tweeted last week is especially great. I think journalism is in great shape but like anything, finding the great stuff and it resonating with an audience large enough to justify paying what people used to get in the 70s and 80s isn't too great. Put it this way, if we paid for some of the contributions on our site we'd barely be able to pay them £3 in ad revenue for their review (and even some of the most read content of the year only garners about £50 in ad revenue), such is the ad-supported economics, for even our site which gets 400k unique users a month but never ever gets 400k people looking at any individual article.

Do you think the branding in the mainstream music press has affected music journalism?
Not really sure it has made any significant difference. I think the mainstream press is more interested in fighting for market relevance whilst compromising specialism for comprehensive coverage in a desperate attempt to compete with the web and with eachother. None of this is really driven by branding or advertising (obviously a drop of audience is a bigger factor in this fight!), and having spent time with agencies, it's fair to say they're less interested in the details (we did a special week and had a Sonic Youth tour diary, and heard "Sonic what?" in response) and they're more interested in the ambiance (or "halo effect" to use crass marketing terminology) of the media brand/publication, hoping to reach target demographics across a range of mediums.

Vice probably do more work with brands than most yet their style of editorial and music they cover isn't mass market or massively important in the grand scheme of things but the brand has a counter culture aesthetic of 'hip' youth, and that's enough for most brands. In the states, a lot of magazines like Fader and Filter actually do a lot of brand marketing (Clash here does bits of it too, curating events for brands - closest I've ever come to this is putting on !!! for Amnesty) and as the magazines don't write about the brands themselves, there's rarely a conflict. However, I'd be curious whether there's any research that says anti-corp bands or images of the-not-hot-looking-musicians have been left out because of this modern folly.... I do know that having pretty girls increases the page space and feature opportunities open to artists in certain publications, mostly in an attempt to offset all the beardie-weirdies. 

Have you ever not been able to write something due to advertising a certain band/gig? Do you think this happens a lot in the music press?
We've had campaigns pulled at the last minute due to reviews (most recently Vampire Weekend who we only gave a 6/10) but on the whole these things are isolated and rare. We tend to only get music-related ads from companies who understand and are interested in reaching our audience and they're well aware they can't buy positive reviews or ensure coverage. Often I only know we have a campaign when it goes live as all the ad sales is done by third parties (a company in Manchester called w00t!media now looks after DiS' ad sales). I doubt the reviews editors at NME have a clue who's advertising either when doctoring scores. Obviously if we're championing a band, we tend to find someone who's likely to be a fan to write the album review but that's as sinister as it gets. I can only think of about 3 reviews we've taken down and none of them were to do with branding, and everything to do with unjustified comments which weren't particularly politik. 

However, with my label boss Wurzel head on, I know there are instances where magazines have asked me to take out ads to cover the cost of having a band on a cover mount cd, which comes with a new band feature or been asked for £22k to include a label sampler with a certain music weekly, which would also get me several pages of editorial for much less than taking out several pages of editorial would... I can't believe some labels paid to do this! This happens quite a lot more than I anticipated and the funny thing is, these features make negligible difference in the grand scheme of things. The only thing which makes a huge difference is a great song, ideally at the right time, in the right place... 

That said, there's a lot more that happens within the PR world in terms of exclusive content and alliances than in the branding/advertising world - no-one really bites the hand that feeds and my lack of desire to 'play the game' has probably held DiS back and benefited our 'competitiors' but is also probably one of the reasons what we say matters and why we've managed to last so long. It'd be piss-easy to run everything people want us to run but our readers don't want a deluge of shit, they want us to filter things down for them.

What do you think of the rebranding of NME?
I read it regularly but not really aware of a rebranding, although I know it's due to happen (again) soon.

Do you think we are a much more celebrity obsessed society in the 21st century and it’s harder to write what you want?
I think it's easier to write about whatever you want but much harder to find an audience who want to read about 'anything' or editors who'd pay you to write about or dedicate space to stuff that doesn't hang on certain hooks. For instance, I couldn't just write my column for the Sunday Times about absolutely anything I want, it has to be something which will make sense to a more general audience but it does mean, if I make things accessible, then I can recommend new bands I love if I can make it relevant to topics and trends. 

I think it's getting harder for editors to decide exactly what to cover and things are somewhat of a contradictory mess. For instance we get tonnes of traffic but some articles struggle to get 1000 hits, whereas Prodigy and Brand New, acts we don't really push to the fore, get really well read. Whereas, in print, they have no true idea how popular some articles or regular features are, apart from in research groups and letters they get in but the only true metric they have is the difference putting an act like Oasis on the cover, rather than Lightspeed Champion, makes to sales in Tescos. 

From my point of view as a label boss that works mainly with brand new acts, I think it's hard - especially considering how many bands don't sell much and how quickly the churnover of new bands is - for many new or cult acts to get coverage without a relevant narrative or specialism or simply being 'on trend' in terms of a made-up sub-genre-leaning scenes or issue themes (and often being part of a 'scene' can be to a detriment as acts get glossed over or deemed something like 'yet another solo electro thing' or you get feedback like 'sorry, we've had too many female fronted rock bands lately'). Obviously it helps if an act is undeniably exceptional in all departments (lyrical prowess, musical virtuosity, narrative hooks (famous families help somewhat!), aesthetics, etc...) but that's all deemed quite subjective. Having a big label with a marketing budget and the resources to shimmy-along opinions (or to do the things which help tick the boxes which lead to coverage i.e. relevant supports, notable collaborations, provide exclusive bits of content, rack up myspace plays through relevant fans of other acts, etc...) is more likely to get you tipped and onto the runaway train of hype, fuelled and propelled by self-perpetuating loops.. Recording in smokey mountain sheds, painting eyeballs on your breasts and flame-thrower bras are more likely to get you written about than being the music mag office band du-jour. And even when bands do get pushed to the fore, the difference is negligible unless the rest of the media follows suit. Personally, I think it's astounding that there's more media space given to introducing bands who've barely recorded a demo or played a gig, than is given to those who've developed and are releasing albums 2 and 3. Every punch is pulled or barely felt for fear or not covering everything, at the expense of highlighting the truly remarkable. 

I don't disagree about celebrity obsession and even fleeting fame has more scope for coverage than innovative or imaginative sorts. Musical virtuosity is always trumped by "a good story", like her mum was in the Bill or she's Sting's daughter. I think it'd be hard for any magazine to tumble too far adrift of what people seem to want or be currently interested in. Even Mojo and Uncut, who did well in the ABCs haven't veered too far from Neil Young, Dylan, Bon Iver and Midlake who're the 'celebs' of their world in terms of dedicating space in their magazines, rather than branching out to covering m83, Justice and Crystal Castles, even if they did love them. 

I think it's a bigger challenge than ever for publications to turn people on to new music (and by this I still kinda class bands like The National and LCD Soundsystem who haven't really crossed-over as "new" but then the mainstream audiences won't be affected by the press, whereas the R1 execs and TV producers who look at the press and web for guidance, are looking for things to satisfy these audiences) but a good start would be to rip up the rulebook and reign things in A LOT, competing with the abundance of the web (or other websites) and focussing on the finest, rather than trying to stick a branded pin in everything - the 24+ new bands and 10+ albums by bands even I've only vaguely heard of the NME covers each week is just ridiculous, although I'm sure their research and label/pr-pleasing policies say otherwise. From the top-end of our stats it's clear people want what they know plus some recommendations, and some analysis and a few interesting opinions, and it doesn't matter if these come from someone whose written 500 reviews or someone who just joined the forum, those lines have well and truly blurred. Magazines and all media today should be instigating and/or expanding the conversation topics, rather than chasing the dregs of it but that's much easier said than done and there are only so many sensationalist talking points (i.e. lists) your readership can take in a period of time.

The music writer as a ‘consumer guide’ is not as relevant today because we can usually get hold of albums before reviews come to print in some cases, do you think websites, such as yours are now opinion leaders instead of the press?
I'm not sure anyone is really 'leading'. Different genres have different flagships and obviously there's a lot of hot air attached to sites like ours and Pitchfork's in terms of our impact but I don't really buy into it. Our coverage does impact on other media (probably more than it impacts on individuals) but it's also a feedback loop as we often cover stuff because of 'them' and because of our boarder. Also, with media fractured the way it is today, consensus is just as broken into bits as the audience is, which leads the plodding agreeable blah to rise to the middle of the internet superhighway or democratically voted 'polls'. 

A lot of people check out bands that have either been mentioned in one place a lot or across a wide swathe of outlets (a bit like inbuilt trending topics, I guess). I'd love to believe we're driving what bands are covered across the board (I know we have 6music producers and Guardian journos, as well as label bosses as regular readers) and am sure there are isolated examples but when it comes down to it, we're just an authority for a select (and sometimes influential) group of people but I'm not delusional and I know we can't change the face of music or break a band, least not on our own - which is depressing because that's what I - and many sites like ours - set out to do and. This is why I decided to start a label instead of writing about bands, to try to do more. If anything, we're just as likely to put some journos off covering a band if one of our many contributors or users raves about them, as we are to get them as far as listening to the act and forming their own opinion.

How do you think the role of the music journalist has changed?
There's a lot more need to be able to react instinctively in an instant with the rise of live-blogging or daily reports from festivals. Within news journalism especially, there's a huge value to being first or adding some details to a story, everything in-between quickly loses its traffic value. There's less time for or interest in considered thought. People who are winning on the web lately are those who provide a unique understanding (even if it's HipsterRunoff's take on an indie album) and hose who provide research, as they're often creating content that doesn't exist elsewhere.... 

The most successful modern journalists are those who've managed to build a reputation for being incredibly informed and entertaining to read. Contrastingly and depressingly, the most successful (in terms of traffic) websites have become those with the most amount of content and smallest amount of quality (see also: Gigwise's Rate or Slate: Lady Gaga's Best and Worst Looks - VOTE NOW!http://tinyurl.com/yf64u94).

As the world has become more individualistic and I think with the tides turning, the importance of editors has receded greatly and things are much more focused on spotting talented and/or specialist individuals, rather than employing incredible sub-editors and forming a party-line for the publications. Journalism, especially online with sites like Guardian or the Gawker network, things have become much more about having a reaction to every bit of information within a field, in the hope of offering a different insight just by spinning the story in a different way. We've obviously shifted from a world with one TV channel to something like infinite forest of people stood on soapboxes, some of them have megaphones, others are just sticking tin can telephones to loudest sources but ultimately the challenge for everyone is to rise above the noise. The only way to climb out of the mush is to innovate and to specialise.

Thoughts on the impact of the web on old media

Reprinted from Sean in Sound's Posterous

15 FAQs: Some of my thoughts on the impact of the web on old media

It's that time of year again when my inbox fills up with questions for coursework and dissertations. I find it a bit odd that I get so many of these as I never studied, in a traditional sense, beyond A-levels. Anyway, as this one was lengthy and asks a lot of the FAQ's about the impact of the web/blogs/user-generated content/etc on old media, specifically music mags, I thought it maybe best to sling this online for anyone else whose sent me questions I've not been able to get back to and for anyone thinking of sending them. Feel free to ask additional Qs in the comments and I'll try to get back to as many as I can...
These questions came from Ashley Martin


1. How would you describe the internet’s effect on print media and music journalism in general?

I guess at first, back in the 90s, it seemed like a collection of pamphlets and places to subscribe to magazines. Then messageboards and communities turned things into letters pages, high on a cocktail of acid, meth and blue smarties. I don't think anyone really thought it would be an alternative to print, and few major publications foresaw the benefits of audio and video. The web seems to have made some publications raise their game and given the broadsheets a better sense of which bits of the paper people read, and it's interesting that the growth and investment in music coverage in non-music mags has been one of the biggest shifts.




2. Do you think this change is beneficial?
For me, personally, of course. There's no way I would have been able to set-up something like DiS without the web. If it wasn't for the web I'd probably have gone from fanzine 'editor' to improving my writing (probably would have gone to Uni) and pitching to express my opinions and passions in other publications.

On a bigger scale, I think the web has taken away the value and point of words about music. It's less to do with the shift in media (there's probably more words available and consumed about music than ever before) but moreso a shift in the need for journalism, when you can inform yourself by listening, rather than spending 5 hours every Wednesday trying to decide your cd purchase for the week by hiding Melody Maker under your exercise book, pretending to do maths.

I'm not sure music writing in traditional music mags is as good as it was but partly that's due to them covering 70+ acts an issue, trying to compete with the abundance of the web and its endless soundbite reservoir of recommendations.

3. Would you say the relationship between the music fan and the music critic has changed?

I don't think people need 'critics' any more, they just want some guidance. I think 'critics' probably only influenced others within the intelligentsia and I don't think that has really changed. People want to know what's good, maybe hear an explanation of why it's good (especially if they're unsure about something on first listen) or they want to peer into the worlds and inside the minds of their favourite artists but increasingly they can do this via artist-generated content in blogs, tweets and on youtube.

4. Is the notion of a tastemaker critic dead?

I'd love to say they're alive and well but I think it's more a case that the tastemaker is more important than ever but the critical element (to slay terrible records, destroy demi-gods and deconstruct the things they adore) is OVA! People, especially those with influence in mainstream media, still rely on those who have searched out great things by listening to all the crap. The trouble is - with things like Hype Machine chart, BBC Sound of Polls - there are now so many 'tastemakers' that its become less about trusted individuals and more about democracy, which in my opinion is incredibly flawed as the agreeable is rising to the top, rather than the exceptional and the acts who 'win' are merely those who have the funds to invest long-term in acts, putting all the right dominoes in line....

5. Do you think the internet has had a dumbing effect on music journalism?

In many ways, I think Andrew Keen was right about this with his book Cult of the Amateur but journopocalypse is a way off. I spent Christmas reading mags like Huck and collections of music writing like the Da Capo Best Music Writing 2009 journal, and the standards are higher than ever, especially considering what all the bullshit from people like John Harris about the death of journalism would suggest. Of course the web isn't suited to text heavy content but at the same time was VBS's Donkumentary or Kevin Rose's Digg interview with Trent Reznor 'dumb' or 'bad' journalism? I wouldn't say so. At the same time, Peter Robinson's Popjustice site and his writing about pop elsewhere is funnier and much more sophisticated and biting than Smash Hits ever was. Then there's Sasha Frere-Jones at New Yorker and I suspect there more great books about music than there's ever been (I guess technically Luke Haines and Kill Your Friends isn't 'journalism').

I suspect the lack of a troop of great writers, all gunslinging at one publication like Creem, is more about economics because writing about music doesn't pay as well as say TV or other such pop culture, which is perhaps why the likes of Charlie Brooker, Miranda Sawyer and Laura Barton aren't writing about music as much? Even Swells was writing about Football to pay his rent, etc. And from my own experience, great writers, who value what they write, don't want to do it for free but sometimes do, by writing blogs, like musicians giving mp3s away, to let people sample their writing, in the hope of or to compliment, paid work.

6. Do music fans simply demand things that print media can’t offer?

They don't know what they want. I suspect if Pitchfork went into print it'd outsell Rolling Stone and NME, and that's not because it's web-friendly but because it covers the music people currently want to read about, in a flicking-through-the-record-racks kinda way. I mean, how many print publications gave a record like Postal Service 'Give Up' the end of decade plaudits it deserved?

Of course the web with playlists and click to play buttons, trumps comprehending some confusing description. But it depends whether you class "music fans" as web-savvy, ringtone-listening, book-hating (Twilight and Harry Potter defy this logic) 14-21 year olds, like NME/etc still does or realise, like the hugely successful The Word, that people in their 50s may be listening to Leonard Cohen and Wilco but they bought Clash and Kraftwerk records in their teens and are interested in bands like My Morning Jacket and Grizzly Bear. When I was involved in the launch of theQuietus.com and when I signed Martha Wainwright, this was something I was very aware of.

7. Do you think user generated content will eventually supersede professional journalism?

I think its already, er, drowned it out somewhat. The reservoir of shite has always and will always exist, I just think that, as with crap bands, the truly great stuff will always be valued and be more successful (some will miss out on the success they deserve but the often very cynically motivated hobbyist crap, which gets no interest - or, if they wanted to do it as a job, enough ad rev - as you need about 100k readers before you can quit you day job!). The reason HipsterRunoff does so well is because it's very funny, GorillavsBear is always 'on it' with their recommendations, MBVmusic looks great and has great content... Popbitch didn't destroy celebrity gossip mags. Is HuffingtonPost going to kill the Guardian or FT, I don't think so but I suspect its made them pull their socks in a different direction. For some papers the web has meant less requirement to search out stories or research them as much due to the instant resources of the web.

The web may eat away at traditional media but most things compliment others and the process of adaption will ensure things which are popular and/or valued survive. Compromise and balance is more important than ever, for instance, if DiS just covered bands only a tiny niche have heard of, who play to 200 people, we'd struggling to get the 400k readers a month that currently visit the site. NME's website reaches more people than their magazine ever has and with sponsored awards shows and wotnot it's probably more profitable than its ever been too. ABC sales figures of the print title aren't the be all and end all. In the same way major labels are learning from what the likes of Trent Reznor is doing, Spin is learning from Stereogum...

8. Do you personally welcome user generated material?

DiS was built upon it and will continue to be. However, we don't let everyone post our featured content (we select contributors based on quality of their submissions) and not every music fans wants or needs to voice their opinion. Our forums are hugely popular but only about 10% of those who post are active users. I started out as a music fan with no idea how to write or edit a 'magazine', and I've learnt everything by muddling through and making every mistake, so I'm still closer to being a webuser generating content, than a qualified, educated, professional journalist.

9. Does the internet provide an engaging forum for discussion or an outlet for offensive and argumentative behaviour?

Both but mostly the latter. Within closed or selective communities things are always nicer but it's like choosing a pub, if you goto a Whetherspoons at 11 on a Friday night, it'll inevitably get rowdy.

10. Do you think the anonymity of the internet spawns faceless or characterless journalism?

To some extents I guess it does. Lotsa people burrow themselves behind the media 'brand' and oddly even our readers still consider reviews to be the editorially-sanctioned 'DiS opinion', rather than that of the individual who wrote the review (something I'm trying to improve). I think characters are still out there writing but like trying to find a great band, it really isn't easy to find that sharp spark amongst the screaming throng of loser-generated blogs. It's very easy to throw rocks, it's incredibly hard (and takes an investment of time, which requires money, support and an element of freedom) to be Lester Bangs, Nick Kent or Charlie Brooker.

11. Would you say the integration of social networking sites like Twitter/Facebook adds anything to online journalism or is it just a passing fad?

It makes it much easier to receive abuse! It does help great content spread and can be useful for keeping abreast of what's going on but not sure it's as important as people think. For instance, DiS has 11k+ Twitter followers, yet links we post rarely get 500+ clicks but on the flipside, we get a lot of new users from social networks. People are digesting more content but in different ways. I think music fans are spending less time coming to sites in case they've covered, say Radiohead, and spending more time looking at feeds of information, hoping to spot trends of bands being mentioned a lot, whilst waiting for a mention of Radiohead...

12. Do you think people will ever be prepared to pay for online music criticism?

For news and pithy reviews, I don't think so. However, I think with the emergence of eReaders there's a chance lengthier articles may have a chance of being monetized. I also think people value curated content and realize that high-quality costs money, so has value. However, I think, with so many free alternatives, there's a lot less need to read to discover music or inform purchases, so it will remain ad-supported for quite some time. Should people pay for poetry? Should people pay to look at art? These are similar questions, I just think it's strange that recorded music and writing opinions about music, have similar questions based on the culture of the past 50 years, which isn't a great deal of time in the grand scheme of things.

13. Do you think today’s audiences only want to read about stories as they break?

Sadly, I think that might be the case. It's interesting tho to see a rise of analysis of big stories in the media, led somewhat by mags like Newsweek. I think articulating an opinion on the story, to help people make sense of it (like all the fantastic Jay Reatard and Kate McGarrigle obituaries that ran lately). Been pondering this quite a lot with regard to festival coverage as a 'breaking' story but I think the people who want to read about festivals are most likely those there, unless it's Glastonbury.

14. Does web-based writing spur as much passion for music as magazines do, in your opinion?

It can do, there's perhaps more honesty and passion online but, for some reason, it still doesn't have the same gravitas. I think there's still something to be said for the space that can be dedicated to a story in print. The web, in terms of design and shoving-stuff-in-readers-faces still hasn't achieved the same impact, so the element that most passionate recommendations which the editor decided everyone should read, isn't quite there. I think it's easy for great things to be missed or lost online, as it's hard to bring attention to things. And I think, with an air of 'maybe no-one's listening' or 'maybe i'm the only one reading this' the passion which goes into the writing or is received from it, is perhaps a little skewed but maybe that's just me.

15. And finally do you think people today pay less attention to what magazines have to say and view the internet as a natural progression?

I'm not sure 'people' ever cared but an influential core are probably getting more out of the web and traditional media, than they ever were. I don't think it's an unnatural progression but it's happening so fast and I'm not sure enough people understand the seismic shift and how to get the best from it.

some links via Twitter

A taste-maker critic talks about being a taste-maker critic.

A vaguely meta-critic site.

Another relaunch for the most ill-thought out (and arrogantly put together) site on the web, MySpace.

Post-Napster myths of the Digital Age.

A column about pop music (with good reference to the way music is designed for consumption).

Bloganthropy.

Do music artists fare better in a world with illegal file-sharing?

Meta-critic's end of year list from 2008.

tightrope walking (reprise)

Thought I'd repost a handful of my answers to some of the comments elicited by Drowned In Sound's Music Journalism R.I.P? week.

tightrope walking

Correct. The monopoly of information has been broken. It had always been broken, to a lesser or greater extent. What does that prove?

Three examples.

1) There are builders outside, replacing my roof right now. I have the same access as them to all the tools required to finish the job - the scaffolding, the tin, etc. Could I? What do you bloody think?

2) All a tightrope walker requires to complete their craft is a rope strung between two poles. That's all I need as well, in theory.

3) School textbooks. We all have equal access to those, correct? So why do some learn faster and some slower? The Internet hasn't levelled off hierarchies (of power, of information), not at all. It's simply destroyed some and created others. HOW DOES THE NEW JACK KID DISCOVER WHAT MUSIC SHE WANTS TO LISTEN TO? WHEN? WHERE? Oh, by trawling through thousands upon thousands of sites themselves...thereby becoming (to all intents and purposes) "an expert". DOES EVERYONE DO THIS? Really?

Alternately, they turn to trusted platforms (P4k, DiS etc) who point them in appropriate directions.... which is what has always happened! There has always been hundreds of thousands of music fans, expert in their own fields. The Internet didn't suddenly change that fact: it just confused the field by flooding it with too much information.

Everett_True | 16 Jul '09, 00:30 | Reply

the person reading this article

Do they have exactly the same access to information as I do? Really? How so? Are they me?

Everett_True | 16 Jul '09, 00:33 | Reply

and

With regard to this point (again), marcusian123, "The information asymmetry is shattered, I can check out American bands the same as the next person."

There's a reason for that. You're motivated. You have a vested interest in doing so. Most users surfing the Internet do not. (Goes back to the classroom: why do some learn fast, and some slow.) Sure, it means that folk like you no longer need to lean so heavily on folk like me. And that's fine. Doesn't mean the same applies everywhere.

Everett_True | 16 Jul '09, 00:37 | Reply

the differences between a taste-maker critic and a critic

Polar Bear is Dying raises a very fair point in response to a previous post that cuts straight to the heart of my research. What is the difference between a taste-maker critic and a critic? Don't all critics influence taste in some way or other?

Um, you could certainly make an argument for that. But wait. Many critics don't look to influence taste. They see their role to inform, to provide a form of consumer guide: or to discuss and inspect without necessarily prejudicing the reader (this form of approach particularly favoured at more 'respectable' newspapers); or (lower down the food chain) to do whatever it takes to blag that free CD or pair of concert tickets. There are whole sections of the critical community that view 'personality' in a writer with distrust - "immature" is a word I've seen used several times in conjunction with the recent death of one of the NME's foremost taste-maker critics of the 80s and 90s, Steven Wells (and not particularly as a prejorative). Many (perhaps most) critics view their duty as to 'tell the story', describe the music - nothing more, nothing less.

I'm not saying that the latter can't be taste-makers. Of course, they can: especially when they have a certain consistency in their views which their audience learns to interact with. For example, David Fricke of Rolling Stone is a man who's never bothered pushing the 'personality' side of his writing, but clearly he's a taste-maker critic - many people, both within the industry and without, set great store by his recommendations.

Then again, there are many critics who would define themselves as taste-makers without any clear reason why. I'm particularly thinking of the sorry breed of writers that showed up at the UK music press mid-90s, having read nothing and experienced nothing except the UK music press itself (and perhaps a few years at university, which frankly amounts to bugger all). Were they taste-makers, simply because the intent was there? Or were they lacking the personality - so crucial to a persona like Steven Wells, or Nick Kent, or Everett True - without which, unless you're as trusty and consistent a source as Fricke, or Simon Reynolds (to give an even better example), you cannot fill that role?

(I'm not meaning to imply Reynolds' or Fricke's writing has no personality - clearly it does - just that that personality isn't central to their whole approach.)

Is it possible to be a taste-maker critic if no one is paying attention to your views? Now, that's another question entirely. To pull in a question I posed a few weeks back, is the critic defined by their audience? Because it sure as hell doesn't just lie in the intent. How can I be a taste-maker if I'm not influencing anyone?

So is there a ready checklist by which you can define a taste-maker critic? Of course not: like all definitions, it is mutable and flexible and determined by the medium it exists within. And yet I need to be able to state - as unambiguously as possible - what a taste-maker critic is, because without doing so, how can I define the changing role of the taste-maker critic in web 2.0 environments?

In the past few days, I've been engaging in a (one-sided) argument with the fine readers of Drowned In Sound over a particularly cantankerous blog post overview of dull-ass Icelandic band Sigur Ros. Most are down with the idea I should be free to write what I like, even if they disagree with the sentiments and feel the post is gratuitous and rather pointless. Interestingly, almost without exception, the entire (message board posting) readership of DiS seem - quite touchingly - affronted that I should be seeking to engage them in dialogue over my views, one staff writer even going as far to suggest, "I wish a little of the old True would come back instead of just trolling for hits".

It's almost like a entire generation of music fans have never engaged with a taste-maker critic - because this is what I've always done!

Oh, and here's a tentative checklist for a taste-maker definition... If I could be bothered, I'd draw some arrows linking and circling the following to indicate the relationships. Maybe one of my readers could oblige?

Taste

Opinion

Personality

Writing skills

Trust

traffic

I've managed to get my hits on my music blog up to around a thousand per day, over the last three days.

Interestingly, being linked to by The Guardian website hasn't make the slightest bit of difference to my incoming traffic. Most of my referrals come either from Twitter, Facebook, the live Nirvana forum or the UK music site Drowned In Sound.

To put all this in perspective, when I published my own fanzine in the 80s I was selling over 2,000 copies per issue, hand-to-hand.