the death (stifles yawn) of music criticism (stifles yawn) yet again

Wired trotting out the same old arguments again. What next? The imminent demise of sports journalism because we can view all the games we want? The end of film criticism because YouTube exists?

Taken from ANOTHER pro-iPAD article (man, these geeks are lovin' it, aren't they?)

2) Music curation vs. music criticism

In the old days all music fans actually had to pay for albums, which meant they had to be careful with their choices. They turned to people called “music critics,” which publications hired to help guide purchasing decisions, because there was no way to find out how something sounded on your own unless you stumbled across it on the radio or stood in line at record stores that allowed free previews on headphones.

Today, you can discover in seconds how nearly any band in the world sounds, assuming it wants to be heard, on YouTube, MySpace, Spotify, The Pirate Bay and other services. At that point, the role of the music critic shrinks considerably and becomes more about curation than criticism.

The fact that your favorite MP3 blog mentions something at all is more important than what they say about it, because you can then download or stream the song and decide for yourself.

Read More http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/feeling-overwhelmed-welcome-the-age-of-curation/#ixzz0oHmkC8zK

my response to a misguided response about SEO

His original response is here.  I've reprinted it for the benefit of those who don't have subscriptions to Crikey.

Response to True: keeping up with the music masses

by Evet Jean, a publisher and music promoter for Opulent

After reading Everett True’s piece in Crikey on Tuesday, I was struck by a great sense of irony — a proud music journalist bemoaning the demise of his career on the very medium he blamed for its downfall. But the greater irony lies in True’s criticism of what he calls Web 2.0 music journalism and its inability for original thought. And how does True demonstrate his point? By using someone else’s tired idea that music writing on the internet is popularised, recycled content. But the opposite is true... True confusingly belittles and borrows from Chris Weingarten. His hatred for web 2.0 music journalism, embodied by the website The Hype Machine, which True incorrectly labelled as search engine optimisation, is well known. But this is not the source of a homogenised music landscape, far from it. The Hype Machine is similar to Google. It searches from a group of selected sites and aggregates them. At your fingertips are a plethora of music sites that offer opinions in narrow fields of interest. But this is a good thing. Music writing on the web is home to niche experts. It’s here that genres have been reborn, careers launched, and trails blazed. All from an uploaded mp3, and few keystrokes from an unknown blogger. From obscure blogs about African cassette tapes that inspire bands such as Vampire Weekend, who go on to play to crowds of thousands — the amateur music journalist is wielding more influence than ever and the results are not always bad. The Hype Machine should be seen as a resource, a music hub that offers sounds that won’t be heard on the radio. The majority of what’s published often goes unnoticed by the mainstream. It’s the stuff the older music journalists haven’t heard of yet and some of them are angry someone on Blogspot is scooping them. True classifies this blogger as someone beneath him and it’s easy to see why he holds this sense of snobbery so tightly. His role is changing. Very few paid music journalist are on the forefront of music. The role of the paid music writer is now to look to the web for what is being written and to do so you must have some respect for the bloggers who work for nothing writing about music they love. Thanks to myriad music blogs, I can access South African dance music, traditional music from Malawi or hear the hits of Peruvian clubs. The home of niche music writing is on the web and its influence is still expanding. The web is on the forefront of musical exchange, whether it’s opinions or actual music, and it has left a lot of people struggling to catch up. I couldn’t think of a medium less in risk of homogeny. My  response follows. Confusingly, he didn't even touch upon the second half of my original article, which built upon Weingarten's arguments to make another argument.. That’s lovely you can do all that. But you’re missing my point. 1) The vast majority of folk using The Hype Machine to access music or Google Search to access websites couldn’t give a rats’ arse about finding alternatives… and 2) all these alternatives exist in their tiny little ghettos. (We call them ‘blogs’ nowadays, but don’t be confused in the change in terminology, or the fact that you can now access one from anywhere in the world.)  Most people use Google because they can’t be bothered to type in the full name of a website. And Google has even recently changed the way it operates searches for individual users so the most familiar sites always come up top - increasing choice? I think not. Most people on the Internet judge music by the rating given at the end of a review, and then go to their favourite meta-site where a whole bunch of those ratings have been aggregated. Is that increasing choice, or simply reducing everything to a lowest common denominator? You’re right about Chris Weingarten, though: I do find his manner distasteful and I do think he’s quite typical of the entire breed of Comic Book Guys who populate (and have always populated) music criticism. But I did like some of what he had to say, and he seems quite smart underneath all of that. Have you examined, for example, the fact that critics in the annual Village Voice ‘Pazz And Jop’ poll voted for pretty much the exact same records as critics in the annual Pitchfork poll this time round? Sure, they’re all Americans… but it’s still pretty spooky, don’t you think? And how do you reckon that happened? That’s right: the wonderful Internet, bringing everyone closer together. Personally, I love the way I can go seek out thousands of new blogs and writers on the Internet: especially as it means I don’t have to even go near the crap that passes for music criticism in the Australian street press in Melbourne these days. Personally, I love the fact I can find pretty much any music I can think of within seconds - and be turned onto hundreds of thousands more, simply idling away for a couple more seconds. I suspect that you’re just as guilty here as what you’re accusing me of: are you at all familiar with what I do? I don’t operate within print environments, or very rarely. I blog. I blog. And I blog about music I love. And that’s pretty much all I do. I guess to such a go-getting judgmental critic as yourself that might seem supremely unimportant, not when there are thousands of others like me out there that you can just dip in and out of whenever it takes your fancy. But it matters a fuck of a lot to me. P.S. Oh and I really don’t think citing the fact Vampire Weekend appropriate from other countries’ cultures is a particularly good example of the power of the music blogger. Not something to be proud of, at all.

music journalism print vs web

Reprinted from Sean's totally excellent Tumblr blog without permission. (Um, Sean - please tell me if you mind and I'll take it down!)

Q&A RE: Music Journalism: Print vs the Web.

My answers to questions from Simon Warner from School of Music at Leeds University http://www.leeds.ac.uk/music/staff/srw/

1. What is the name of your website and what is your role?

DrownedinSound.com I’m the sites founder, editor, head of business development and VP of coffee-making. I also run and A&R Drowned in Sound Recordings.

2. What is the readership of your website?

The site teeters between 520k unique users on a busy month and 405k unique users in the quieter/shorter/more-bank-holiday-riddled months. We get an average of 27,600 visitors a day and have about 1500 die-hards who post on our boards on a daily basis.

3. Do you write online music journalism? If so, what and for whom?

I write every so often but most of my role is now in a more visionary and structural capacity. I contribute a lot more to the conversation on our forums than I do to saying why a record is only 6 out of 10. I tweet a lot/too much too and I also write a column for Sunday Times’ Culture section, as well as a monthly blog for Spotify. I don’t write many reviews as I’ve never really been a writer and I’m indifferent to most music, and prefer to focus on the stuff I passionately love and believe in. I do blog a fair bit tho http://seaninsound.tumblr.com andhttp://seaninsound.blogspot.com

4. Do you read online music journalism? If so, what?

I read heaps of stuff in print but I’m much more a nibbler when it comes to web content, trying to keep abreast of topics, trends and recommendations, rather than reading a great deal. This is partly due to written word fatigue from trying to keep up with a never-ending torrent of emails - I get around 1000 press releases a day about bands you’ll never hear about from one-man PR companies who have no idea who we are and make no attempt to build a personal relationship.

When I do read lengthier music things online it’s usually on the Guardian, WSJ, New Yorker, or industry-ish blogs like fingertipsmusic or hypebot. I sometimes read Hipster Runoff, MBVMusic, Stereogum etc but most blogs are just like radio djs, giving pithy intros, acting as filters, often reinforcing the buzz status quo. I kinda consume blogs, rather than read them, if that makes sense?

5. Do you write for a print music magazine? If so, what and for whom?

Yeah, Sunday Times’ Culture mag. Have also written bits for Bang magazine, a piece for NME and will be contributing to The Reverand’s Ark magazine.

6. Do you read print music journalism? If so, what?

I read loads. I probably buy about 10 broadsheets a month (Guardian, Times and FT Weekend) and at least 10 magazines. I love Wired, Huck, Esquire and Fast Company, which have a fair bit of music. Been really impressed by the relaunch of NME.

7. What impact has online music journalism had on print music journalism? Please comment on issues from sales to style and content. Have there been any benefits to the print sector?

Print has tried (and failed somewhat) to compete with the comprehensive nature of the web but seems, especially with Newsweek and relaunched NME, to be returning to the in depth analysis and lengthy, photo-fabulous features. I think the web has intensified people’s desire for both passionate and considered opinions from individuals and print has really realised this - Russell Brand’s football column is a great example of this.

The web has also shifted the tone of some publications, replacing formality with a more human and irreverent voice but few have really managed to reach the dizzying heights of Charlie Brooker or Chuck Klosterman. Obviously the idea of print breaking a story is well and truly over and any ‘exclusive’ is instantly replicated and reacted to in the web echo chamber. I’m stunned more newspapers haven’t gone weekly, leaving their core audience reading daily online but then I’m also surprised NME has turned into a free or pricier monthly publication - or even taken over daily sections with their ‘authority’ in places like Metro and Evening Standard. I think licensing and aggregation of specialist content will be a big thing in the year’s to come as publishers save money but want to maintain specialism. I still want to take DiS into print but it won’t happen in a hurry.

8. What advantage does online music journalism have over print music journalism? Is it merely that it is free? Are there any subscription sites in this sector that you are aware of? Are there other issues/attractions that might be driving readers away from magazines in print?

The web’s ability to throw in a video or something with a play button is, for most people, a billion times better than a verbose description involving seemingly irrelevant metaphors. There’s also the instant nature of the web and the ability to find and mine increasingly further down the niche of a genre, which for the truly dedicated music fan, who once relied on the limited selection in the media, is incredible. The fact it’s free and a few taps or clicks away is a factor and I can’t think of any website or music blog people would pay for as there are so many free alternatives (although obviously people would pay to access music via Spotify or Oink and there is scope for music specialists to charge for curation, to overcome choice paralysis but that’s a way off).

9. What disadvantages does online music journalism have over the print version?

My major bugbear with the web is the inability to really prioritise content in the same way you can with a cover artist or multiple page spread, although the number 1 slot in year-end lists is one of the few websites can do this. The web is now increasingly consumed via feeds and shared links, rather than people checking out even half of what is presented on a frontpage. People once checked out and debated the 1 new band a week (50 a year!) in the NME or the manifesto-like outpouring of their favourite journalist, now they check out the few bands a day that they’ve heard mentioned 3 or more times. The web is trying to adapt to this behaviour but print still has a massive advantage in terms of a visual ability to stick-their-neck’n’balls-on-the-line for an act they truly believe in, it’s just a shame there’s such a pack mentality and every mag is covering the same blog-approved, agreeable trite. The whole data-led nature of popular=best or falling in line behind the acts which have had the biggest record deals is something magazine editors really need to shy away from and become informed tastemakers again, rather than buzz-chasing, pr-informed pussies, constantly caught in the churnover of new-new-new and dismissing acts because they didn’t form 3 weeks ago and instantly get covered on Gorilla vs Bear. There’s a huge swathe of acts releasing third+ albums with no scope for media coverage, yet every magazine dedicates space to the flavour of the moment, often without seeing the band live or hearing a body of work - some acts are getting tonnes of coverage after sticking a demo online and then they have nowhere to get coverage when their album comes out 2years later. Quality not quantity, etc.

Plus print can suck you in based on imagery, whereas most of the web has a few characters of description to perk your curiosity. And then there’s the fact people are likely to read longer pieces in print, rather than just look at the scores (our reviews get 6 to 10 times more traffic than our interviews of the same acts).

10. To what extent does the industry – the labels, press and publicity officers, advertisers – respect or fail to respect online music journalism? Does the industry’s attitude matter?

Respect? Ha! If you’re Pitchfork or Guardian, you get all love in the form of genuinely special exclusives for acts people care about. The labels, especially indies or interesting acts on majors are constantly assisting this monopoly - Broken Bells for instance included the Pitchfork interview in their mailout, whereas we’ve done equally as much on the band, etc but we’re well aware we aren’t the dominate voice of indie-rock but then nor is Q which people quote on their advertising!? The rest of the time, artists break news or reveal videos on their own websites, meaning sites like ours are expected to aggregate it and constantly playing catch-up. We rarely have information or unique ‘assets’ to excite our readers or attract new users (which is especially frustrating when we give the smaller acts more love and rarely get the ‘pay off’ from labels biggest acts). Some labels still think a band playing a gig is a news story, rather than a glorified listing, yet a lot of sites will just republish every press release for the sake of google traffic.

There’s also STILL a sense that the web isn’t that important, with print getting promos sometimes months earlier than the web and much more than 15min interview slots (even if the publication has less than 5000 readers they still often get better treatment than sites like ours). We’re often asked not to run things until after magazines have gone to print or radio has aired them, working to the labels plans, rather than anything which might be in our interest. It’s rare we come top of people’s priorities which is fair enough based on our relative scale but long-term, damaging to the eco-system as a whole, shunning the hand that feeds into other areas of the machine… I hate being part of the machine but it’d be very short-sighted to do as we please.

Since writing for the Sunday Times (which is only a column every 3 weeks) I’ve noticed a huge difference and disparity in the calibre of things I can get access to and the sorts of things I get early enough to have a considered opinion on by the time they’re released or weeks after they leak. I mean, sometimes we get promos the day a record is released, yet printed press obviously don’t have internet connections or flog their promos to cd exchange, which is how a lot of stuff leaks. It’s very rare I get a personal email (rather than a blanket emailout) from most PR people/labels, least of all from anyone I’ve ever met who knows my taste. I get tonnes of emails about acts we would never cover. There are exceptions, obviously but of the 300+ pr companies/labels who email me each week, with an average of 3 staff at each company, I’ve met probably 30-40 of them IRL in the 10years I’ve been doing DiS. Each PR is usually working 5+ campaigns at any one time, yet it is rare to have much human, let alone personal interaction, especially considering artists/labels are paying these people £500+ per month. I just wish more labels came to us with interesting and unique ideas which are creative and reciprocally beneficial, rather than focussing on getting as much coverage as possible, irrespective of whether the sites or publications they choose have a relevant, passionate or large audience.

However, I repeat, there are some really great PR people but they account for about 5% of them.

11. To what extent do artists respect or fail to respect online music journalism? Do bands see equal value in web coverage as print coverage?

It varies but I think bands get it much more than labels a lot of the time, I guess partly because we’re more ‘fans’ than ‘cynical’ ‘clueless’ ‘journalists’ who turn up and ask faq’s which wikipedia could answer.

In fact, I got an email from one of The National this morning about checking out and considering some editorial for the support band at their shows next week, yet I’m not sure I can even get a ticket to the show.

12. Does online music journalism have a) more influence than print music journalism; b) less influence than print music journalism; c) an equal influence?

Equal. They compliment eachother. It really depends on the style and scale of the music. Obviously for a lot of acts who would once have sold 10k albums from curiosity purchases, they now sell considerably less but are heard by a helluva lot more people. Print still has more impact on mass media in this country but a lot of print is now powered by the opinions of the web.

13. Will the internet ever be able to create funded jobs and a recognisable career structure for music journalists? Can the web ever produce a viable economic model?

We’re a long way away from that. DiS struggles to pay 4 part-time salaries and the ad-funded model isn’t perfect (sponsorship, is a different matter). I think it would take all the major sites going behind a paywall to know if a paywall could work but then I think sites need to be able to create and curate content of real value and like I said, we rarely get the access to acts or support from labels to provide things of real value. Being associated as added value to a brand/product/services which values the ownership, even if its in a philanthropic kinda way or gives them integrity, like banks sponsoring art galleries, etc. This was sort of the idea with DiS’ short-lived deal with Bskyb/Sky.com/SkySongs.

14. Could you ever foresee a) the death of print music journalism or b) the use of paywalls in the online music journalism sector?

Print will be revered like vinyl at some point but I think e-readers/iPads will really help change things. Paywalls are possible but the required huge investment in quality content and services makes it an impossible catch-22. If people aren’t paying for music, they’re not going to pay for words about music in a hurry.

15. Do you have any other thoughts that have not been raised by the questions posed?

I think I’ve covered everything.

Pitchfork. They really haven't got a fucking clue, have they?

Welcome to "Why We Fight", Pitchfork's latest column. The ongoing goal of this column is to look seriously into our conversations about music: how they work, how they locate what's at stake when we make allegiances to different artists or genres, and the different issues-- like social class, race, novelty, and transgression-- we bring to bear when we talk about music. These conversations might be "about" music, but they say even more about how we see ourselves and the world. More importantly, they might even change the music itself-- both how it's made and what it winds up meaning to us.

Of all the ways technology's changed how people relate to music-- how we make it, listen to it, hear about it, pay for it (or don't)-- the one that's always amazed me is the way we talkabout it. For most people, that conversation hasn't changed: we still get word-of-mouth recommendations, share circles of taste with our friends, and don't waste time obsessively tracking what's going on beyond our interests. For many music geeks, though, all that's been joined by an online world where "everyone" hears about "everything" at the same time-- every development tracked like breaking news and hashed out in reviews and comments boxes, on blogs and message boards.

I tried to read more, honestly. But my eyes had completely glazed over. You might want to best me, here - take the Pitchfork challenge! Get to the bottom of this excruciatingly badly-edited exercise in navel-gazing without ripping your own eyeballs out and feeding them to the local possum. Best of luck. Here's the link.

This doesn't mean people should just be "nice." People who dislike things should say so, and any artist who puts out a record should be prepared for the fact that not everyone will love it. This is just life, and there's no good alternative to it: Scenes in which every artist is uncritically considered a special, fragile snowflake tend to get really cruddy really quickly. But when you get to the point where you're wary of any band that seems to think it's actually doing something cool-- even when that act's only gotten as far as selling a couple of hundred singles-- you're halfway to kneecapping any opportunity for bands to actually be cool.

Aaargh! Nurse, quick! The screens!

web 2.0 critics

How many web 2.0 critics does it take to change a lightbulb?

None. They just sit round and endlessly talk about it

craftsmanship

Reprinted from The Times Online.

Thanks to Steve Dillon for pointing me in its direction.

From The Sunday Times

February 10, 2008

The Craftsman by Richard Sennett

Reviewed by Roger Scruton

RECOMMEND? (4)

Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman continues an argument begun in the 19th century, when writers such as John Ruskin and William Morris extolled the crafts remembered in our surnames (Smith, Cartwright, Thatcher, Mason, Fletcher) while lamenting the mind-numbing and soul-destroying labour of the industrial process which was replacing them. A long line of thinkers, from Hegel and Marx to Sennett’s teacher Hannah Arendt, have sympathised with the argument. But Sennett does not think that craftsmanship has vanished from our world. On the contrary: it has merely migrated to other regions of human enterprise, so that the delicate form of skilled cooperation that once produced a cathedral now produces the Linux software system. Linux, for Sennett, is the work of a community of craftsmen “who embody some of the elements first celebrated in the (Homeric) Hymn to Hephaestus”.

The quotation illustrates the range and boldness of this book. Sennett defines craftmanship as “an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake”. His interest in the subject arises from his work as an academic sociologist, but this says only the barest minimum about his expertise. He is at home in historical, philosophical and psychological literature, and has a lively interest in music, architecture and urban planning, all of which have influenced and broadened his conception of craft. He believes that craft is as vital to the healthy functioning of modern societies as it was to the medieval guilds lauded and romanticised by Morris and Ruskin. And he chooses modern examples to illustrate his thesis. He criticises computer-aided design as the enemy of the eye-guided craft of architectural composition, in terms that recall Ruskin’s assault on neoclassicism. He praises Nokia’s way of innovating through free cooperation in terms that might have been applied to the drafting of the Rule of St Benedict. His argument moves with consummate ease from the anecdotal to the theoretical and back again, and whether he is reflecting on the origins of the scalpel, on the technique of jazz piano, on disgruntlement in the National Health Service, on Diderot’s concerns in the Encyclopédie, on Schiller’s theory of play or Raymond Tallis’s theory of the hand, his thoughts are always lively, engaging and pertinent. A lifetime’s learning has gone into the writing of this book, and it is not surprising if its argument eludes any simple summary.

Craft, as Sennett sees it, belongs to the category of “social capital”: knowledge and skill that are accumulated and passed on through social interaction, and which are easily lost when social customs change. He gives the illuminating example of the Stradivari and Guarneri violin workshops, whose secrets have not survived the death of those who exploited them – not because the secrets were known to the few, hidden from the many, and then carelessly lost, but because, in an important sense, they were not explicitly known. Social capital of this kind is an example of what the scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi called “tacit knowledge”: knowledge that exists in a social practice, but is not detachable from it, like the knowledge of the human heart that is contained in the practice of good manners. Such knowledge confers authority on the one who possesses it, and, as Sennett illuminatingly argues, craft traditions have been as much under threat from the modern suspicion of authority in all its forms, as from the industrialisation of the productive process. Originality and “doing your own thing” have replaced obedience and perfection as the standards to live up to, and this is everywhere to be observed in the deskilling of modern societies and in the marginalisation of those who truly know their job, and know it as something more interesting than themselves.

In various places, Sennett points to the importance of religion and ritual in the transfer of tacit knowledge, and he recognises that the great craft cultures of medieval times, in which the legacy of tacit knowledge was kept in place by the self-policing guilds, went with a form of life that we can no longer recuperate. The household of the medieval craftsman was not a place of domestic love, but a place of authority, in which the relation of master and apprentice was more fundamental than that of father and son. Civic pride counted more than domestic contentment, and the crafts themselves were fully incorporated into the religion of the town, taking their place among the rituals and sacraments whereby the community renewed its sense of legitimacy and its devotion to God. Sennett does not linger over what this means for us, who have lost all forms of tacit knowledge that depend upon a shared public faith. And for some unaccountable reason (unaccountable in a man of such broad culture), he does not mention the greatest of all artistic presentations of the phenomenon that he is describing: Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Had he looked to that exemplary source he would, I think, have recognised more clearly that craftsmanship is more than the desire to do a job well for its own sake. It involves the desire to make a gift of the result, a gift to God, and to the community that has sought God’s protection.

EXPERT VIEW

 Sennett's chief strength is his willingness to criticise the craft mentality, enumerating all the many ways in which life as a craftsman can spoil your day, not to mention your life 

Simon Ings, The Times

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That is the burden of Ruskin’s argument in The Seven Lamps of Architecture, a source that Sennett respectfully discusses. For Ruskin, architecture serves the community only when approached in a spirit of piety and sacrifice. Architecture must set effective boundaries to public space, and it does so by relinquishing the desire to show off, to stand out, to record the artistic flair of some temporary ego. Architecture succeeds in its public task through humility and devotion, of the kind that can be observed in the moulding, firing and laying of a properly proportioned brick, but which is violated at every point by Frank Gehry’s bombastic Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Sennett writes beautifully of bricks and their manufacture. But a residual sympathy for modernism leads him to praise Gehry’s costly extravaganza. He is entitled to his taste; but he should be clear that Gehry’s building is not an exercise in craft but an attempt at art, and exemplifies the same kind of “look at me expressing myself” that has led everywhere to the death of those virtues – humility, piety, obedience – without which no tradition of craftsmanship can really survive.

THE CRAFTSMAN by Richard Sennett
Allen Lane £25 pp326

Why the Internet will fail (from 1995)

This is dynamite. Thanks Rich!

Taken from a Newsweek article in 1995.... (the re-post that I've linked to has 162 comments)

My favourite paragraphs are as follows:

Consider today’s online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

What the Internet hucksters won’t tell you is tht the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading. Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them–one’s a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn’t work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, “Too many connectios, try again later.”

And here's the full article...

The Internet? Bah!

Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn’t, and will never be, nirvana

By Clifford Stoll | NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Feb 27, 1995

After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Consider today’s online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

What the Internet hucksters won’t tell you is tht the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading. Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them–one’s a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn’t work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, “Too many connectios, try again later.”

Won’t the Internet be useful in governing? Internet addicts clamor for government reports. But when Andy Spano ran for county executive in Westchester County, N.Y., he put every press release and position paper onto a bulletin board. In that affluent county, with plenty of computer companies, how many voters logged in? Fewer than 30. Not a good omen.

Point and click:

Then there are those pushing computers into schools. We’re told that multimedia will make schoolwork easy and fun. Students will happily learn from animated characters while taught by expertly tailored software.Who needs teachers when you’ve got computer-aided education? Bah. These expensive toys are difficult to use in classrooms and require extensive teacher training. Sure, kids love videogames–but think of your own experience: can you recall even one educational filmstrip of decades past? I’ll bet you remember the two or three great teachers who made a difference in your life.

Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

What’s missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who’d prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where–in the holy names of Education and Progress–important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.

STOLL is the author of “Silicon Snake Oil–Second Thoughts on the Information Highway” to be published by Doubleday in April.

the Pitchfork effect

Critics review reviews using Google search and then basically write the same review, leading to an increased homogenisation and "indie-fication" across the web – the collective view is the one everyone defaults to, which means mediocrity rises to the top.

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.