Professional music journalism is declining at a frightening rate. What’s going on?
I spend a couple of hours each morning scouring online sources for the latest music news and recommendations.
Some of what I find gets compiled and linked from my personal website, while other information gets turned into Ongoing History of New Music shows and my Uncharted: Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry podcast.
It’s also how I keep up to date on what’s going on in the world of music. It’s all part of the gig, you know? It’s been getting harder to keep on top of things because music journalism has been taking hit after hit after hit.
Sites I used to rely on to stay informed have been disappearing at an alarming rate. And this month, four excellent sites were gutted.
Veeps, the livestreaming startup founded by Benji and Joel Madden of Good Charlotte and now owned by Live Nation, has taken apart the editorial staff of Alternative Press, Brooklyn Vegan, Revolver and Goldmine. The first three provided all kinds of alt-rock material (especially of the underground/emerging/up-and-coming variety), while Goldmine was essential reading for collectors and vinyl junkies. Nearly all the staff of each publication have been let go. This is very, very bad.
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Trusted, human-curated professional music journalism has been a part of the culture for decades. Not only do fans depend on this information, but so do artists, labels and the live music industry. The future of the sites is obviously uncertain, and it’s unclear why a company as big as Live Nation would do this.
Yes, online advertising is a battleground, especially as agencies allocate ad dollars to social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram. The attitude seems to be to dump money into influencers and paid social media views. Great. Fantastic. How’s that working for you?
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This decline has been underway for years. In the late ’90s/early 2000s, I spent somewhere around $3,000 a year on music magazines. While that seems excessive today, it was bloody essential back then. The web still consisted of Geocities and Angelfire sites that contained both valuable fan-created content and plenty of material of dodgy provenance.
I bought hundreds of issues of Q, Select, Mojo, Record Collector, Vox, Smash Hits, Chart Attack, Melody Maker, The NME, Trouser Press, Sounds, Kerrang, Alternative Press, Blender, Smash Hits, SPIN, and so many others. It was a golden age of music magazines.
Eventually, my basement archive of music magazines became a fire hazard, so I sold everything off for a pittance. Rolling Stone started experimenting with online content in 1996, but, wary of cannibalizing physical magazine sales, chose not to share too much. Besides, internet speeds were too slow to handle anything more than primitive graphics. And don’t get me started on attempts at streaming video back then.
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The same with Billboard (debuted online in 1995), Pitchfork (1995) and All Music Guide (also 1995 … Loved it! And it still exists!). I also depended on standalone music news sites like Velvet Rope (sometime in the middle ’90s), SonicNet, Addicted to Noise and half a dozen other sites that I’ve forgotten and that have long since disappeared.
If you want a paper music magazine today, the best retailers are big bookstores like Indigo and Chapters, which still offer up Classic Rock, Record Collector and Mojo, thank goodness. Unfortunately, most airport stores don’t bother with music magazines anymore. Last month, I was hoping to purchase some reading for a 13-hour Air Canada flight to Japan, which mysteriously didn’t offer Wi-Fi. Think I could find anything music-related worth reading at any YYZ newsstand? Nope. What’s happening?
There’s an infinite amount of ad space online, which has depressed what sites can charge. Print editions can no longer subsidize their online counterparts as advertising from record labels has dried up. There’s a surfeit of free online content and only the most hardcore are willing to shell out to get beyond a paywall.
The algorithms of streaming music services seem to satisfy most people jonesing for music discovery. And because so many publications pay a pittance (if anything) to freelancers, it’s not exactly an industry that attracts a new generation to take up the mantle of Lester Bangs, Ben Fong-Torres, Robert Christgau and other famous music writers of the past.
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Most newspapers don’t have dedicated music writers anymore. Today, we have precious few full-time, well-connected music writers and critics who aren’t bound by restrictions set down by publicists and record labels. The result is a very uneven music journalism environment.
But let me end this on a positive note. SPIN is still with us and will soon reveal its SPIN Canada site, run by Michael Hollett, the founder of Toronto’s alternative weekly, NOW magazine.)
The original NOW still exists online, but it’s a shadow of what it used to be.) CREEM magazine was resurrected as a physical publication that comes out four times a year. I’ve had a subscription since the first new issue, although its physical size has shrunk from that of a small tabloid to something more compact. You can still buy a physical copy of Rolling Stone, although it’s a shadow of what it was in the glory years. Mojo, Record Collector and Classic Rock and its related publications are still lifelines for me.
As for my music, news and recommendations website, A Journal of Musical Things, I’m not in it for the money. In fact, I lose money on this venture every year, losses that have accelerated over the last 36 months, when algorithms from referring sites began changing.
Traffic is not what it used to be. Thanks a lot, Facebook and Google. But that’s OK. There’s a reason this site is called A Journal of Musical Things. It’s my personal music journal, a place where I can bookmark all the information I need for Ongoing History, Uncharted and other projects.
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I’m still passionate about sharing what I learn. I’ve kept it up since 2011, with multiple posts every single day. I’ll keep plugging for as long as I can. Someone has to.
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.