With all due respect to Bruce Houghton at Hypebot and Andrew Dubber at New Music Strategies, the dream is over. It’s time to wake up and smell the coffee.

Bruce’s post “Why Are We Still Debating Free?” infuriated me. Sure, Chris Anderson’s notion of “freemium” sounds great for any website looking to get users to come back often to consume content, but look at the body count piling up in Music 2.0 and tell me how that looks. It’s not truly “freemium” because they don’t own the good in question to begin with. Andrew Dubber incorrectly states that “Yes, Google gives their consumer-facing stuff away, and they are a massively successful company.” Google owns search on the web. They’re not giving that away. They have a near monopoly on the most potent revenue stream on the web!

Those of us who work very hard on the editorial side, especially on the web, know just how difficult it is to get people excited about music these days. There are times you can’t give the stuff away! For all the talk about bands as brands and what-not, I can say honestly that music may have never been a smaller part of the overall entertainment picture than it is today. Sure, music may be ubiquitous in commercials, on our iPods, and wherever else it lives, but that doesn’t mean people are actively seeking it out in any meaningful way.

The music business has changed and so have music consumers. Now that music can be had for next to nothing, consumers are willing to accept whatever low-quality product is available online and see no incentive to upgrade. The same is true in any other business that’s been affected by the Internet. It pains me to say it, but there may be no future whatsoever for music as a business in its own right. The only thing these businesses can really sell are t-shirts! How can a strategy around “freemium” work when consumers are already acquiring the good for free or nearly free?

If we as critics concentrate solely on solving the music industry’s problems, we won’t be able to adequately address our own. Jason Gross and I have been going back and forth quite a bit about this on Twitter. He wrote, “Music biz = our bread/butter (& our love). As for saving criticism, do you mean the whole scribe trade or our just our own turf?” Conflating the music business with music itself is silly. (I’m sure Jason agrees, but his tweet is illustrative nonetheless.)

If criticism survives it will be as a cultural filter. It sounds impersonal, but it’s of crucial importance to an audience. We have to stop thinking of ourselves as servants of the music industry and concentrate on being of value to an audience with precious little time to spend thinking about our passion. Remember, critics have always been cultural curators, so it’s not a radical change in job description. We just have to think of our role in broader terms.

Our love is writing about music. Let’s not forget that.

The answer is easy. Search your heart. Everything will be easier if you can just admit what you know to be true.

No. The vast majority of people surfing the web aren’t interested in music, or just not as much as you believe them to be. Don’t get me wrong: there are audiences for obscure stuff that’s off the beaten path. I, for example, love Raven Sings the Blues, but I think one can safely assume that that blog, wonderful as it is, has a small, committed audience.

The problem I see with an editorial approach that values quantity over quality is that the bulk of your work is simply being ignored. It also plays into the perception that you’re willing to cover just anything in order to have fresh content. It’s one thing to cover music that deserves mention; it’s another to slave away writing content for content’s sake.

If you think that this post is directed at legacy webzines like Pitchfork, you’re right. Pitchfork’s trademark practice of assigning numerical values in their reviews certainly contributed to the way we consume music press today. Why read a review when you can just click inside, look at the number, and ignore the rest?

Now they’re reaping what they’ve sown.

The site recently revamped its news coverage, imparting a bloggier tone. In a strange twist, you’ll find that Pitchfork is often behind the rapid-fire internet news cycle, something that had never been as obvious as it is now. Then again, an audience that goes exclusively to them for their music news wouldn’t notice something like that. That’s the sort of inside baseball only RSS junkies would catch.

More importantly (damningly?), Pitchfork went from publishing a daily feature piece to three-a-week maximum schedule. They only published two last week! You could chalk it up to a bad economy translating into less money to pay for long feature pieces, or you could view it as an admission that publishing regular pieces on grime and dubstep below the fold weren’t appointment reading.

If it’s not a list, it’s hard to get people to commit to features. As much as analysts want to write off critics now that the web has made everything available on demand, it’s impossible for just anyone to sift through the amount of information out there to get a great overview of a genre or even the best new music in a given year. Sites like FAIL blog demonstrate the value of a curation to create a best-of-web experience. It’s what makes a site worth visiting. Curation is still king.

Now, not everything needs to drive clicks. Like any publication, Pitchfork’s features have always been a mixed bag of the excellent and the irrelevant. To their credit, they’re not abandoning them entirely, but rather shifting them from text to video, a risky move that’s difficult to monetize. It’s the right one, even though it might not seem that way now.

I think the move to video storytelling for music is a natural one. It’s been interrupted by music’s disappearance from television, but it’s familiar enough and exciting enough to grab someone’s attention. The real hurdle is convincing workaday info snackers to make the jump from reviews and features that take a second to skim to longer form video that can run for several minutes, all while they’re on the clock. It ain’t easy, but it may be the last best hope for music features on the web.

I know I promised to tell you how to run a successful music site this morning, but I’m running out of time. I’ll say this: Pitchfork’s new news section, though odious at times, is a step in the right direction. It’s the sort of content that can build a traffic stream to support the purer music content on the site. There are audiences for both and we as editors need to accommodate the full spectrum of music fandom to the extent that we can. It’s the only way to survive!

I guess that it, too, is part of a “kind of obsolete vernacular,” as if to say, not quite yet. But when the new Yeah Yeah Yeah’s album, It’s Blitz, leaked earlier this week, I couldn’t help but smile. Here’s an album that won’t street until April, yet it’s everywhere you turn around online. This wasn’t like the U2 leak, where the labels did due diligence for a while until they realized the game of whack-a-mole was going to kill them. This leaked everywhere!

Blogs like Stereogum jumped right on the case. See, editorial has adapted. They’ve had no choice. Part of what I learned as a freelancer was that it wasn’t good enough to wait around to request an album to pitch it. Leak blogs were simply too fast. If you’re not on top of them, you’re left out in the cold. We had to change the way we did things to meet the changing habits of the most intense music consumers. The problem is that the industry hasn’t caught up yet.

If everyone agrees that leaks are inevitable, then why is anyone pretending they’re not. Even Pitchfork holds fast to release dates, which just seems absurd. We have to change the rules that print media set for us!

The real difficulty in reacting when an album leaks is the continued reliance on CD sales. If it weren’t for CDs, online outlets could flip a switch and make mp3s available. That would be easy, right? It would, but it would offend brick and mortar shops, which are still the industry’s bread and butter, immensely. That would be a bad thing. The last thing labels want to do is give retailers, especially big box stores, any excuse to pare back their music inventory further.

But something has to change, and overnighting shipments of product to those big box stores isn’t going to fix the problem.

So what’s the best solution? I think it’s a matter of reaching out to online outlets the moment an album leaks. Just pick a few to start and set up interviews, performances, whatever you can do to get out in front of the publicity again. Give yourself a chance to salvage some brand awareness. If you don’t, editorial will have a field day with your release and all your planning will be for naught. It’s hard enough in this business as it is. Why make it harder?

This issue was emaciated 96 pages. It was a bad year for metal, or at least it seemed that way to me. When I am familiar with most of the top 40 metal albums, I know something’s amiss. (I haven’t paid serious attention to metal since I accepted my current gig. I still love the music; I’m just not seeking it out as much.) The top ten features the usual suspects: that Disfear record that came out ages ago; the obligatory Opeth nod; relative upstarts Made Out of Babies; Baltimorean black metallers Nachtmystium; and mind-bogglingly awesome pop metallers Torche. The list is so underwhelming that Torche doesn’t even rate a cover!

It is worth noting that my favorite Japanese doomsayers Coffins rated the 40th spot for their 2008 joyride, Buried Death! Hails!

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of these people dancing on print media’s grave. Heck, I’m asking for Beer Advocate for Christmas! Our household is littered with print media. That’s partly why I can’t really wrap my head around what made all print media decline so rapidly, and why magazines I’ve loved (and worked for) fade so fast.

I know printing and mailing costs have risen, but that doesn’t explain how people declared their independence from print overnight. They’re not all autodidacts are they? They still want to read all kinds of lists and have things recommended to them by authorities of one sort or another. Where are people finding that sort of content, if not in magazines that have provided it for generations? Have their audiences really become so Internet savvy?