Part of it for me is access. I think that when the music business panicked after Napster they made several mistakes, one of which was going in the tank for any random blogger who reached out with the vaguest interest in an artist. When publicists complain that Hype Machine is littered with major label artists, they’re pointing the gun at the wrong guy. The real culprit was those selfsame labels who couldn’t discern between a Stereogum or a Fluxblog and someone who was just looking for some affirmation that he or she was indeed “in the industry.” I’ll grant that this started the career of many writers I enjoy today, but it also created the culture of entitlement among bloggers that publicists lament.

So I know music bloggers’ heads will explode to read this, but chances are, you’re not influencing the music industry in any meaningful way. Are you capable of letting your friends know about great new artists? Absolutely. Is word of mouth still the number one way for any cultural artifact to get noticed? Totally. But are either of those things changing the fortunes of the music business? The music business is in a race to the bottom and social media has done very little to slow the stampede.

Can anything be done to change the way we view artists and the way we treat music? I think so, but it all comes back to the sort of access bands and labels give to get the exposure they want. Part of the problem is that legacy print outlets like Spin and Rolling Stone still get the lion’s share, even as the print media business approaches its vanishing point. As I see it, the music business is shrinking very quickly in both sales and public perception. The whole experience of music is diminished when publicists cater to music blogs. The uniformity of coverage, often a streaming mp3 and its attendant press release, fade into the background. There has to be a better way.

Music needs to go where the eyeballs are now, and if you think that Google Search helps you reach a mass audience, you’re wrong. Flooding blogs isn’t helping your clients. Expectations need to be different. As Lucas Jensen wrote recently in the Idolator comments, “Clap Your Hand Say Yeah’s success really made it hard on a lot of indie publicists by filling our clients’ heads with all sorts of ideas. ‘So I can just self-release it and sell 20k copies, right?’ Uh…” I said at last year’s Independent’s Day panel at Drexel that if you want to make it in the music business, it helps to be Coldplay.

But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the new reality is one defined by lower expectations. Maybe that’s where the energy should go to change the way we think about what constitutes success in today’s music business. Since I started writing this blurb back in April, Google has changed the way we search for music by introducing links to streaming options, presumably to keep people honest when it comes to piracy. Realistically, if those links aren’t ignored outright because people want to find a MySpace profile, band website, or Wikipedia entry, they’ll bankrupt the companies responsible for making payment on the streaming rights.

This does nothing but tilt the signal-to-noise ratio in the wrong direction. People can hear music all day and not really understand what makes an artist special. Music needs a new religion if it’s going to be something future generations think of as more than just a soundtrack to their favorite new commercial. You know, like in Demolition Man.

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?

Part of my music crusade has been to say how impactful events like this are for the music industry. There’s a great comment in the Idolator post on Blender’s closing from the friend of an anonymous flack who doesn’t know which outlets will be left to pitch by year’s end. It’s that bad. That outlook, coupled with the industry’s retreat from promotion in the name of revenue, viz. videos holed up on Youtube with no embedding privileges and the like, music will soon be harder to find than bin Laden!

Heck, even the thing people seem to enjoy most about music online is changing. Last.fm announced this week that they’ll be changing their streaming policies in many parts of the world, setting off a tidal wave of outrage. Powerful music search engine Seeqpod will begin charging developers for its data, too. Ominous noises are coming out of the Imeem camp, too, no matter what they’re telling Michael Arrington at Techcrunch.

Those of us who foresaw the end of Music 2.0 can only shake our heads. Chris Anderson’s “freemium” dream is over. The blue sky mines are collapsing around our ears.

What’s ahead? No one knows. I’m talking to my friend Jason Herskowitz almost daily about the future of music on the web, especially around music discovery. He’s been working on some cool stuff lately, most recently Playdar, an idea I urge you to check out. Nevertheless, he fears that Darknet will soon replace anything remotely legitimate for content sharing online. It’s a frightening proposition for rights holders who have any interest in protecting their properties in this brave new world, and equally scary for those of us who care about music as part of our cultural fabric.

What a difference a year makes.

Well, not quite a year. More like four days, if that. What I learned, along with just about everyone trying to cover SXSW, was that it’s nearly impossible to shoot video and turn it around fast enough to matter. Then you begin to realize how much work goes into creating something you can share with your peers without embarrassing yourself too much, and the reality hits you: it’s just not worth it.

It’s sad. I wanted to attend this year’s festival just to see how far off it was from last year. I wanted to tell the story that it simply didn’t live up to expectations, that the industry’s last best hope was finally running out of gas, and that fans would need to look elsewhere to discover new and interesting artists. No one else did.

After considerable headscratching, I wrote my own synopsis based on what I’d read on blogs and music websites and then comparing that coverage to that of previous years. In my view, the major labels have taken the reins in the hopes of wrenching every last penny out of the only people on earth who are dedicated enough to attend a four-day-long music festival. I don’t think it’s a culture war between the cool and the uncool, but rather an indication that the majors will co-opt their farm team, even if it means mortgaging the future.

Why should any band participate in SXSW when the bulk of the coverage will be dedicated to artists who are already household names? And remember when bloggers were believed to stand outside of the hype as bastions of good taste? Those days are over, if they ever existed.

My friend Mark pointed this out to me and I just laughed. He quoted my friend and colleague Jessica Suarez, someone who knows what bands are breaking now, but wants to understand why tastemakers from the countless outlets that attend SXSW don’t concentrate on digging for gold during their time in Austin.

It’s a common lament worth repeating. We’re exhausting our cultural resources faster than new ones can develop, and that’s a problem. The AP’s Jake Coyle caught up with Grizzly Bear’s Ed Droste:

“It can be really detrimental to explode too quickly,” said Droste. “For me, personally, the music that I like the most is the stuff that takes a little time to grow with and has a bit of longevity. There are albums that I’ve jumped on and been like `Yeah!’ and then three months later, I’ve been like, `Nah.’ It’s sort of the nature of the beast.”

As I’ve written in the past, it’s high time music critics stepped up and disrupted the hype cycle. I know it sounds corny, but if you want to prove how important editorial is to the music industry, it’s at events like these. You might say that you’re doing your part by highlighting lesser known bands like Wavves or the Dirty Projectors, but you’re missing the point.

When every so-called cultural critic is coming to the same conclusions, it gives rise to notions of the music critic cabal that we’ve been fighting all these years. Does it mean taking unpopular stances on popular albums sometimes? Absolutely, but what do you really have to lose? If nothing else, you come away with a unique viewpoint, which has the ring of cultural currency to me, to say nothing of retaining the last vestiges of your dignity.

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.

What lies ahead will be painful, without question, but that doesn’t mean that no good will come of the demise of the record industry. You know all those CDs that are largely being ignored on store shelves these days, while kids snap up Fallout 3? It’s costly waste. Think about the piles of plastic junk that will be lounging for lifetimes in landfills all around the country for a moment and then tell me it won’t be a net positive when CD manufacturing stops.

Most industries force consumers to adjust when a newer, cheaper method of delivering product is discovered. The music industry hasn’t. Instead of seeing an opportunity to shift consumption to a purely digital market once the iPod was released, the music industry continued to produce CDs, even though they are increasingly being ripped to hard drives and discarded anyway.

I saw how long and difficult it was to get consumers to move to DVD while I worked as a video store clerk. It’s tough transition, to be sure, but it did happen. The video industry weaned consumers off of VHS. The music industry has done the same frequently throughout its short history, moving consumers from one format to another, usually to protect its profit margin. Why doesn’t that still hold? They too are living in the past.

Is the music industry’s demise encoded in the CDs DNA? Chris Ott alluded to it in his 2005 Stylus feature, “This Click’s for You.” He might have called it “Death by 44.1kHz.” The changes fomented by the digital revolution were simply too great for the music industry to counter. They underestimated their consumers and now they’re paying a high price for it.

You’ll have to forgive me for seeing karmic retribution in what’s happening in the music business today, but it’s hard not too. Whether they’re ripping off artists or consumers, we’re talking about an industry that commodified art at a handsome profit for generations, only to beg for forgiveness on their deathbed.

Unfortunately for the music industry, the engine of innovation isn’t a spigot that can be turned off. The democratization of technology is a net good for society. More people are toying with ideas that make our lives more convenient through the sheer ease of digital files. It’s a phenomenon affecting many industries today. It will probably kill the newspaper as we know it. It just hit the music industry first.

Tennent’s plea asks us all to put our heads in the sand. No amount of cultural amnesia can fix this problem. Men in black can’t wipe our memories back to a time before Napster’s existence. But I know it’s not that simple-minded. This sentiment is common among critics, most of whom have no stake in the music business selling music. It’s a noble, but ultimately pointless exercise. I think our time as critics is better spent sifting through the ruins of the music industry to uncover the treasures they leave behind.

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!

He writes:

And given that release dates still have an effect — their relationship to touring comes to mind — I don’t know that there’s an easy way to make this work. Also worrisome is the fact that it essentially hands over control of the process to participants in what could at best be called an ethically grey activity, which, while arguably pragmatic, doesn’t necessarily seem like something to be encouraged.

As far as I’m concerned, so-called pirates have hijacked the discourse surrounding the music industry for over ten years. This “ethically grey activity” threatens to sunder an industry that failed to accept technology into its business model, and a consumer base that doesn’t seem to care one way or the other what happens to it.

We’ve been mired in this ethical quandary for more than a decade, but moral victories are driving both the music industry and press to the poorhouse, and the music industry isn’t known for morals. Since my argument is for editorial to reclaim its relevance from the technologists who believed in better living through circuitry, I’m sure the industry wouldn’t mind if we reframed the conversation about their artists and releases, instead of focusing on the tragedy of yet another leak. Adhering to the old way of doing things may be more convenient, but everyone will have to relearn their jobs to face the new realities of the music industry.

But most importantly, I can’t state strongly enough how little release dates matter to the consumer. As I think back through time, I can think of exactly one Tuesday morning when I found myself waiting outside of a record store, and it was to buy a mediocre Pavement DVD. Tuesdays don’t generate the same excitement for the music business that Fridays do for Hollywood. The traffic simply isn’t there.

Music is shrinking from the public consciousness in both space and time. As record stores close and big box stores cut back on music inventory, music isn’t a tangible feature of consumer’s regular routine. Music is at once everywhere and nowhere. MTV and big publications like Rolling Stone and Spin once played a crucial role in promoting music, but either they changed, or their audiences did. Nothing has stepped up to replace them, certainly not on the scale of those once venerable institutions.

Music is in full retreat. Ask anyone who’s trying to drive traffic to music-specific websites. The metrics don’t lie. So how can we rally people to the cause? We need to make music relevant to consumers again. Only writers can breathe life back into it. We need a new mythology!

The alternative? Ruin. Fleeing into niche ghettos won’t work. Anyone who collected checks from Paper Thin Walls should know that. That’s not meant as a zing, but rather a commentary on how music performs at the margins. We need to bring the story to an audience in a way no one else can. The industry needs to allow us access to artists again, let us get close enough to tell these stories, help us build a bridge between the artist and audience over the fragmentation that characterizes media consumption.

The music press reads like a stream-of-consciousness novel with no punctuation. Coverage has been democratized to a fault. A critic’s value is in his or her ability to separate the wheat from chaff. We’re failing in that regard. It’s time to step up and reframe music in a way that helps consumers make decisions about what’s worthwhile, without resorting to rockism. It can be done. We can reduce the noise!

Don’t despair: tomorrow I’ll share a dirty little secret about how to program a music website that works.

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?

I wrote the following in the comments: