Here’s my absurd, reductionist viewpoint on why editorial will survive the demise of the music industry: just because big conglomerates won’t make money selling music doesn’t mean people will stop making it. Artists will keep doing all sorts of beautiful, irrational things, often at considerable personal expense, even if there’s no one to buy it. Someone still needs to dig around to find what’s great, right?
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.
I’m not sure the function of critics is even as curators any more — social software means your friends (who you actually KNOW) can be your curators. Critical voices will just be triangulation points — things to define yourself alongside or against to different degrees. So Pitchfork is useful because it works as a shorthand/guide for “the stuff people who like Pitchfork music like” (yes, it all gets a bit circular!). You know where you stand with Pitchfork people, so you triangulate accordingly.
I think that fragmentation will actually knock out the niche players like Pitchfork ultimately. It’s such a specialized publication, relative to everything else, and I’m not sure they won’t get swept away in the downturn that’s affecting all other sectors in publishing. I think they’re making some great moves by teaming up with IFC, ABC, and NPR, but I’m not sure that those moves will result in a sizeable increase in overall traffic to the site, one that allows them to fill the void left by Rolling Stone and MTV.
There’s an even more interesting argument hidden here as to whether criticism in general can best survive by fragmenting into niches (like, say, itsatrap.com) or by aggregating into portal-like sites.
I think ultimately the answer lies with a combination of an increased focus on metadata/semanticweb stuff and middleware sites like Hype Machine.
At some point i hope to be able to plug in a list of my favorite artists (or pull a list from last.fm) into a site and get a continuous stream of rateable criticism about bands that i like and bands that i’d like.
j
That’s a good point, Jeremy. I think today’s advertising climate will ultimately push people toward aggregation. It’s as simple as that in my mind, especially as social features make it possible to suss those niches out so advertisers don’t have to hem and haw about where their dollars go.
Well, you can substitute any kind of branded critical voice (or high-profile individual) for Pitchfork: I think their brand — which thanks to the rating scale is very much based in filtering — is pretty strong now, whether tied to a publishing channel or not.
But maybe not strong enough: we’ll find out in the next few years!
In general though I think I’d paraphrase your first paragraph: “Just because people will stop paying for music writing doesn’t mean people will stop doing it.”
I think Pitchfork is a strong brand, without question. I think the advertising piece is going to make or break them. I think aggregation and media convergence will need plenty of paid people to maintain quality and tone with comments and other user-generated content doing what they already do: add keywords and provide insightful information to marketing.
I’m flattered that you quoted me (really, I’m not kidding!) but as you said, tweets don’t always allow us to spell out what we fully mean to say.
In my case, I wasn’t saying that it’s the mission of a music scribe to save the music industry. What I meant to say is that scribes do care about music because that’s what they devote their work, brains and sweat to, whether they’re covering it, writing about it, thinking about it, worrying about it, pontificating about it as well as recommending and damning certain pieces of it.
The fact that the biz is in trouble now is dismaying to some scribes because it means that artists are scrambling to find answers about how they can survive in this new atmosphere and how various music scenes can continue to thrive now. I think if we come across good models that might inspire or motivate musicians to follow them, we should definitely report about it.
But realistically, scribes can’t save the biz and frankly, that shouldn’t be our job (anymore than you’d expect record labels to save the field of journalism).
My question about ‘the whole scribe trade or our just our own turf’ concerned whether we should be worrying about journalism in general or just music journalism in particular. I think we have to focus on the former but you can’t separate our field out- as solutions come up (even temporary ones), it’ll ultimately benefit all of the scribes out there and the whole field of journalism.