how much do music journos make ?

(Drew Barrymore is cute'n'all, but she will have to PAY WAY MORE THAN SHE HAS SO FAR OFFERED to be allowed to have sex with me.)

If you type my name into the search engine at "sound on Sound" magazine's site, you can find some stuff I wrote there too. (boast, brag, self aggrandisement) They wouldn't let me use "sux0r", of course..... They paid well too. The Korg MS20 write-up is my favourite. (be aware - this stuff will be VERY boring to non-musical types)

Techy writing like this is very hard to get, and if you do get some, it's even harder to keep getting it :(

xoxo

Best freebie I ever got: a very nice MP3 player to review. Runner- up: a months-in-advance copy of Poe's latest, which I probably wouldn't have bought on my own but which became my 2nd-favorite album of last year. How do I go about getting those bags of weed and BJs???

I am very lucky to make just enough money to live on (cheap flat), but there's nothing more annoying than writing for consumer mags and not actually being able to be a consumer because the pay is shit, and can take six weeks to come through with hassling. The Guardian has the best payment sytem but worst pay.

Most luxurious freebie: trip to NYC and beautiful, class flowers after a cover story. Favourite freebie: my Viz comics Human League In Outer Space mug. Nobody else is allowed to drink from my Oakey dokey cup.

You know, the people who post on this thread should provide URLs, if their work is available online. The Voice URL is www.villagevoice.com.

Four pages of text and photos in Japanese magazine Relax this month earned me $2000. 1000 words in the US style mag Index: $750. And an article in US fashion mag Black Book last month brought in $1000, at the standard rate of 50c a word. Pretty useful when record and publishing royalty checks can be six months apart.

Nick, re. index, thanks for the ammo.

The advertising thing is a pretty recent development, some magazines don't think they can get feature cooperation and ad sales unless coverage is positive. That's why mainstream mags are SOOOOO bland. So I guess you have to assume if they aren't covering something which is everywhere else, they don't like it, or don't like it enough, or the press officers have prioritised another title. Nobody really notices this with Edgy Consumer Magazines because of the competition trying to get in, and they're promoting the new and underground which provides its own excitement.

Not so fast there, my friend. Speaking as someone who does see print occasionally (not that I'm necessarily worthy of it, but anyway), I have to say that undistinguished records are incredibly hard to take apart. First of all, good luck actually being allowed to: the first question you or your editor(s) ask in the case of a mediocre unknown is the always-legitimate "Why bother?" If it's Dave Matthews or Coldplay, both of whom are popular etc., then yeah, they'll get coverage, so by all means let 'er rip, although listening to either of those bands (or worse, trying to think about them during or after the listening itself) frankly gets depressing. If the music's mediocre as hell, then they're generally not going to inspire very interesting thoughts. Why would you want to read terrible things about someone you've never even heard of and likely never will? Kicking people while they're down is bad sportsmanship, even for rock critics.

There's also the matter that for most legit print mags there's not much interest in letting-'er-rip. While to some good degree that's too bad and why we need sites like Freaky Trigger to balance things out, it also makes a certain amount of sense. Frankly, it takes skill to critically tear something apart without merely looking like an asshole with a grudge. (Some great recent examples: Douglas Wolk's review of Mark Prendergast's The Ambient Century, http://12.11.184.13/boston/music/other_stories/documents/00630909.htm; and Sasha Frere-Jones's Crown Royal review in Spin, http://www.spin.com/new/features/reviews/magazine_reviews_march2001.ht ml, down some.) And most writers who wish to let-'er-rip simply aren't very good--just like most writers who pen ass-kissing I'm-with- the-band copy aren't very good, either. Rock criticism has become an overcrowded field, and especially given the economy right now there's less chance that you're gonna be allowed to just get on a pedestal and throw raspberries when there's so many others who can do the same thing better.

>>> B) Would you rather read a savaging of 'someone you've never heard of and someone you never will', or yet another article on why Radiohead are great or why Fred Durst is an asshole?

I don't understand. Fred Durst (?) is someone I've never heard of. Is that the point you're making?

I don't want to read another article on why Radiohead are great. I'm not convinced that they're great. I want to read an article on why Lloyd Cole is great. Why are there no such articles?

When you're a freelance writer, whatever your editors deem is so, or what you can convince them is.

"B) Would you rather read a savaging of 'someone you've never heard of and someone you never will', or yet another article on why Radiohead are great or why Fred Durst is an asshole?"

Neither. But if you're running a magazine and want to keep your readership, you're probably more likely to run the latter than the former.

How does one get ones' foot in the door if one would like to, perhaps, get published in one others' magazine? Sending the editor a sampling of your work & a resume seems akin to slipping a screenplay under the stall door while a Hollywood exec is dropping a deuce - no matter how good you is, you ain't goin' nowhere. Is this how it's done? Or must I schmooze & gladhand? Or must I suckle at the tit of Questionable Judgement to get myself noticed? Or must I suffer the slings & arrows of greivous pink slips? Personal experiences from the writerly members of the ILM audience (of which I'm a member & a client) would be most appreciated.

Not that you care, Duane, but I'm more curious as to what it takes to get "in the door" than in actually becoming the life of the party. I read the contract I have to sign for my li'l book review to get published in the Hartford Courant, and it's a bit disheartening to know they're reserving the right to butcher my article as they see fit & publish it without attaching my name in any way, shape, or form. (I was also upset to learn that I can't hit them up for a PC or a typewriter. Maybe I can break into their building and steal some pens.)

A term I'd like to see get it in the billiard room with the lead pipe is "rock critic". Is "rock critic" a shorthand term for music journalists that can't actually write? It sure seems that way. As if creating a cogent sentence that's not reliant on misunderstood slang & sycophantic hyperbole is such a difficult skill to master. (Well, I'm not one to throw glass stones in my house, so I'll just cease & desist right here.)

(sorry, guys, couldn't resist!)

I'm hardly a model of How To Do It on any level, but the way I got into it is hardly untypical. Having never gone to college (always a reliable source of new blood for weekly newspapers and the like, FYI), my first writing experience came when I wrote a letter to a fanzine (Crawdaddy! in its newsletter format) foaming at the mouth about Moby's Everything is Wrong, which I was completely obsessed with at the time. That got printed, and I began contributing other things--not stuff I'm proud of today, but it was a start. A couple years later, I met and became friends with another writer, Jon Dolan, through another friend. Jon shortly thereafter became the music editor of Minneapolis/St. Paul's City Pages, and I began writing for him--a slow process (six months passed between my first and second reviews for the paper), but after about a year I was contributing regularly. From there, I began sending clips to other editors at other weeklies in other cities and began writing for them as well. The more you write the more you're going to find people to write for, basically. And I must stress that when I met Jon I had no idea he was going to be getting the job; if he hadn't, I most likely would have ended up writing for them at some point, though not necessarily as quickly as I wound up doing.

"I read the contract...and it's a bit disheartening to know they're reserving the right to butcher my article as they see fit & publish it without attaching my name in any way, shape, or form." The no-name thing'd piss me off--how can you use it as a clip without attribution? But editing is part of life for any freelance writer; you can only hope to find people who are sensitive to your nuances, or who can spot and strengthen your weaknesses. A good rule of thumb, at least in my experience, is that the harder I work on a piece the less likely the editor is to do a lot to it. There are exceptions either way--editors so overworked that they don't really have time to make many changes as well as slap-happy editors who think their way is the only way--but this has been the case almost every time out. "A term I'd like to see get it in the billiard room with the lead pipe is "rock critic". Is "rock critic" a shorthand term for music journalists that can't actually write?" I like the term "rock critic"--when you're writing reviews of rock records what else are you supposed to call yourself? It also points to a specific writing lineage--Christgau, Bangs, Marcus, Meltzer in the U.S.--that most of the people who write about pop music are working in the tradition of. Even if most of what I write about is dance music I call myself a rock critic because what I'm doing is rooted in that style of writing and thinking. I'd also argue that there's more good writing in rock criticism than there is in "music journalism"--I tend to remember reviews, and artists' quotes, but very seldom do I recall "music jounalism" unless it's especially odious (that Alec Wilkinson piece on Ry Cooder that Kogan mentioned earlier in this thread) or if it's not written by a "music journalist" (Bill Buford's amazing Lucinda Williams profile in The New Yorker last year).

assigning reviews is at least as much of a challenge as reviewing them. with a limited budget and (offline, anyways) limited space, you're striving for a balance that serves your readers. working at general interest sites, i've always strived to make sure that all of the big name releases are covered (regardless of quality) first, because if they're not covered, you're going to hear about it. the rest of the budget goes to unknowns who i think everybody should be listening to, or to anything that makes my freelancers ridiculously excited. there's no point to publishing negative reviews of unknowns; it's a waste of my budget.

i was always on the lookout for more freelancers, and they came from all kinds of sources: sometimes from other editors or freelancers, sometimes from other music industry people, and yes, sometimes from query letters. maybe one in ten query letters proved interesting enough to lead to some work (but enclosing CVs is useless; about 4 clips is ideal), but editors prefer working with established freelancers for some basic reasons: they have access to the artists and albums early; they tend to be good with deadlines; they have a track record; and it's easier to edit someone you have a relationship with.

--randy

Come on pinefox, that is really boring, if you know it already why would you like to read about it again? And anyways there is a simple remedy. Write the article yourself! I just checked the Lloyd Cole: CoD thread. As most of the time you only commented, you did not make any valuable contribution.

And you know why there are no such articles? Because it is not true. At least not grammatically. Lloyd Cole maybe *was* great something like ten years ago. And the magazines were full of praise. But it is over. LC has become one of the top bores nowadays.

well, you transcribe court cases. you sit through a session, you do a word by word transcription and you get to hear the most disturbing things about humanity before anyone else. and it's big £££!!!!!!!

i would do it full-time any day. in may i only worked two sessions and was able to take a month off work!

I do still freelance regularly for a newspaper in the east and work full-time as the entertainment editor and critic at a mid-sized daily in the west. (A good, regular salary is a great benefit of taking the newspaper editor route.)

OK, one question: Does anybody know what Amazon.com pays for CD reviews? I'm just curious. Very little, most likely?

1) Mid to upper level freelancers (names you see regularly in places like SPIN, Blender, etc.)

2) Music editors for weeklies.

3) Pop music critics for your average daily newspapers.

4) Pop music critics for places like the NY Times.

Not asking anyone to post their tax returns or anything -- just trying to get a ballpark idea of what people who do this full time make in US $ per year. Really appreciate any help.

1) between $1 and $4/word
2) about $30-45,000 salary
3) about the same as #2, more if you've been there/doing it a while
4) a bit more than #2, with the same dependent conditions

but i can only sorta count myself as having any real experience in one of these sectors, so please, more informed answers welcome

2) depending on the size of the weekly, in the $25,000-$50,000 range; larger weeklies pay more

3) not sure

4) as I recall from the Ruth Reichl book I just read, Times writers make around $70K, though I may have that figure wrong

I don't know the full range, but yeah, that's about where they start, 70-75.

So, somewhere between there?

The music coverage waxes and wanes with the whims of the editors and publisher. I nominally edit music reviews, though a combination of shitty freelancers and broke publisher means that's pretty well dried up. (I'd love to do more editing, but whatever. I have this gig while I'm in school and will try to get the hell out once I'm done).

We only pay once the reviews run, and that's been a stumbling block for retaining freelancers. I understand it, we run on a shoestring. But it means that I submitted reviews to the overall music editor (who used to write columns and etc. and now has to content himself with over-editing what is submitted while working for a paltry rate) in August and they are slated to run in the January issue. That's a long time to wait for pay, especially if you're talking about only having one review in. Further, we only really write about local stuff, due to a parochial editorial focus, which means that there are a LOT more mediocre releases. Luckily, there are enough good small things here that make it all worthwhile.

(I used to do the magazine work fulltime, but with an increasing classload, I just couldn't hack it...)

Seems like most alt-weeklies pay around .20-.25 a word, and the non-Rolling Stone/Spin music magazines pay around .50 a word. But from my understanding, Rolling Stone and Spin don't use freelancers anymore. Is this also the case with Blender??

I think a hard-working freelance music scribe can probably eke out a living by writing for a lot of alt-weeklies and the occasional magazine, but they won't get rich doing it and the immense workload required would probably mean their day-to-day writing would suffer (not enough time for deep thought, etc.) Seems like the only way to go would be to have a regular day job and write about music on the side, as some others here have suggested. Seems like full-time music writing jobs are few and far between.