Online Zines: What do you want? What do you get out of it?

My two cents: the most important thing is a consistent musical outlook. It can be eclectic, sure. Or it can even feature dissenting views from different folks. But I always hate it when I read a review on a site for a record that I have and I know that if that other guy there had reviewed it, it would have gotten different marks.

I also think most online webzines are obsessed with writing way too many words. I want to know, in the most efficient way possible, if I'm going to like a record, and I don't feel like wading through a bunch of creative writing 101 assignments. If they can be thought- provoking, okay, go on a bit. But narcissism gets tedious quickly.

Also, everything should take as few clicks to get through as possible.

new answerz.

What Doug said. I think it'd be interesting to NOT attribute articles to their writers, so that the 'zine presents a unified facade, offering its works as the sum of its parts instead of some writers overwhelming other folks. (Hands up if you click through online zines looking specifically for certain writers w/out giving unknown folks a chance.)

I've said this before, but Last Plane to Jakarta's presentation on the web is the aesthetic that more online zines should use as inspiration - the articles aren't much shorter than the average Pitchfork esay, but by parsing them into smaller, more navigable sections, they're much easier to read than most on-line articles.

Doug and Dave,

I was actually thinking of going in the opposite direction- but having a blog type set up where only the writers on the site could contribute and have their say on records that have been reviewed on the site or other things of musical interest. Other ideas included having one person reviewing a record and then having all of the other reviewers rate the record themselves and have it under the review by the first person.

I guess, by nature, I'm not tyrannical enough to have a sort of unified facade, rather than allowing my reviewers to express their opinions however they feel like. I know that some PF writers that don't write there anymore have expressed a distaste for the apparent hatred of all Elephant6 releases that come out...Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

I have to disagree here. Music writing is only as interesting as the people writing about the music. I find the anonymous "Moments In Love" very hard to read because I spend half the time trying to guess who's writing -- the "unified facade" seems like a very artificial way of separating music from human response. A zine with more diversity of views is more interesting anyway.

Anyway, my idea is that you should make Ethan review trance compilations and metal.

And hire Ally as your IDM correspondent.

What I really want is Indieshite back.

Ideas

1. Put what you want into your zine. No one can really tell you how to make it good. Just do what feels right. You don't have to nail it with the very first "issue".
2. Don't take any reviews from Brent DiCrescenzo.
3. Simple page layouts.
4. Pay your bills
5. Avoid rating/grading systems in your record reviews (1-10, A-F, etc.)

I'd have to agree with you on the faceless issue, don't make it one bland point of view. Take the Brent DiCrescenzo example from the post above, Oliver mentions Brents name and doesn't say anything about www.pitchforkmedia.com . Whatever happens some people will take offence at your words no matter how you write. Now you stll want them to come back, even if they hate your review. As for the length of words, it all depends on the record i think. And to quickly know wether you will like the record or not, the giving of points may not be ideal but it works. what you could do is sumarize your review in the first paragrapf in italic. (e.g. like the small summaries with the daily reviews in pitchfork) the more opinions there are out there the better, so i do hope you go through with this thing. all the luck to you.

and pay your bills. :)

I want range that I can trust. I want reviews I can put some faith in, whether they're of indie or R&B or reggae or drum & bass or country. I want a zine that understands that white boys with guitars aren't a superior form of music to anything else, just another form.

The one-voice idea is a non-starter unless one person does it, and it's not what I want anyway. I want personality. Actually, despite what I said first, I'd rather have unreasonable but entertaining reviews (say Steven Wells) than dull, reasonable ones. Extreme reviews are the most entertaining: as someone who has written thousands of the fucking things, it's infinitely easier to write high praise or vicious attacks than reasoned, balanced, 'not bad' reviews: this makes scores handy pointers for me when browsing - I'll read a 2/10 review of Radiohead where I'd skip an 8/10; or vice versa for Enrique Iglesias. But don't make rating systems mandatory - many reviewers reasonably loathe them. Worst of all is what NME did (still does?), with editors adding a mark when a writer refuses to offer one.

You want me to visit once a day, you need frequent new stuff and top entertainment. You need to make it easy for me to find what I want, even at the expense of good design - ILM is hardly pretty, but it couldn't be a great deal easier. Good luck with it.

> Other ideas included having one person reviewing a record and then having all of the other reviewers rate the record themselves and have it under the review by the first person.

That's actually not a bad idea. I like it a lot.

What I mean by a unified aesthetic is not anonymity, or reviewers with identical tastes. What I do mean, though, is that there's a reasonably consistent mindset to the site, and that reviewers have comparable senses of musical history, etc.

And lastplanetojakarta.com is a beautifully designed site, and some of the best writing on the Net.

And I, too, think it's nice to have a capsule summary of the review.

> (steadyshot@skynet.be)
Hmm, fellow Belgian Waffle on the board.

I like it simple and short. Simple design. Short articles. The attention span of readers is much lower. So I'd go with Q&As instead of an article which quotes the artist. I also like sections which seperate the genres. That is if you focus on different genres. Thumbs down to rating records. It's a lot of work. A LOT of work. I know from experience.

I like huge long print-em-out articles and as few reviews as humanly possible, but you knew that. I also like a selection of widely differing viewpoints, which you probably didn't know if you read the zine I edit.

> (steadyshot@skynet.be) Hmm, fellow Belgian Waffle on the board.

hello to you too ;)

I think the idea of having blog-style reviews with differing viewpoints from staff writers is a brilliant concept, although you'd have to find writers who would be willing to publicly contradict each other. I think it would be nice to have a short summary at the top of each review which attempted to describe the sound of the album as concisely and accurately as possible (references to similar artists would be helpful here). Too often I find that I have to wade through several paragraphs of high-concept writer-wank to get to any description at all of what the music is actually like. I strongly prefer reviews that focus on the music (and lyrics, if any) to those that attempt some sort of humorous or polemical screed only loosely based on the record supposedly in question.