is print music journalism over? have music blogs killed the print media music star?

id say so
most print reviews now are prob better written than on the net but theyre also mostly either just towing the company line (cos the net journos, by and large, dont... perhaps) or just kinda vacuuous and lacking that kinda fervour you get on the net.

it's not over as long as magazines have people buying advertisements.

if Arthur falls in a forest,does it make a sound?

Blogs have not and will not affect print journalism either qualitywise or in terms of sales figures. Stupid dumb fuck middle-aged editors of music press desperately trying to make their magazines/newspapers more "bloglike" by stopping doing everything that's worked for the past 50 odd years for the mere sake of ticking off some checklist handed down by upper management probably will eventually kill the form off, however.

we're doing fine, thx

"if Arthur falls in a forest,does it make a sound?"

Arthur's demise didn't have anything to do with blogs or inability to attract readers or anything like that.

Doing fine maybe, but with no influence or credibility. Just something to read on the bog.

just blogs, no -- however, the ease of finding things online via music sites, newsgroups, message boards, file sharing services, etc has *drastically* affected the likelihood of me buying a magazine to read about music. The internet is faster, I can usually hear sound samples, get more opinions on the same stuff at the same time -- the *only* thing I can't guarantee is better is the quality of the writing, but then I wonder how many people eagerly looking for something cool to listen to really care about that.

I've never found the blogs useful in terms of "finding something cool to listen to." I'm much more likely to just click around emusic/amazon/itunes/whatever looking for things myself. I don't trust print journalism for that either, so I guess the only time I read music journalism is for some sort of insight, commentary or historical background. When I do read print music journalism, I'm more likely to read someone who works with an editorial staff than a blogger, but I don't read it all that often to be honest, because there's very little I find to be consistently good and of interest.

There seem to me to be as many good niche print mags now as there were when I was a teenager so I would say no it isn't over at all.

if only Sploosh ahd a cd review column.

if only Sploosh had a cd review column.

some of the most informative, on point reviews of classical CDs I've read have been at amazon

i like glossy pictures

Just something to read on the bog.

ha! we talk about that all the time...it's important...we try to do a few things each month that we think will be good in the bathroom.

Depends how old you are, there are not many journalists I respect, I find most new music through itunes top 100 or celebrity playlists. Old music I love tracking down myself,

As long as people are still buying music mags, I guess they are still fine.

However, the Net has given peole the opportunity to write really long and detailed reviews again, something which you will only find for real major acts in music mags. And this is a good thing, as a 6 sentence review rarely says a lot, really.

However, the Net has given peole the opportunity to write really long and detailed reviews again, something which you will only find for real major acts in music mags. And this is a good thing, as a 6 sentence review rarely says a lot, really.

Most writing on the internet is 6 paragraph reviews that say just as little.

haha

Most blogs are so poorly written that I don't think that their oppressive reign will last too much longer.

Blogs do however play successfully into an increasingly fragmented demo, you can go to one for any style or subject you want and plus some are at levels of "hipness" and intelligence (c.f. beware of the blog) that simply couldn't sell in a mall. Like you can't offhandedly drop Curt Boettcher's name in passing in a glossy magazine without a lengthy sidebar explaining who the hell he was and why, whereas with blogs you can, either because your readers know who he was or can click around and find out immediately (which I indeed suggest they do!).

I don't see any reversal of the trend of the Saturday Evening Post going down but that is a separate issue. In fact this thread has (as I see it) 3 basic premises associated with it. (1) is can magazines survive into the future and what is their role in general with (2) being the issue of where is the best place to get your Lester Bangs on, and (3) being the issue of how does one become a "print media star" in the current environment.

Problem is, as I am sure many of the writers that frequent this place can possibly attest to, is that the pieces they get to write are not really right where they want to be musically or critically and the life of being a paid writer of any kind is not real lucrative, so you don't tend to turn down a lot of good jobs. Case in point that Electronica article in Blender that someone posted here (don't know if that was in print also, but it's just leading up to a point anyway) that was really so ludicrous. Now that person seemed like a nice guy and I am sure he doesn't sit around listening to Fatboy Slim all day (and I am not out to ridicule him), but yet that was a pretty plum article to get I have to imagine. There's a bit of rent/beer money there.

That is a paradigm which seems, along with the mass nature of selling glossy magazines at Borders (not to mention that even Borders itself has built the fact that you will sit there and read the mag for free into their business model), seems to create an inevitability of mediocrity on the part of the writers, no matter how well they can write or what sorts of insights they are capable of offering.

This is what being a "hack" is, whether you are a poetic genius driving a cab under that rubric, an actor waiting tables, or just a smart cool great person with a soul-crushing job somewhere. If you want to be in the print media, you will have to do some things which undermine your potential to break out as a star in it. And there is a broken heart for every light on Broadway baby.

I am not saying any one of these things is true-- that music magazines are dead, or that blogs will reign irreversibly forever but I think that the answer to the thread question would have to be "yes"-- how do you become a Lester Bangs nowadays when you have to take Blender money to write up some Fallout boy bullshit or whatever. The only way to have that type of integrity, and hence develop into a media "star" is with a blog, because it's yours and you can do whatever you want with it.

The only question remaining is who actually killed the print media star because I don't think blogs were the thing that did it. I see very few stars from the early 90s, before most people even had internet connections. I mean, like Michael Azzerad is a nice guy and a decent enough writer, has good taste in music and had a large amount of success but I would argue that he is no "star". Unless maybe he is a star and I have just been spoiled into thinking otherwise. Where ARE the stars of the last 20 years of music journalism (a term that gives me something short of the giggles anyway)?

To be honest, I think that the "dancing about architecture" quote (whoever originally said it, apparently there is some issue on that) was just about as damaging a thing to music criticism (a term I am fine with) as any other "new media" development because it made people realize the fundamental truth of it that was nestled into its koan.

Independent print music journalism is dead, more or less. Corporate print music journalism will be around for at least a while longer.

Most writing on the internet is 6 paragraph reviews that say just as little.

"The new Gang of Four album shows that the band still has it with their famous 'herky-jerky' rhythms and 'angular' guitar still a dominant part of their sound. The lyrics still portray a great deal of leftist angst and frustration and...(succeeding paragraphs dedicated to the resurrected Marxist clichès the author remembers from his social problems class back in college, the music business as a business, the Go4's hipness over the last few years, how much the world has changed since Reagan and Thatcher took over right when the group originally broke up, a song about Iraq and oil, the group's softening rhetoric, comparison with RATM, 'angular' again"

i blame idolator

I always imagine that most people who write about music on blogs or for Stylus or PFM or wherever probably started out doing that because they wanted to write for NME or Rolling Stone or wherever, and saw the net as a conduit, as a practise ground, as a labour-exchange to show themselves off in, and that that very action has scuppered the chances of writing for NME or Rolling Stone or wherever, because those venues have been undermined by so much free online content (of whatever quality). Hoist by one's own petard, as it were.

I don't think print music journalism is 'over' anymore than I think Youtube will kill DVD (or Blu-ray or whatever) sales; I do think that it's changed it though, and not necessarily for the better.

did anyone see frontline's special on the media, mainly about this cat and mouse specifically? it aired last night and was pretty amazing. you can find it here if you're interested: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/newswar/

[short version: w/o newspapers, we're all pretty dumb, since they're generating all the content we find on the web anyway. the hyperlocalization trend strikes me as pretty bizarre too, since it's like going back to the penny press of the 18th century at a time when we're all more connected to world events than ever before.]

to make this relevant: there's a fundamental difference between music criticism and news gathering in my mind. anyone can snag an album and write their thoughts, or even ask an artist a few questions. very few people can go to locations w/ the access required to produce news stories.

what's threatening about blogs isn't content related at all; advertisers looking to maximize their investment are really confused right now and it's their uncertainty that threatens the profitability of mainstream publications. once that process is set in motion, as the frontline piece made clear, it's very hard to regain shareholder confidence to recover even if profits are at 20%. fact of the matter is, very few online publications can afford to pay their writers, even with some advertising. that was just the first wave of "user-generated content". under the new paradigm we're all interns reprocessing misinformation!

I have a vaguely sickening sensation that web.2 protocols and systems will soon eliminate the advertising industry completely, and leave the online arts / culture industry even more skint than it is now, and also fuck over print / production media/culture too.

advertising is the cockroach of consumer culture. we'll all be dead before it is.

There will somehow always be a market for t-shirts too!