>>I disagree.
>>
>>First, there's far more outlets than any music-industry
>honks
>>could hope to control or influence.
>
>I agree with the first part but not so much with the second.
>IMO this wormhole opened up because the industry honks saw the
>traffic that blogs were getting and started hiring the
>bloggers. Never mind their ability to write, their ability to
>draw traffic would suffice. AND bloggers turned music
>journalist were easy to edit and direct.
>
but most people in the know don't take these folks words any more seriously than they do the fake-sports-journalists of SB Nation/Yard Barker or the fake culture critics at Vice.com.

I'm pretty sure all those sites accept content from would-be-writers submitting work for free or close enough.

And there's still plenty of folks operating outside the realm of industry passed-downs & promo.

You can even say us having conversations here is part of that.

>>Second, music journalism (particularly on the hip-hop side)
>>has been mostly dead for damn near a decade now.
>
>Agree with that. Began with the decline in print, which
>incidentally can be attributed not just in reader interest
>going online, but advertiser interest as well. One of the
>interesting things about when there was print is that there
>was always a system of checks an balances (unless you were in
>the free paper route). Namely advertisers paid for ads based
>on subscribers, and subscribers came to magazines not for the
>ads but for the writing. If you started a new mag you could
>sell a shit ton of advertisers for your first couple of
>issues, but if you weren't getting the subscriptions you went
>under. Incidentally this was why so many hip-hop oriented
>pubs would go under. Despite how much we may have loved them,
>mofo's ain't subscribe. If you dind't hve a subscriber base
>advertisers pulled out. And then at the end when mags atarted
>selling every other page as advertisements and failing at
>content, the readers pulled out.
>
>Today some places still have preimium ad space, but so much of
>it is no longer a direct relationship with the pubs ad manager
>directly soliciting and securing advertisers. Instead
>algorithms place relevant ads based on content. The ad rate
>for your pub is greatly determined by your search relevance,
>search relevance is measured in clicks (not reads), clicks are
>generated by headlines (not content), and headlines are
>written by everyone else but the journalist.
>
>It's a problem. As I said elsewhere I'm not even sure if its
>fixable.
>
It's companies trying to monetize profits on the internet, its pervasiveness is both understandable & so much further-reaching than this field that the flailing music-industry model is barely a speck on the overall canvas of web commerce.

People been trying to sell things since the beginning of time, they've just created a few new approaches to doing so in order to exist in the current environment.

>>Reviews of a record or news blurbs don't qualify for me.
>>
>>I rarely read anything at a music-based online that reads
>like
>>it required any real degree of research, brings me into its
>>story, is written with any kind of style or distinctive
>point
>>of view.
>>
>>Rolling Stone will still crank out a good long-form piece
>like
>>the Boston Bomber or Aaron Hernandez, have a Taibbi column
>>that stings or maybe a story on Dylan/Bowie/Berry/Wilson
>>Pickett/etc but rarely anything of note with something
>>current.
>>
>>And the online stuff is far worse off than that.
>
>I agree with all of this and while not the only culprit I
>think much of it does stem from what I describe above.
>
>█▆▇▅▇█▇▆▄▁▃
>Big PEMFin H & z's
>"I ain't no entertainer, and ain't trying to be one. I am 1
>thing, a musician." © Miles
>
>"When the music stops he falls back in the abyss."

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