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Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Media / Zzzzzzzzzzzzz Today in the Death of the Music Critical Industrial Complex

Posted by on Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 1:00 PM

Jonah Weiner, formerly of now-defunct music magazine Blender, has a piece up on Slate on the three biggest reasons music magazines are dying. Here's one:

Music mags have less to offer music lovers, and music lovers need them less than ever anyway.

With the proliferation of online music, sanctioned and otherwise, music fans don't need critics to play middleman the way they once did: If a fan wants to decide whether he likes a new album, there are far easier ways than waiting for a critic to weigh in, from streaming tracks on MySpace and YouTube to downloading the whole thing on a torrent site or .rar blog. The value of the music reviewer has always been split between consumer service (should people plunk down cash for this CD?) and art criticism (what's the CD about?), but of late the balance has shifted from the former toward the latter—answering the question of whether to buy an album isn't much use when, for a lot of listeners, the music is effectively free. It's a valid point that the professional critic still wields an aura of authority rare in the cacophonous world of online music, but between taste-making blogs and ever-smarter music-recommendation algorithms like Apple Genius and Pandora, the critic's importance is being whittled down.

If you're into depressing prognostications about the future of music journalism (and who isn't?!), you might enjoy reading the whole thing.

 

Comments (2) RSS

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1
The world needs ditch diggers too.
Posted by Jeff on July 29, 2009 at 1:31 PM
2
LOL his last name is "weiner"

Posted by Brandon Ivers on July 29, 2009 at 2:11 PM

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