Do we have a PAZZ AND JOB 2009 thread yet?

Not sure why that should be surprising...?

Score one for the indie kids. In a rather amazing turn of events, Vampire Weekend — they of the piqued Polos, pan-ethnic pop stylings and proudly independent label — will snag the top spot on next week's Billboard albums chart. And the competition wasn't even close.

Contra, the band's second album, sold close to 124,000 copies in its first week to debut at #1, besting runner-up Susan Boyle's I Dreamed a Dream by nearly 50,000 albums. Released on XL Recordings, Contra is the first independent album to debut at #1 since Pearl Jam's Backspacer bowed at the top of the charts back in September (that album was released on the band's own Monkeywrench label but sold exclusively through mega-retailer Target, independent stores and online). Contra is also the highest indie-rock debut since both the Shins and the Arcade Fire released albums — Wincing the Night Away and Neon Bible — that opened at #2 back in 2007. It's the first #1 album in XL's 20-year history, not to mention the label's highest debut since Thom Yorke's The Eraser bowed at #2 in 2006.

didn't you hear jaymc? indie is a little nothing that nobody cares about.

Not that I agree with much of what Lex is posting here, but Scott, haven't you been expending a bunch of energy on this thread explaining the precise niche and specific demographics of your website?

P4k still regularly publishes many of the best music writers working today, and their news section and features are also consistently excellent. i used to read it almost exclusively, and even though over the past few years i've branched out to read other sites too, it's still one of my favorite things to read.

I mean, my line for a while now has been that most everything in pop music, broadly defined, is a niche, including the mainstream. It's a generalization, obviously, and clearly Lex is throwing a dagger there. But is that niche/specific thing altogether bad in Pfork's case? It's done very well by it. (xpost)

xpost

(i also wish blogs/more publications would follow P4k in (1) splitting up their RSS feeds into categories that make sense and (2) using sensible, non-bullshit headlines for their stories. makes things so much better for people using feed readers.)

Indie is a niche Matos, I agree. I think outside of very few artists, all of music is niche these days. But I don't think we are a website that just covers one niche for an audience that only wants one niche, which is what I think the Lex believes.

p.s. lex: the #1 LP in america this week is vampire weekend
The fuck.

Clue: Their album was released the second week in January.

(2) using sensible, non-bullshit headlines for their stories. makes things so much better for people using feed readers.)

seo optimization = death

(trust me on this. it doesn't take that much effort to skim the first line of a story!)

yeah but xhuxk, just as a point of comparison, last year's no. 1 this week was taylor swift's 'fearless' -- it scanned 63k. breaking six figures in this era is a legit good showing.

(surely i'm not the only one who has seen the 'cousins' video on mtv hits? and thought it fit in well with the rest of that channel's manic-leaning playlist?)

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p.s. lex: the #1 LP in america this week is vampire weekend
The fuck.

Clue: Their album was released the second week in January.

― xhuxk, Wednesday, January 20, 2010 3:54 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

i also maintain that while im sure these guys are pretty super-popular that sales dont actually represent popularity as a proportion in any meaningful way any more

God I miss when headlines were considered writing, too.

What does then -- ILM mentions?

xpost

nothing?

there is no good way to measure popularity right now, which is part of why critical coverage of genres like rap are so awful

xpFearless had been out how many weeks by then, though? At least two months (since November '08), right? I'm not scoffing at the VW numbers; just saying that their entering at #1 was pretty obviously going to happen, wasn't it? What other albums even came out last week?

Also that album was like $3.99 on iTunes, so come on fuckin guy

I don't know, deej. Even in this climate a #1 record is a pretty accurate gauge!

...of people who buy albums. which includes ... no teenagers basically

do u remember how many CDs j0rdan sarg3nt owns

xpost

but maura, i'm not asking for TechCrunch-style, bland, link-baiting headlines, just ones that make sense! (back when you were running it, and i was reading it, i thought Idolator headlines were good.)

but shit like Tiny Mix Tapes headlines circa-2007 were borderline unreadable, sentence-long jokes that had little to do with the corresponding story, which itself often began with sentences of bullshit puff-text that had little to do with anything. as a reader, i want well-written, non-bullshit headlines, which doesn't equate to non-creative, SEO-bullshit ones.

but albums aren't CD's anymore, as you admit!

xpost

From http://web.archive.org/web/20071214102355/http://www.tinymixtapes.com/

Sufjan Stevens Brings His State Odes To Japan and Australia For The First Time, And You and I Know That The Japanese and Australians Will Probably Relate More To The Songs Than Us Because They Know More About American History. Admit It.

Americans are narrow-minded sonsabitches. We’ve been proven scientifically to be the most racist and sexist humans in the history of human civilization. But you know what? We’re god damn proud of it! Simply put: we’re better than everybody who doesn’t hang our red, white, and blue flag — it’s in our DNA. Fuck with us, we’ll fuck with you. Don’t fuck with us, we’ll still fuck with you. We’re mighty proud of being assholes and even prouder of havin’ lower scores in arithmetic than pretty much the whole world.

^ bad headline, bad lead-in

i agree with ksh, but gotta admit that this cracked me up today

but albums aren't CD's anymore, as you admit!

― Blue Fucks Like Ben Nelson (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, January 20, 2010 4:05 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

itunes sales are a minuscule fraction of the amount of music traded online

Also that album was like $3.99 on iTunes, so come on fuckin guy

but chris, I thought the charts mattered because that was our shared culture and that's why critics have a responsibility to engage with pop and what audiences are buying? That was the crux of your twitter talk. I see it doesn't always apply ;)

Who reads TMT as an up-to-the-minute news source though?

i did in 2005 i think. even as a non-timely news source tho, it was useless back then. looks better now, although i don't read their site regularly

nabisco has an insanely long blog post about (after skimming it v.briefly, what seems like) this kind of stuff up on his tumblr today btw. haven't read it yet, but will definitely do so later.

haven't read it but i bet it's otm

Weren't the album charts historically imperfect reflections of what was "really" popular? What with the buyer-reported sales and all? Does no one remember the sea change that occurred during the first week of the SoundScan era?

I mean, I'm not saying that sales as they're measured now aren't an accurate reflection of *something* -- and honestly I do think that the hothouse provided by the Internet makes many a phenomenon seem more important on a grander scale than it actually might be -- but I don't think the Billboard 200 is sacrosanct at all, and I wasn't posting the SS numbers above to claim such. Just trying to point out that, even though they're in the vernacular in these parts and in other Pitchfork-fluent corners of the Internet, probably not everyone out there knows who Girls are!

i just mean that plies is probably still a bigger name to most of america than vampire weekend even if hes never had a #1 album

haven't read it but i bet it's otm

It is.

probably not everyone out there knows who Girls are!

In more contexts than one.

i just mean that plies is probably still a bigger name to most of america than vampire weekend even if hes never had a #1 album

I don't know about that, I mean Vampire Weekend has gotten tons of hype in NYT profiles and other outlets that non-music fans are more likely to be exposed to.

nabisco hasnt really made a point yet though, just set up the framework for 'part 2'

when people start talking about "most of america" i think of my sister, who's just a little younger than me and likes bruce springsteen and green day (and also plays fiddle and listens to a lot of old-time music), and who i just this christmas introduced to an obscure artist she had never heard of: taylor swift.

"most of america" doesn't belong in this conversation at all.

(btw my sister is now a big taylor fan and her 11-yr-old son is mad at me about it.)

I think this is a point, even if he's made it before recently:

What’s always interesting to me w/r/t critics and “indie” is that many people seem to think of middlebrow music criticism as automatically occupying the sphere of privilege and dominance — like the U.S., in this analogy — even though its readership and importance in the wider world of music is really more comparable to that impoverished African nation and its quaint local sport. And they often do this because — even as they lambaste criticism for privileging “collegiate” or middlebrow types of music — they themselves privilege “collegiate” and middlebrow ways of talking about music; the way critics talk is closer to them, more comfortably in their vicinity, than the ways many people talk about many other kinds of music. Which is fine, and not hypocritical at all, though I do wish it were acknowledged more.

(xpost to deej)

Do Tim Finney's ocassional reviews of R'n'b on Pitchfork get less internet hits?

Pretty sure this is the case! The only emails I ever get about my R&B reviews (and I rarely get any) are from trolls wondering why it's being favourably covered in the first place.

The fact that this is probably the case and yet Pitchfork still publish me reflects well on Pitchfork (w/r/t its interest in covering non-indie-rock at any rate) rather than the reverse.

The absence of a "critical community" for R&B is not some new problem by the way. Scott is right to say imply that the big difference this year was a the lack of a critico-commercial nexus that traditionally pushed big Neptunes productions or Missy Elliot albums so high. And yeah I think the difficulty in identifying what is popular is part of that.

Deej's point about the relationship b/w sales and popularity is important in another way: the more "niche" something is (i.e. the more central to the taste of a niche fanbase) the more likely that a significant proportion of its actual consumption will be done for free - not just in the typical sense of illegal downloads, but also specialist radio shows and mixes, which appear online with pristine sound quality and in a vast and regular profusion in a way that simply wasn't true even a couple of years ago.

What this means is that the remaining audience(s) for actually purchasing music tends to be the crossover audience(s), who still depend on the traditional top 40 radio / video clip / stories in broadsheet papers / physical CD or iTunes download process for identifying the pop music they like. This audience will go for Ke$ha and Lady Gaga and BEP and even Vampire Weekend, all of whom are not only populist but receive a level of mainstream non-"critic" journalistic coverage in a way that, say, The-Dream, just... doesn't (in part because of their sales - the cycle is self-perpetuating obv).

The traditional nexus whereby niche fans purchased something such that it gained enough critical and commercial prominence to then crossover to a broader audience is, if not broken, then a lot weaker than it used to be. Why would niche fans go out and buy e.g. a Gucci album when they already have five mixtapes, and probably downloaded his "official" album for free anyway?

This, I think, has been even more deadly for dance music sub-genres than for others. I've stopped expecting a UK Funky track to actually chart prominently in the UK because - unlike in the case of its obvious predecessor UK Garage - much of the core audience who might care enough to gain any potential hit or foothold in popular consciousness probably don't need to buy it: if they haven't already downloaded an illegal copy they probably have it on an internet DJ mix or radio set and that's sufficient for their purposes.

The upshot of all of this is that I think the current dominance of these more marginal/liminal pop figures who exist on the borders between genres (Gaga, BEP, increasingly Taylor Swift) is here to stay, at least until something changes in patterns of music consumption.

i just mean that plies is probably still a bigger name to most of america than vampire weekend even if hes never had a #1 album

possibly. But to the music writing-reading population of the U.S I imagine it's no freaking contest.

no question. but i think its important when writing to have a sense of perspective that way, and acting as if indie is the most popular kind of music out there, as if this justifies its critical dominance, rather than recognizing that these are independent variables, is wrong imo

of course, but I don't think anyone thinks indie is the most popular music out there! I'm obviously teasing Chris upthread. VW is one thing but it's not like the #1 (or even #200) LP next week is going to be Surfer Blood.

*doodlydoodlydoodly*

"SURFER BLOOD TOPS CHARTS; 'We Owe It All To That One Meme.'"

xp yah i mean i have other issues w/r/t people not recognizing sales which we've talked about before -- i think that purely from a journalistic standpoint ppl dont have a very good grasp on how popular things are & what the shape of pop music really is, and that this affects the way they talk about music & how music outside their comfort zone is treated -- its easy to marginalize music that doesnt claim the center if its outside of the genres you usually pay attention to.

i don't know who GIRLS are!

i think that purely from a journalistic standpoint ppl dont have a very good grasp on how popular things are & what the shape of pop music really is

Need it be purely from a journalistic standpoint? It's hard to conceive of any true definitive statement from anyone from a creator to a consumer, it's more a constantly shifting battle of claims.