Rolling Music Writers' Thread

More cross-pollination between genres of media journalism would work wonders imo

Was really happy to read two high-profile pieces on unsung-hero friends this year (Rob Moose in The Star, Shahzad Ismaily in The Times)

Todd L Burns is ending his Music Journalism Insider substack

https://www.musicjournalisminsider.com/

Baltimore Sun newspaper was bought by right wing Sinclair Broadcasting exec so that likely means even less music coverage there.

pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

Pitchfork demise on Pitchfork thread

LA Times laid off a lot of staff including Suzy Exposito

Music editor and one or two music writers included in the LAT layoffs.

Ugh. Exposito I guess had shifted away from music to another area there. But all bad. Another billionaire owner I think worried that he's losing millions on this one thing that won't significantly impact his bottom line

Not really about the music writers here, but more about the LAT layoffs.

Editor Craig Marks was at Blender and Spin aways back. Billionaire owner’s massive cuts are brutal

Wow, I remember his name from Blender! That's the only mag that ever published my stuff, as a "freelancer" (in college)

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/30/pitchfork-q-music-reviews-critics-songs

That’s J. Doran from Quietus re Pitchfork and Spotify

NPR radio station , WAMU , at American University had taken over the DCist news website years back. Suddenly they just decided to kill it , and are blocking access to the site . Years of articles including my freelancer 2020 interview piece with Ethiopian musicians Hailu Mergia and Selam Woldemariam, who are both based in the DC area. 15 people got laid off.

https://www.axios.com/2024/02/23/wamu-dcist-layoffs-npr-washington

Sheesh, how miserable.

Someone checked and my article I referenced above is still luckily enough available if one places the url in the wayback machine of the web archive, but one has to know that. Management shut down Dcist because they said they wanted to focus on the radio station (but many of the dcist reporters also did audio stories, and the station gets lots of money from listeners and from the University , so it's not a funding issue).

Is it OK to plagiarize your own words from a story you wrote 10 years ago for a publication that no longer exists (and whose website is long gone)?

Hmmmm, do you feel comfortable doing that even if few will know?

Firmly of the belief that reusing your own words is not plagiarism. I don't know the context you're using it in, but you could always say, "as I once wrote ..." or something. But morally/ethically, I personally don't have a problem with it.

I think it's fine. I literally don't think the words I wrote exist anywhere anymore, unless they're in the artist's mom's scrapbook or something.

Story published in 2017. Publication ceased to exist in March of 2020, both in print and online. When I Google phrases from it, nothing comes up. The artist even has an extensive "press" section on his website and it ain't there.

Doesn't really matter anyway - as is often the case, I think I have an idea and then when I start writing it goes a different direction.

But! I have enough defunct outlets in my past that this question comes to my mind a few times a year.

We should ask Bill Ackman what he thinks.

Oh, and I've done the "As I wrote back in..." thing before. Rarely, but a few times - a couple times in the same pub as the earlier reference, and a couple times linking to something I wrote for someone else!

If the 2017 publication still existed, I don't think I'd be comfortable with lifting directly, even my own words. That might be too cautious, I don't know.

Googlability does seem like a pragmatic metric.

The clincher: Some right-wing group bought this alt-weekly a few months before COVID and was in the process of turning it into "the conservative alternative" to the bigger alt-weekly in town before just shutting the whole thing down in March of 2020 with no warning whatsoever. Fuck 'em!

(Although they were *not* the owners when I wrote the piece in question.)

I recycle all the time. Magazine or web articles get expanded into book chapters, etc. No such thing as self-plagiarism IMO.

I recycle too.

I haven't had a new thought in 17 years, so I quote myself all the time, here, there, and everywhere--as tipsy said, usually prefaced by "as I once wrote ..."

worse is when you write down yr insightful and amazing present-day comment on some phenom from a decade or four ago and then find you wrote abt it at the time except you forgot, and when you check what you said last time it's identical

all creative people recycle.

I would be very pleased to have a current-day thought and then find that past-me had the same thought, as opposed to (as is typically the case) something infinitely more stupid, embarrassing, annoying, and long

oh man i would gladly swap one of my old long embarrassing thoughts for one of yours any day of the week. i find that not looking back at all is the key.

I know at least one really great ilxor writes for the site and I'm a dedicated daily reader so I don't want to bash them for a touch decision but, uh, seeing that Aquarium Drunkard is transitioning to $10/month for future access makes me really fucking depressed about the future of the internet.

Like, maybe that's not much, but when I'm suddenly being asked to pay $10 a month for every site I read? That's unsustainable.

"tough decision"

Don't get me wrong, paying writers to provide good, thoughtful criticism is totally valid!

Maybe it's just fatigue of being constantly bombarded by substacks and other outlets asking for money as well. I get it, the media landscape is fucking bleak. I don't know the answer. Just looking through my inbox right now, to buy in to all the great writers and thinkers I'd want to follow in an ideal world it'd cost me over $100 a month. That's not a sustainable solution, for anyone.

I grant that AD posts a lot of stuff, and it's mostly really good, but $10 a month is a lot.

I had a dream last night that a conglomerate that owned a lot of different media brands was going to be hiring writers for their publications and, I think, Chuck Eddy gave them my name. The thing was, you didn't know what publication you would be interviewing to write for. I got a call and I was interviewed with two other people. They were both much younger than me. One of them mentioned that their favorite live concert performance that they had ever seen was by Kelly Rowland. I felt totally unprepared. I was hoping i didn't have to answer any questions. Finally, they did ask what people thought about a release being "overhyped". I said that manufactured enthusiasm for a release was as old as time and a PR firm's number one priority but that the internet had created a monster of hype for EVERY release and that there weren't enough eyeballs or enough money to make that anything more than noise that people learned to ignore in favor of algorithms that did all the consumer's thinking for them and thus took chance or even possible disappointment out of the listening equation. The interviewer looked at me like I had three heads. i shut up after that.
The name of the magazine I was possibly being hired to work for: Formica Magazine

sounds like a dream job!

Jon, I think about that a LOT.

I subscribe to the substacks et al of a few friends but can’t really afford to do more than that. I feel bad about it.

It’s the decentralization of media, analogous to what’s happening to TV.

“What if you didn’t pay $120 per month for cable anymore? What if I told you that instead you could pay $200 per month for a variety of online services?”

Not the fault of the writers, or the creators, of course, but you know what I mean.

(I haven’t started a pay site of my own - or even a non pay site - because I’m not quite self-directed enough, and kinda need assignments and deadlines from others. I need the pressure! I salute those of you who can make self-schedules happen.)

Like I said, I get it - I want sites like AD to stick around in this bleak as fuck online media landscape and I 100% believe in supporting the writers. $10 just seems like a huge ask.

It just makes the future feel so bleak. Almost daily I like to check out AD, The Quietus, Stereogum for the metal and jazz columns, Pitchfork (for the occasional worthwhile review or feature), The Obelisk for stoner rock news, to name just a few off the top of my head (and set aside your personal opinions of each for now, or feel free to enter your own favorite daily bookmark). Are we looking at a near future where doing so costs me $45-50 a month? This isn't even considering individual substacks, Patreons or mailing lists that have a cost. I know everyone is scrambling to find a way in the current landscape, but this feels massively unsustainable.

I keep seeing enthused comments about the paywall saying things like, "what's the big deal? it's less than two cups of coffee a month!". Which, yes, correct. And that's fine if it's literally the only music site you care to pay attention to, but I don't know any music obsessive that limits themselves to only 1 or 2 sites.

Yeah it's a tricky thing. I subscribe to a few Substacks but right, I can't subscribe to every single person I like.

I mean, I live on the subscription model, literally — all of my income for the past 5 1/2 years has come from subscribers. So I am an evangelist for it, but I also recognize that what we're really talking about broadly is trying to backfill the loss of advertising revenue. And that was ~ 80% of the revenue that most print media used to rely on. So, are there enough individual subscribers out there who can afford to support the number of writers and reporters of any kind who used to be supported by advertising-driven print vehicles? Absolutely not.

I have a regular job (three of them, really), so writing Burning Ambulance is entirely a labor of love. Yes, I am willing to accept payment, but free and paid subscribers get the exact same thing, at the exact same dosage. Honestly, if everyone was reading the newsletter for free, but 10% of them bought a CD on the label, I'd be overjoyed.

I think I'm one of the last of the old school '00s bloggers, and I'm not sure I have it in me to charge for the service.

(I don't intend this comment as passive-aggressive anything against anyone here who does)

Well to be clear, the work that I charge for is NOT stuff I would do for free or out of love. It's going to County Commission and school board meetings and writing about budgets and zoning and state legislation and all that kind of thing. My free writing is all the movie/music stuff I post on Facebook (or ilx!) when I'm procrastinating from the day job.

tipsy, your stuff in particular enrages me! You should still be a staff writer covering a government beat. But it also works out: you've got editorial independence.

Yeah, it's a trade-off for sure. We're very fortunate there are people who will pay us to do what we do, but of course we lack a lot of resources. And, like, can't ever take a day off. Sad lol.

But to steer back to the music writing, and arts writing in general, which has gotten so hard to sustain — has anyone explored putting together some sort of cooperatives? Joining forces via mutual subscriptions, that kind of thing? Subscribe to any 3 of 5 for $10 a month, I don't know, I'm sure there are a lot of possible revenue-sharing models.

I suppose eventually you would just end up reinventing music magazines.

It's been fifteen years since someone asked about this, and that poster was interested in hearing from people who've been paid for their music writing, while I'd like to hear from anyone who has noticed themselves improve:

How do (or did) you get better at music writing? -- whether it's in terms of insight, voice/register, structuring, anything. I figure that, as with anything else, you've gotta write a lot, but that isn't quite enough, is it?

Curiosity and prolificity.

read a lot. of everything.