Rolling Music Writers' Thread

I'm at a point where I've got as much freelance as I can handle without going insane - and this is after losing some gigs because (a) places have gone under, (b) space is sphincter-tight, or (c) editors have revealed themselves to be either inept at corresponding or severely overworked (and i'm talking about editors who I'd worked for for years before, suddenly, my submissions and pitches vanished into the ether and my inquiries after same began to be roundly ignored).

Have I sent cold-pitches in the last year or so? Sure. I've even gotten some feedback. But until one or two outlets disappear or don't need my services, I'm not gonna bother. There are only so many hours in a day, and I have a family and friends, and I have a super-demanding full-time job.

(And I'm starting my own online concern, because I am insane.)

I used to get several writers pitching me every week at the Voice. Always got back to them, and always told them I needed to see examples of their writing, preferably as published. Then, if they didn't send ideas, I sent them back to the drawing board.

Never understood writers who figured an editor would just stumble on their byline somewhere and they'd be called out of the blue, but then again I don't understand people who buy lottery tickets, either. I already had scores of writers to choose from; the idea that I'd go hunting for new ones who hadn't even contacted me is, well, really wishful thinking.

Well actually, once in a while, I would see somebody's writing somewhere else and be impressed enough to track them down, or I'd really be in a pinch for some obscure genre specialist and I'd go out hunting, but those were exceptions to the rule.

Anyway, if I still had that job, here's what I'd say: (1) Send clips first (I prefered hard copies to links, because I didn't want to do your work for you, but then I'm old); THEN (2) send specific pitch ideas, in an email convincing me that the topic is worth covering. Not "if you ever need somebody to write about something, I'm here."

I mean, obviously if you're already a household name (if you can be reasonably sure the editor would know your work without googling), sending clips might not be necessary. But when I was editor, that applied to fewer writers than you'd think (and at the Voice, since I ran Pazz & Jop, I probably had the most extensive database of music critics on earth. So I can't imagine it would be different anywhere else.)

Chuck, I'm one of those writers who pitched you and received a thorough, welcoming, quick-turnaround reply! You never were into my pitches, but I appreciated you taking the time to say "no thanks."

I've never been recruited, probably because I don't write for super high-profile outlets.

Before the Collapse of 2006, I sent cold pitches all the time, with clips attached (xhuxk actually gave me the second fastest turnaround I've ever experienced).

Writers thought I was really efficient at getting back to them! But really I just neurotic; figured if I didn't answer right away, I'd never get around to it. (Billboard was a little different, btw, since the stable of freelancers was smaller, and the pay was less than it had been at the Voice, and since people who can write about the industry are rarer, especially certain segments of the industry. So there, I did spend more time looking for writers. At the Voice, they came looking for me.)

xhuxk was the the fastest turnaround in the biz. i did do my best to always reply in a timely fashion to pitches, but my "best" varied widely. to be kind.

jess, you were pretty fast, man!

we should start a thread on the slow, cruel death of the print music review? or just talk about it here?

i think it's been discussed on a few threads (weingarten's recent speech at the twitter conference raised a lot of discussion) but feel free to talk about it here. that said i'd prefer if this thread could focus more on positive discussion, hints and tips, solid examples rather than hundreds of people moaning into their pints about shit bloggers etc.

sorry man.

i'll try to think of some advice.

oh, wait, here's a chestnut: don't delete your article from your email system's "sent messages" queue (or your hard drive) until it's seen print. why? because your editor could inadvertantly delete it.

this sounds like common sense, but i lost some stuff forever because i was young and foolish.

if we're going to talk about it, better to focus on how (and if) it is possible to get printed reviews back on track.

i still buy magazines from time to time, but there's nothing to really get my teeth into on the news stand these days. i either feel that i'm being patronised by feeble indie weeklies (NME) trying to force things down my neck, being reminded how great old music is (MOJO, Uncut etc), or am subject to amateurish attempts at hip design values cabled together with very dry reportage (Artrocker, Notion whatever other upstart rag'll end up collapsing within a couple of months) that purposefully avoids the yellow-journalism of the aforementioned indie weeklies by avoiding all humour and interesting points.

Select was my bag back in the day, and I felt they got everything right - knowledge, subject matter, humour, diverse content, subjectivity etc.

xpost :-) cheers

I don't buy magazines, either. At this point, I'd only buy the Wire, but it's just way too expensive, so I read it in the tsore then leave.

bea, who are you? i've been gone too long to keep up with the namehopping.

ray cummings

Didn't pitch my first thing at the Voice, or at Creem many years ago, for that matter. Just sent them in. xhuxk told me he probably couldn't use it. I forgot about it. A bit later he e-mailed back and asked me to resend it but I deleted it. At the time, my e-mailer was one which didn't stash a copy of everything sent.

Anyway, stopped pitching in music for two reasons: The pitches were getting half as long to as long as the paragraph reviews. Got tired of the quid pro quo required to get review copies in a timely manner.

"Got tired of the quid pro quo required to get review copies in a timely manner."

i actually wrote a few reviews for a mag a year or two ago, then stopped, because the editor a) wouldn't send review copies and b) wouldn't pay me.
(which is to say he just stopped writing back to me. i called and left some messages, no dice.)

which sucks because i no longer have copies of the reviews - which i was really proud of - in my email and flat out refuse to subsidize the mag by buying it.

anyway, that's more hatorade, and i should chip in with advice, right?

here's a basic one: spell-check your copy. when you're swamped and in a hurry, it's easy to not do this. i'm guilty of it myself. but if you do it, that's less work for your editor, and your editor will appreciate it. (probably.)

when people were talking about pitching mags and papers i got a shiver when i thought about the only time i actually sent e-mails and letters to people (i was a baby daddy at the time and not working so i thought i would have more time to write) in order to get more work. the only magazine that got back to me was magnet. the less said about the stuff i wrote for them the better. oh, and blender contacted me and asked me to send them more stuff and i did and then i never heard from them again. (for which i am eternally grateful) anyway, i realized then and there that i could never hack it as a freelancer. and that i was much better off not worrying about and writing for fun. or occasionally writing for people i liked if they asked me. mostly ilxors! (i got my job thru the ilx!) it was hard then and now i imagine it is a LOT harder. i mean, it's hard for everyone in the print biz now. my advice - i have advice! - to anyone with a, um, burning desire to write about music is to d.i.y. as much as possible. get together with like-minded people and start your own website. put out your own books with an e-press and hawk them on the street. or whatever. use the cheap and easy tech available. if it's good stuff, maybe someone will notice. or maybe they won't. in any case, try and have fun with it. start a zine! zines are on the rise! no, really. cuz there is almost NOTHING good on newsstands these days. NOTHING. when i think of a perfect world where i could write for a cool magazine - other than the cool magazine i write for every month - i draw a blank. if mojo or the wire called me up and asked me to do something, i would. i like them. that's about it. for real. so, there IS definitely room for something cool out there if you are willing to work it.

The tricky part is getting people to buy it. For reasons which escape me, Mojo and Classic Rock can exist in the UK. But stuff like that fails here, discounting the fact that they work as imports at urban bookstore mag racks.

Well, maybe they don't really escape me. I'd guess the audience for Mojo and Classic Rock is older and still familiar with the idea of paying for stuff. Kind of like the base for Guitar Player.

xp Yeah, George was definitely an exception in the pitching (or even assigning) department -- He pretty much sent everything to me on Spec, and I wound up printing most everything he sent eventually. Thing is, George had an extremely good grasp of wordcounts (he sent lots of sidebar-length reviews I could use to plug in holes on pages), my sense of humor, my musical tastes, subjects other writers wouldn't be writing about and could be fairly evergreen (in other words, the records were so otherwise unnoticed that nobody else would notice if I ran the reviews five months after he sent them.) I wouldn't necessarily recommend that anybody follow his lead -- certainly not now; in fact, I have no idea where you could get away with it now, with alt-weekly editors seemingly operating under limitations I never had to deal with.

Scott may have sent stuff on Spec now and then too, come to think of it -- Or maybe we'd at least exchange emails about it first? Maybe he remembers.

it has always amazed me that those magazines exist. when i see one of those special uncut issues devoted to one band especially. the things are massive! on really nice paper! they are as handsome as books.

but when i said do it yourself, i meant the real deal of olden tymes. handmade. hand stapled. an old xerox machine! if you put out a cool rock zine you could sell it to every smelly record store on the planet. there is almost nothing to choose from these days.

xhuxk-post

Actually, I had a similar experience with you, Chuck - everything I sent on spec got printed, while everything I pitched got rejected.

Maybe Dave Queen sent stuff on Spec, too? But those guys are weirdos. (And George, especially, is a really fast writer; he can churn stuff out in his sleep.)

One thing related to Beatrix's posts: Use Google Docs. that's what we use at XLR8R, and it works like a charm-- not only can you share with editors easily, you can also go back to previous drafts of things to do comparisons, etc. i've been using the Docs system since it was in beta, i guess, and it has saved my ass numerous times.

I think I'll download that program, table! Was just reading about it in Chris Anderson's new book, had never known it existed.

also, i am gonna rep for xlr8r here and say that it does a better job that 95% of the music magazines that i read.

you don't download it! you just use it on the web-- easy uploads, too, so you can write something sans internet and then just zip it on up when yr connect is together.

He pretty much sent everything to me on Spec, and I wound up printing most everything he sent eventually

Very true, but everything else I wrote for the mag -- and in toto I wrote for every section except movie reviews, including a cover piece -- I pitched. And that was quite a lot.

The other good thing was being able to invoice the Voice for the CDs if they weren't review copies. Which took the publicists and the quid pro quo arrangement right out of the loop, very good things.

the first one or two things I wrote the voice were done on spec, but that was seven years ago and i dunno how many places are looking for reviews that aren't mega timely now

the demise of pop music criticism reflects the general decline of print media overall and as Gorge says the disinclination to "pay for stuff" w/r/t music

not just downloading and filesharing but streaming leaks and previews -- all the ways legal and ill that people can access music now has radically changed the role of critic as gatekeeper and tastemaker. getting an advance copy of a new release no longer gives writers a leg-up on consumers. and in the internet age I think music aficionados actually read MORE about music but they do so from a variety of sources rather than one trusted outlet like a magazine or alt weekly or authoritative critic. pardon the cliche but the playing field has been leveled. and over-run with people publishing their own opionions theories rants and discourse on blogs messageboards online publications what have you. scott is right: at this point you have take in your own hands and DIY. figure out something people want to read about and give it to them. the money will come eventually, maybe. better that then making a million compromises and getting your copy shred to ribbons and then getting stiffed just so you can say you're published. it's meaningless.

yeah if I was a young person determined to make a concerted effort to "break into" what's left of rockcrit, I'd just blog a lot, interact with other blogs/forums and send out specs that, if rejected, could easily be worked into my DIY stuff. that infamous ying yang twins piece i did for the voice was originally going to be a blog post until i decided to throw it chuck's way just in case.

xp Yeah, as Anthony says, the timeliness factor ("pegging" everything to release dates, or maybe local shows in the case of alt-weeklies -- in a bogus attempt to be "newsworthy" when really it usually just means kissing music biz butt) is something else I didn't have to worry about much at the Voice.

"Music Biz" in this case meaning "record labels who want publicity on the day a record is released" and "local clubs who advertise in your paper."

I'm kinda amazed that the sinking-ship record companies would have that kind of clout anymore; you'd think publications would be freed up to run reviews when they want.

fifteen years ago in my nightmare final few months at R0lling $t0ne I nearly got fired for suggesting reviews not be tied to release dates and daring to run a review of a three-month-old album that had belatedly surfaced near the top of the charts.

i think i've just convinced myself to put out a zine. anyone want to write for it? for free? i'll put out a hundred copies. or more, if needed. i know a cool guy at forced exposure. maybe they can sell it. the aquarius guy is really nice too. maybe he could sell it too. i need a new fun project. um, aside from the new fun record store that i just opened.

scott, i'll write for your zine if you promise to send me a copy.

seriously!

xpWell, for years (in pre-Entertainment Weekly days, so through the end of the '80s at least) running reviews of albums weeks after their release was more common than not -- especially if, say, the album was ignored on release and now had a couple hit singles. Some albums have to be lived with a while to sink in. Nobody thought twice about doing it then, because it was the sane way to do things. And I'm guessing that, now, it's not so much that the companies have clout as that the practice became commonplace when they did have clout, so suddenly editors (and their bosses) started worrying about being "scooped" if everybody else reviewed an album first, and nobody wants to go against the grain, especially since lots of editors haven't been around long enough to remember when it was any other way. (As if reviewing an album first has anything to do with scooping; as if reviews are even "news.")

scott, if you do do that, i would be happy to cover some weirdo new music/electronic stuff.

this thread kinda makes me want to do some music writing, y'alls professional woes sound kinda fun

eating ramen noodles is not fun

what about tweeting about ramen noodles?

"eating ramen noodles is not fun"
even though you probably don't literally mean that, them's fightin words!

xpost to some dude

I set you up for a subway gag and you bring that? ^^^

if i'm gonna bring it i'm not gonna bring subway gags

hey i keep my ass in cheesesteaks well enough.