Is SPIN really circling the drain?

It will give Whiney more time to complain about hipsters on ilx.

Makes me feel like Position Position was running on fumes in the criticism department.

Fart fumes.

lol

http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/That_Makes_Me_Angry.jpg

anything that makes people mention/talk about/think about spin magazine can only be a good thing. at this late date.

I didn't know whiney even had a job tbh

if it were possible to discuss this decision without Whiney getting super-aggro, it's an interesting and "important" decision with much to say about it, but lol at anybody who thinks Whiney didn't go into this with an "oh boy, lemme scrap with some people about this, I love to argue" attitude

I have the impression Whiney does everything with that attitude - ordering coffee, picking out socks, changing the channel on the TV

it's an interesting and "important" decision with much to say about it

i will be very surprised if anyone is thinking about this feed by 01/13.

(bc the mayans will have destroyed the world)

this is a weird/sad concession to the fact that cultural discourse has become largely truncated and economically worthless... is that what's interesting about it?

isnt the trade-off that there will now be actual long-form criticism in spin? (am i reading this right?) seems like a net positive

its sort of a switcheroo, people think that they're taking a step towards twitter but really they're taking a step towards critical essays

Bring back Joshua Clover!

I wish magazines had much larger reviews sections. More music is made than ever and I'd quite like to read about some of it. I hate the NME style of a couple of reviews over 2 pages with most of the page taken up by a photo.

wait the NME is still being printed

yup

i guess selling 20,000 copies a week will still make more money than being the uk's answer to pitchfork

its sort of a switcheroo, people think that they're taking a step towards twitter but really they're taking a step towards critical essays

if that were true, it would be a decision of remarkable courage, but here's what looks to be the case; first

Thankfully, this new plan also means no more overwrought 80-word blurbs on middling, nobody-cares bands where a grade of "6" or a "7" ultimately translates to "Hey, this exists; and it doesn't totally blow!"

this is otm. Review space in Spin and elsewhere is now so trimmed, and the per-review word count so short, that there's really no point in the reviews at all. Like, no point. They're only there because music magazines, historically, have had record reviews. But this (emphasis added):

We will still be posting about 20 longform reviews a month on SPIN.com. The very best records of the year will be given special consideration and placement, notated by the tag "SPIN Essentials." You can read our first Essential review, a celebration of Guided By Voices' triumphant return, Let's Go Eat The Factory, written by SPIN magazine's editor-in-chief Steve Kandell.

links to a 700-word piece, only "long form" by the most easily-distracted reader. I mean - the decision is half-right; there's no point in running 100-word reviews. Anything under 500 words is kind of a joke, in terms of actually offering critical insight; I'm more likely to buy and read Spin if it doesn't have a "here's where the reviews go, these aren't really reviews though" section. Tweets are fun to read & are a great exercise in concision, but the idea that they're of actual critical value (or that, since the object of criticism can be easily heard by the reader, the function of criticism is somehow diminished) is dubious, to put it mildly.

But more than anything, and this I think is healthy and good, this seems like a decision by the new editor to do something restoring a little vitality to the magazine. The actual idea, I think, is full of holes, and the editor couldn't really defend it without resorting to a lot of questionable assumptions - about readers, about how things got to where they are, about what might be done about that. But as a gesture, it indicates a willingness to think big, to get attention, which like...I don't like that you gotta do things that get attention, it makes me sad, but you do, and so you should at least do things that get attention that open up some discussion because that's a net good. So, good decision, stupid rationale, kinda, is my take

To me it sounds like 1500 opportunities per year to drive traffic to the website and that's about it.

My friend's band recently got a 6 or a 7 in Spin and was super thrilled about it. I doubt he would've been as pumped to add a tweet to his press kit.

No, polyphonic, I think you're wrong about that; I think the editor has passionate opinions about music coverage, I don't think we have any evidence that his general curmudgeonliness is actually cynicism.

x-post

I think actually that tweets attributable to Spin will be just as good as # ratings from the magazine as far as the press kit goes. And honestly as a guy who has hated numerical ratings systems since he was a kid I'd be pretty happy to see them dispensed with by @SPINreviews.

I don't think we have any evidence that his general curmudgeonliness is actually cynicism.

I definitely don't think Whiney is cynical about the music he cares about, and I'm sure lots of bands that wouldn't normally be highlighted by Spin will appear for the first time via the tweets, but I don't think Twitter reviews are very effective. I didn't care for Whiney's 1000 or @Discographies or any similar projects. Might as well just link to a YouTube at that point.

eh numbers are the only thing that make one sentence reviews a 'viable form of criticism'

I would prefer the SF Chronicle rating system tbh

http://kookykitsch.com/Portals/0/productimages/294_2298e.jpg

I don't know - I thought 1000timesyes occasionally achieved a sort of condensed ideal. (I totally love @discographies.) The first several @SPINreviews are up, though, and the shortcomings are pretty immediately clear - a lot of things (Ladysmith Black Mambazo, for example) can't really be usefully reviewed without first placing them in a context. Sure: readers can Google to get the context, but the critical value of the tweet review is nil. Plus, most businesses want favorites & retweets bad, so the probable tendency will be toward zingy lines and colorful similes. This, like I need to say it, is neither a service to music nor criticism.

isnt the trade-off that there will now be actual long-form criticism in spin? (am i reading this right?) seems like a net positive

― Sh1pley Gohard (D-40), Wednesday, January 11, 2012 7:09 PM (41 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^^^^^^

LADYSMITH BLACK MAMBAZO/And Friends: Two disks of South African a cappella suggest you CAN have too many friends, e.g., Josh Groban. #RG#6

good zing, but needs a simile. #PP#5

can i somehow add this twitter to my rss feed? only possible way i'll actually read it

soon

is this a cost cutting measure in the long-term?

good zing, but needs a simile. #PP#5

I don't know, I dislike that one on so many grounds. "This is South African a cappella lol who doesn't hate Josh Groban" - you sort of want to know: what else does the writer know about African music? About the group? as I say, given the state of Spin reviews in recent years, it's not much of a loss, but that particular tweet sort of suggests that the feed's platonic ideal of reviewing is handing somebody a record in a genre about which he knows nothing and asking him to say something clever. Which is like...why bother at all, you know? It's a drag; it's like an attempt at the last line of a good Xgau dismissal without the important groundwork that goes into that last line

esp since no one is going to listen to that album for the groban song. paul simon, tho!

(The thing about the long-form claim is: this is where that claim is made:

Obviously, we wouldn't want to do this to the complete exclusion of longform music criticism, a viable and under-appreciated medium in any year. We will still be posting about 20 longform reviews a month on SPIN.com.

The pretty clear implication of the one sentence following on the next is "longform criticism will now be on the website" - you'd have to detain & torture the paragraph to make it read otherwise - and as I say, the link demonstrating this is to a 700-word review of GBV, which isn't really "longform" - until 2001 free weekly reviews pushed 750 words routinely.)

Richard Gehr has been writing about african music forever, dude

Also, I hate to tell you this, but it's not 2001 anymore

Like the Village Voice doesn't even run record reviews of any size any more, so I think having a budget for what is becoming an outdated medium is pretty swell.

Also, I hate to tell you this, but it's not 2001 anymore

^^^exactly why there's no point attempting to discuss this in a room where Whiney's present

dude, you're being snarky too!

you said "until 2001 free weekly reviews pushed 750 words routinely" and I'm just saying, yes, the climate has changed and we're trying to bring some of this back in what little way we can

by helping destroy it?

dude, you're being snarky too!

I'm not, really - I'm trying to discuss what I feel is an important decision, and an interesting one, as I said from the outset; prior to that post, which amounts to a throwing-up of the hands on my part, I'd been posting rather long thoughts airing out what I think's in play. I can dig that in your shoes you're probably already very defensive here, but I also know from having posted on the same board as you for what ten years that there is no way you're going to be able to have a discussion about this without zinging constantly, and when there's something actually interesting to be discussed, either the participants have to agree to talk like grownups or there's no point in having the discussion at all. That this preference for/love of snark & drama informs your stylistic preferences here rather more than high concerns about what the age calls for, what's "pertinent," etc, seems self-evident to me, but again, that'd require some unpacking

The only point of the 2001 reference was that what constitutes a long form piece didn't change just because publications no longer allot decent space to reviews. 1000 words isn't "long form" - 1500 would really be the absolute minimum in my mind, and that's really being generous. A long piece takes up ten or more printed pages. The goalposts really haven't moved in that respect.

Some of them are going to be 1500

I think it will really depend on what the 20 long reviews per month actually are. I'd be thrilled to read a 1500-word review by Richard Gehr on African music in Spin, but I worry that what will actually happen is that the stuff that doesn't drive advertising will largely be left to Twitter, and no amount of expertise that Richard has can be conveyed there, as the LBM tweet shows quite clearly.

Yeah man look - I get what you're up against, in many ways editing a music magazine is like being a politician: you elect to settle for doing what good you can, maybe get people to think about things that are important to you & that you think are in some way important to have out there in the general discourse. And while the opening salvo talks about the last days of the music industry, it's no secret that magazines have suffered a similar fate as recording artists have, and getting people to buy magazine, like getting people to buy records, at all is a fucking chore - if it weren't for airport newsstands a magazine-lover like me would be pretty fucked. I think this is a pretty ballsy choice to make, and I'm keenly interested in how the magazine reads in the absence of reviews; I'm into finding out about that. But as I say, I think a lot of the rationale expressed is kinda bogus & involves some uninterrogated assumptions about the causes of shortened review sections (which we all know was "either we allot more space for ads or we're dead" industry-wide), etc

I mean obviously if we had zillions of dollars in a flush advertising climate we're run pages of reviews out the ass; but even if we did it would sort of feel like a vanity project to some extent just because I think THE RECORD REVIEW means something totally different now than it did in 1976 or 1996 or even 2006. I remember in the 90s when people would talk about record reviews (Anthony and I remember SPIN's lead review on Timbaland's first record very fondly) and honestly the last time someone talked to me about a record review due to what was WRITTEN in it and not the crazy/unlikely/grand score attached was when J0rdan went in on Mac Mille. I think by narrowing the field of reviews, I'm HOPING that people will spend more time with them instead of just glancing at the score and moving on.

the 80-word reviews were always especially unsatisfying to me so i'm cool with the idea of just going to the extreme in both directions at once

otm

I can actually fathom buying spin at the airport again if the review section isn't just a blender barrage.