Is SPIN really circling the drain?

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.

that said shouldn't there be an author-key in the twitter description or at least a link to it?

workinonit

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

― some dude, Wednesday, January 11, 2012 7:33 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

otm

― da croupier, Wednesday, January 11, 2012 8:01 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

bingo

basically

this is a good conversation

http://necktomace.tumblr.com/post/15715900419/sit-down-spin

That dude--most ppl criticizing it actually--seems to be missing the fact that were still doing long reviews. Even one on the OMG CLOUD NOTHINGS RECORD HE'S LISTENING TO RIGHT NOW (so plugged in, guy)

I will cop to burying that fact in the story tho...

May or may not be of interest that the big quote at the start of that tumblr is from a ranty Everett True blog post:

http://www.collapseboard.com/everett-true/why-music-criticism-still-matters-so-go-fuck-yourselves-spin-magazine/

Yeah, I had some words with him about that. Def LOLs at Everett True calling anyone a "tarnished brand."

And then he’d have to find some real work , writing scripts for Family Guy say

he knows you too well

Of course, none of this matters to Chris, up there in his ivory tower.

lol what

an ivory tower constructed thanks to the royalties from the Public Enemy book?

criticising someone for writing to make. a. name. for. themselves = irony explosion

EVERETT TRUE criticising someone for writing to make. a. name. for. themselves

someone was definitely on. their. period.

lmfaoooooo @ a$ap rizzley

it is kind of s tarnished brand. or maybe that's not the best way to describe it. but that doesn't mean that someone couldn't make it better. should change the name to Spin 2.0. Spin XXXXtreme!

Def LOLs at Everett True calling anyone a "tarnished brand."

just sorta gotta point out that this sort of "you're one to talk!" line is transparently a way of not responding to the actual content of the post - I mean the kind of elephant in the room here is don't we assume there've got a be several in-house reasons for this decision that it wouldn't be cricket* to talk about in public? however I gotta say when E.T. puts "so fuck you Spin magazine" in the title of the post it kinda doesn't help matters, that's red meat for the Whineys on the block

*I chose this over "kosher" & several others especially for you man so recognize the love

and again we are all talking about spin. so there you go. its a step in the right direction.

What is funny to me about the Everett Truie thing is that quite a lot of the reviews in Careless Talk Costs Lives looked just like this:

http://www.songdog.co.uk/carelesstalk-haiku.jpg

Not going to count the characters there but, um...

when was the last time someone here actually bought a physical copy of the magazine? i honestly can't remember the last time i did.

feel bad cuz i always forget that chuck has stuff in it every month! but i forget about it in general. don't even see it anywhere to buy.

missed opportunities in short reviews about albums called 'haiku'

aero where did you find that high horse

just like walkabouts
country noir only stripped back
songdog co uk

i bought a subscription a couple years ago, brought the most recent issue to work w/ me today to read. i posted about my annoying call about resubscribing upthread, though, i'm gonna try to just find it at newsstands in the future.

What is funny to me about the Everett Truie thing is that quite a lot of the reviews in Careless Talk Costs Lives looked just like this:

yeah lol I wrote for them a couple times and the word counts on the reviews were ridiculous - but they had bigger reviews every few pages - pretty ahead of the curve on just the thing he's complaining about

when was the last time someone here actually bought a physical copy of the magazine? i honestly can't remember the last time i did.

to be 100% real it was when they did an aerosmith story

i really thought that 9/10 review of Nine Lives was just payback for the interview tbh

lol getting an interview w/aerosmith is not exactly the impossible dream

For all the posturing and bloviating and incorrect sky-is-falling doomsaying that I've seen regarding this move, I'm most curious about two things: 1, how the Spin "authority" will translate to Twitter; and 2, how the Twitter reviews are going to be a self-sustaining business, since from my understanding the reviewers are being compensated. Ads/sponsored tweets? Syndication (and if so, to whom, and why would those syndicatees pick it up)?

my guess there's just going to be a chunk of budget dedicated to it as a loss leader or part of the mag's general 'be more web savvy' game plan?

Not to be all "I worked for Nick Denton and might be a bit traumatized about it still," but loss leaders and web-savviness generally do not go hand-in-hand on balance sheets.

well Gawker is the king of 'there is a direct relationship between how much a piece of writing profits us and how much we pay the writer for it,' wouldn't what i'm describing, if accurate, be the opposite of that?

I'm guessing the tweets will form the content for some sort of album review online database and as well as the advertising revenue from that, maybe you could licence that stuff out like a bite-size AMG?

^^ not a bad idea if they haven't thought of it already tbh

But doesn't that go back to the idea of authority?

I don't know, the idea of where people get their news now is just something I've been puzzling out in my head a lot lately. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if say BuzzFeed (ugh) started a music section (although I get tripped up trying to figure out if they'd ever think it worth their time-slash-money)... would it have a lot of authority/influence? Already the sort of LOL-culture bullshit from the music world that it passes around has a lot more staying power outside the obsessive bubble than even, like, Kreayshawn and her memetic ilk.

I had an offer to get a year of Spin for like $5 but I didn't and I feel kind of bad, because... Whiney and stuff

denying whiney a five dollar footlong, shame on you

haha

for better or worse i do think that brands that have been around since the print media days (spin, xxl, rolling stone, etc.) still have more 'authority' tied up in their names than a lot of places that get way more hits these days, i don't think getting a 8/10 on @spinreviews instead of in the pages of Spin will really stop people from putting that in their press package or referencing it as a signifier of an album's success/acclaim

tbf, I think Whiney probably gets less than a nickel per new subscription

But what does that mean outside of the world of people who get one-sheets? Things have become a lot more Darwinistic in this respect, much moreso over the past 18 months I'd say.

But what does that mean outside of the world of people who get one-sheets?

it was never really as important as bands thought it was, though in the early 90s a good Spin superlative could literally open doors that were otherwise shut - I namedropped our first Spin mention to a southern California booker 94 after he'd just told me "no openings for a month" and bingo suddenly a space opened up

people more connected now, you could have three consecutive 10/10s from anyplace and the person being asked to book you would still just look at what your actual draw is on data readily available to him & base his offer on that, not on "these guys must be big & I just haven't heard of them"