Rolling Music Writers' Thread

it was part of mtv's strategy -- the grantland-y stuff (which was always overstated IMO, The Ringer is a better fit) got all the press but a fairly significant part of what they actually published was exactly that

at least 50% of the actual content was stuff like this (and I realize pretty much every music site operates this way, but): http://www.mtv.com/news/3020995/jersey-shore-team-meatball-snooki-deena-sleepover/

sorry to go off-current-topic, but i've never read one of those "this album turns 20 today" pieces ... are they usually interviews w/ the artist? personal essays about how great the album is and how it affected the writer? some sort of "let's put this album in the context of 1997" look-back? a combo of these, or something else?

the latter two, usually

it depends on the outlet and the access

I've read good ones and terrible ones, depending on the outlet and writer and, importantly, editor.

utterly bizarre that someone —or many people— thought that Grantland should be recreated at MTV.com in the first place.

The stable of writers they assembled was outstanding, but I agree there was always a disconnect between the brand and the content. There was always a sense of "why am I reading a longform personal essay on MTV News?"

It's a shame the whole experiment couldn't have just been ported over to like a Rolling Stone.com, where it would have made more sense, and where the youth and diversity of online writers would have offered a nice corrective to the magazine's historic biases

i'd so much rather read an artist (and peripherally involved ppl) talking about a 20-year-old album, plus some writer-provided context of the time ... than the one i put in the middle.

anyway, thanks y'all. appreciate it.

mostly I'm just exhausted with the same old "hire 20-22-year-olds, possibly as permalancers, lay them off as 23-24-year-olds" churn being celebrated as a win for youth or social justice or anything like that. conditions are never as rosy as the puff pieces claim -- to take a non-music example, a lot has come out in recent months about the less-than-ideal editorial process and pay rate at Teen Vogue.

Being a writer sucks. Being a writer has always sucked. My life is defined by two competing quotes:

"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money" - Samuel Johnson
"I write only because I cannot stop" - Heinrich von Kleist

mostly I'm just exhausted with the same old "hire 20-22-year-olds, possibly as permalancers, lay them off as 23-24-year-olds" churn being celebrated as a win for youth or social justice or anything like that. conditions are never as rosy as the puff pieces claim -- to take a non-music example, a lot has come out in recent months about the less-than-ideal editorial process and pay rate at Teen Vogue.

― sick, fucking funny, and well tasty (katherine), Thursday, June 29, 2017 2:36 PM (forty-nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

at the very least I hope Lauren Duca is making a decent living for dragging Tucker Carlson.

anyway, between this and the new york times' copy editors it has been a thoroughly depressing week for media (also known as a week for media)

this is...... extensive http://www.spin.com/featured/the-mtv-news-experiment/

yeah, from time to time I worry that I am being overly paranoid/anxious about the state of the media, that I'm just projecting my own ~*quarterlife anxieties*~ and then I read things like this

also, I don't know the benefits situation, and I know the timing probably has more to do with the fiscal year than anything -- but if these positions came with any sort of health insurance (some permalance/temp jobs do) it's the icing on the cake to lay everyone off just as the Republican Party is about to get rid of it

“There’s this cycle that happens, that I was a part of. Someone gets the idea that they want editorial, and then a couple editors who all know the other editors are like ‘Come here, the faucet is on’,” Suarez said of the state of the industry. “And everyone runs to that faucet and it attracts the attention of higher-ups who realize there’s too much money coming out and shut it down. Then somebody you bring to your faucet gets their own faucet, and so you run over there.”

otm

yup

That Spin article deserves it's own thread.

just further validates my conviction that Chance is corny af.

spin made me take out a negative sentence i wrote about mtv in a review once. it was the best sentence!

i should find that column about pitchfork that jessica asked me to write that pitchfork wouldn't publish in their magazine. in retrospect though, i didn't really want to write a column about pitchfork. but, like samuel johnson, i can always use the money.

is journalistic "freedom" and "integrity" really a thing now though? especially on the internet. i don't really expect it. there are people with money and there is what they want to do with that money.

a thing that wasn't mentioned in the Spin article (I'm sure a lot wasn't) is how much vitriol MTV News writers got, particularly if a piece leaned progressive or against consensus, and yet Kings of Leon gets to spike a writer's story over "plays like an imprint of the last five years of music—neither a return to Kings of Leon’s svelte roots nor a reinvention worth investing in."

(as far as chance someone on twitter -- david drake maybe? -- had suggested the reason he's "the face of this" so to speak is because of his label situation, or relative lack thereof)

"Similarly, I couldn’t be too upset to hear that the recent “woke” iteration of MTV News was coming to an end, both because, like literally everyone else on the Internets, I had no use for the site, and also because, come to find out, it was wildly corrupt."

https://www.getrevue.co/profile/byroncrawford/issues/i-m-glad-they-re-cleaning-house-at-mtv-news-63286

Sargent must not read Infowars.

how is jordan going to recover from this burn

I have a lot I can write about this but i won't because you all know it already. I will say though that I worked for an outfit that frequently found itself trying to square the circle MTV News did; i.e. it fashioned itself an objective voice on music but relied on deep linkages with outlets that basically exist to promote product. So you'd run into situations where an album gets keelhauled in a review and the CMS has badged it "album of the week" or something - just nonsensical for the audience, yet all perfectly rational from an organizational and back-end POV. i can't get mad at musicians, reps, labels etc deciding not to work with an organization that slates them, i mean it's ridiculous. You guys hate my album yet I'm a featured guest on some show of yours? Playing the songs you say you hate? Anyway in my case it was always an uncomfortable fit and in the end that faucet got turned off.

who else burned out this year

It's high time I admitted to myself I don't write about music any more. I contributed to a single group piece this year. A couple of times I got the urge to express some thoughts and feelings about certain albums or gigs I attended, but just couldn't face the idea of staying up til all hours outside of my day job to write them

No burnout, but I tend towards just aiming at a few stories per month. And I’m fine with that.

I feel kinda the same way as Ned. I'm really enjoying writing about music, but that's because I have a monthly column, the occasional feature assignment (some of which, particularly over the last year, have been of the last-minute "somebody big died" type), a review here and there, and...that's about it. I've also started podcasting interviews with artists I admire, because I love doing interviews but hate transcribing them, and that's been great.

Unless it's an interview, music writing in the Spotify era is pretty much useless anyway, so I wouldn't worry yourselves about it.

what a cool original opinion

anyway i took myself down to 1-2 pieces per month which started out all right and then for some reason became horrible. just told an editor to reassign something i was supposed to write this week which felt horrible but needed to happen

REMINDING MYSELF that i need to listen to some of philthy phil's podcasts...

https://burningambulance.com/

Are many folk still making a proper living from music writing?

i know a few staff writers and pure freelancers, yes

It'd be interesting to know how far the numbers have declined. Not in a ghoulish way, just to get a sense of how much the landscape has changed and what the perceived consequences are.

I make decent dinner/drinks money; that's all

it’s mostly important to me that music writing keeps alfred in cocktails

Seconded

i’m not a pure freelancer because i teach.

I feel like...I burned out last year, and I'm kinda in a lower gear this year. Invested more time in podcasts. Wound up pouring more energy than usual into album anniversary pieces and "my top ten tracks my artist X" pieces. Scoring assignments has somehow become more of a struggle in some places, and I don't know why: lots more writers in the field? My pitches are less enticing somehow? Or maybe I'm not as great a writer as I like to think I am. So a weird middle aged lethargy + feeling like maybe I'm aging out of this business a little, or maybe I'm just not as patient as I used to be or something. (There's more behind this and sometime in the next month I may try to expand it into a longer piece.)

tl:dr - Wants to write about weird music that doesn't have publicity muscle, is tired of bullshit.

(I'm a freelancer with a day job; if I had to depend on freelancing to make a living, especially in this era...can't even imagine.)

This time ten years ago, I was writing four or five pieces a week. So far this year, I've written two; both are magazine cover features, though. I wrote them because I was asked. I haven't pitched anything in at least two years, and I'm totally happy to be out of the game. Oddly, I feel like the lay-off has somehow improved my writing - both features were relatively painless to put together, and I think they're two of my best.

I mean, I love writing as much as I ever did but I would also feel disillusioned if I had to depend on it as anything other than supplemental income.

it’s mostly important to me that music writing keeps alfred in cocktails

― ToddBonzalez (BradNelson), Friday, November 24, 2017 5:08 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Seconded

― Modern Zounds in Undiscovered Country (James Redd and the Blecchs),

thirded

mike, can those great stories be found online?

I didn't burn out any more than I already had but I did get two new (non-writing) jobs and made the brilliant decision that I could not only write as much as before but write more