Rolling Music Writers' Thread

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

i have a standing offer to write stuff for the metal magazine i used to write for which is SUPER nice and cool but....i think i'm good. sometimes i'll look at the reviews and think: i used to write stuff like that! but i don't need to do it now. let the youngsters do it.

if i could do my dollar bin column somewhere online where people would actually read it i would totally do that. i love doing stuff like that. but overall i like cleaning records all day.

getting burned out is different than all this sad old timer talk though. you can totally recharge from burn out. it is the end of a long year after all.

xpost niels - no, they're print only and one hasn't been published yet.

getting burned out is different than all this sad old timer talk though. you can totally recharge from burn out. it is the end of a long year after all.

― scott seward, Saturday, November 25, 2017 10:02 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is always good to hear, thanks scott

you just gotta get some emocore in you, the pure stuff

One thing I've struggled to reconcile this year is my unhealthy relationship with deadlines. They hang over everything I do, guilting and eating at me whenever I'm putting off an assignment (which is often). But then during those rare times when I don't have any assignments, instead of feeling a freedom I just feel like I'm slacking off. Deadlines become a kind of addiction. I feel miserable with them, and incomplete without them.

An amusement.

3rd text in as many days reporting that journalists being headhunted for a M-- N--- pivot back to a "text focus". I AM STRAIGHT CACKLING.

— Jessica Hopper (@jesshopp) November 28, 2017

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-la-weekly-20171129-story.html

LA Weekly’s staff was gutted Wednesday as Voice Media Group completed its sale of the alternative newsweekly to a newly created company, Semanal Media.

Nine of the 13 members of the editorial staff lost their jobs, including all the top editors and all but one of the staff writers.....Voice Media Group announced in January that it was putting LA Weekly up for sale. It said at the time that the publication, founded in 1978, was still profitable.

and this, amazingly, has been on the la weekly homepage for the past 12 hours:

http://www.laweekly.com/news/who-owns-la-weekly-8911213

Who Owns L.A. Weekly?

by KEITH PLOCEK

Who owns the publication you’re reading right now?

It’s a question you should ask no matter what you’re reading. In Latin there’s a phrase cui bono, which roughly translates as “who is benefiting?” It’s a good idea to know who is profiting in any situation. Why? So you can make educated decisions.

The new owners of L.A. Weekly don’t want you to know who they are. They are hiding from you. They’ve got big black bags with question marks covering their big bald heads.

These new owners just laid off nine hardworking journalists. Why? For sport? To start anew? To fulfill a blood vendetta that is centuries old?

Maybe they have a good reason. Maybe they don’t.

We don’t know. You don’t know. No one knows but them.

Who owns this publication?

It’s a fair question.

Who is benefiting?

You deserve to know.

Who owns L.A. Weekly?

https://www.nashvillescene.com/news/article/20984367/southcomm-makes-cuts-scene-editor-steve-cavendish-laid-off

SouthComm fires Nashville Scene editor who won’t get rid of staff and others.

Southcomm bought a bunch of weeklies some years back. They now want to sell Washington DC City Paper.

Oh no, Ben Carson's corrupt buddy wants to buy Washington City Paper.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/why-does-conservative-armstrong-williams-want-to-buy-the-liberal-washington-city-paper/2017/12/04/217db692-d5f9-11e7-a986-d0a9770d9a3e_story.html?utm_term=.73a84841c96f

His plans include a possible change to glossy print, an increased focus on celebrities, distribution to places like Philadelphia and New York, and more human-interest stories — he specifically suggested some soft-focus takes on prominent Trumpites, such as Hope Hicks’s hobbies or Stephen K. Bannon’s charitable works.

http://www.motherjones.com/media/2017/11/armstrong-williams-washington-city-paper-ben-carson/

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

― Gholdfish Killah (Turrican), Friday, November 24, 2017 1:12 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I keep coming back to this because it's correct, except for one caveat: there is exactly one thing that writing about music does for you in audience terms, and that is making people dislike you intensely, and inform you of it, in no uncertain terms. this part is, of course, mostly unchanged from decades ago, but every counterbalance has dissolved away to nothing. so whenever I'm writing anything, I'm conscious of the fact that filing a piece means in a couple days you're gonna flip a couple hundred or thousand new people on the global record of people who dislike you (people that it's entirely possible, given your major shared interest and general geographic clustering, to actually meet; I've experienced the moment where someone's talking to me and they realize who I am and what I've written, and a certain superiority enters their face)

if you have any perfectionism problems, this exacerbates those too -- it's not perfectionism when you know that if you file anything less than perfect, you will hear about it on Twitter.

you're gonna flip a couple hundred or thousand new people on the global record of people who dislike you

katherine, i think you are severely overrating the number of people that read music writing

never said they actually read it

"I've experienced the moment where someone's talking to me and they realize who I am and what I've written, and a certain superiority enters their face"

anyone who would actually do this to YOU is playing themselves so hard the only responses they deserve are scorn or pity.

Yesterday I came across a track by infinite bisous on Spotify, looked for online music writing to get an idea of whether this was an acclaimed artist, not much writing to be found on Google but his 2017 was not poorly rated on RYM so I gave it a spin, at which time I came across a piece of music writing on a kind of blog, maybe it was actually half journalism half infomercial, but there was an interview with the guy where he said something that resonated with me about musical production:

I’m probably going to get told off for saying that, but what a weird idea that mostly musicians are complaining about not making money from their music. I just find it a really crazy idea to believe you’re owed money for something you’re supposed to do for yourself.

Can't help but connect this idea to the idea of music writing as something you should get paid for, I mean obv it's a job and I wish only the best for every writer on ilx, but there's a lot of good writing on ilx too, by which I want to say that I think it's likely possible to have an informed, public conversation about music that has no commercial interest (the extent to which this conversation relies on published work, especially books, I'm not sure abt).

There's that new Jann Wenner bio I really want to read, and I'm thinking maybe it will tell a story of the parallel commercialization of music production and music writing/media. I don't know much about the history of journalism but surely professional criticism is a very recent phenomenon?

(I have spent countless hours on amateur music writing and music making)

the notion that music writing/crit/journalism is valueless is absurd & wrong ... though the way some people do it,

i mean, why any journalism of any kind ... there's no commercial upside to it. thats why we pay matt lauer 23 million to read other people's work at us

I would never suggest it's without value, only that it's not uncommon to see good music writing done for free (just like a lot of great music is made without any commercial gain in sight)

surely the monetary value of journalism is the lesser of its values these days

MTV's "pivot to video" doesn't seem to be working too well

https://s7.postimg.org/oio71kbuz/mtv-stats.jpg

I'm not suggesting it's valueless (though my career would not exist had I not written for free initially) but it *is* thankless

now do one that goes back to 2015

only options are 2 years back or all time (which is 5 years)

2 years back

https://s7.postimg.org/5l8mbwxiz/mt2-1.jpg

5 years

https://s7.postimg.org/hodxzciu3/mtv2-2.jpg

there's a big spike in 2016 leading up to a peak in traffic in August of 16 of 14.8 million (November 17 was 4.5 million so almost 1/3rd of the peak

they are essentially where they were at back in 2013, after a couple of good peaks in 2014 and 2016....

I don't know what was going on in August 2016 in terms of MTV's site but it's a pretty big spike

That's a really generous reading of that graph

could you just say what you want to say? i just c&p'd this stuff i'm not an expert on the workings on mtv.com

I don't know what was going on in August 2016 in terms of MTV's site but it's a pretty big spike

election/post-election coverage?

for mtv, august = video music awards

ahhh

yeah, and they streamed it on their site

could you just say what you want to say? i just c&p'd this stuff i'm not an expert on the workings on mtv.com
― Universal LULU Nation (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Monday, December 4, 2017 4:57 PM (seventeen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the cool narrative is that "pivot to video doesn't work as well as prestige thinkpieces"

the uncool narrative that no one wants to talk about is that prestige thinkpieces did not work as well as the Buzzfeed-y news aggregation/quick-hit model of 2014-2015

for mtv, august = video music awards

lmao duh never mind me

the quick hit model is losing traction though from what i can tell. what worked in 2014/15 is not necessarily working in 2018. a couple of years ago i worked for a site that would routinely publish long-ish pieces about musicians and pop culture that got more uniques that the extremely expensive videos that were being produced a few yards away. of course the videos d00ds would then add in their FB "reach" and claim that those numbers counted just as much as their site uniques, but they don't.

quick hits are also basically useless if your site is not already well-trafficked, unless you manage to find the sweet spot of "has a fanbase that clicks"/"does not already have 1000 quick-hits about their latest instagram post from bigger fish than you."

the uncool narrative that no one wants to talk about is that prestige thinkpieces did not work as well as the Buzzfeed-y news aggregation/quick-hit model of 2014-2015

isn't part of that narrative, that the buzzfeed-y model was arms-racy too?

Southcomm, owner of the Nashville Scene and other weeklies, announced awhile back they wanted to sell the Washington DC City Paper by the end of the year. As they haven't sold it yet, at a meeting today per tweets they informed staff: Washington City Paper staffers will be undergoing a 40 percent pay cut starting in 2018.

that is ... a lot

They didn't make much before the cuts.

https://www.washingtonian.com/2017/12/18/washington-city-paper-staff-has-salaries-cut-40-percent-as-alt-weekly-struggles-to-find-buyer/

Dumb question, maybe: Where are the progressive rich ppl to buy these papers and keep them alive as progressive voices, aka the opposite of what the new owners of L.A. Weekly are (allegedly) trying to do?

There are rich progressive people, too, right? If I had a billion dollars I'd buy up these papers and lose a small fraction of my bottomless pool of money just to keep them alive and doing what they do.

there is some interesting stuff going on with the chicago reader right now/this year

This is what's fucking depressing, overall; the feeling that longform nuanced discussion of a topic is relegated to the whims of the progressive rich.