Rolling Music Writers' Thread

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.

http://www.robertfeder.com/2017/10/07/chicago-reader-staff-accepts-new-contract/

I mean, let's all assess what we have going on, positively-speaking. What would happen to The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Review of Books, or Scientific American if the upper-middle (or possibly just upper class) stopped supporting them overall? Is there enough of the true middle-class to support these publications? Maybe.

something of a tangent but I keep imagining that I'm going to wake up in the middle night and have my past month's workload presented to me, Ghost of Christmas Past-style, as an intervention

just this very long dickensian clip show of everyone I've disappointed and everything I screwed up

https://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/columns/article/20986837/long-live-city-paper

Mark Ein, Democrat philanthropist and Washington Kastles tennis team owner is buying the Washington DC City Paper. This looks like good news.

With purchase of @WCP by @Markein staff will NOT take pay cuts. @jaketapper will be part of advisory group as will former DC Mayor Tony Williams pic.twitter.com/pUVE1bAQjO

— Mark Segraves (@SegravesNBC4) December 22, 2017

after 2 years of total burnout, i think i like writing again.. whoa

— Fire Marshal Meaghan (@meaghan_garvey) December 21, 2017

inspo for the burnt

oh neat a new at&t audience network (?) series about a failed music writer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38ZTaGlbQjM

lol

starting with "spent too long on the road with bands" (more like, spent too long in the coffee shop with strong enough wifi to download and stream), ending with "I think she's the reason he's redeemable"

The actor playing Loudermilk is 50, it's not that far-fetched imo

i like ron livingston a lot. he was really good in SEARCH PARTY.

also this was created by a farrelly brother...

to be fair I don't know how old he's supposed to be in the series, guy doesn't look 50 though

he turned 50 in june

Southcomm sold its Kansas City paper too

https://www.bizjournals.com/kansascity/news/2017/12/26/the-pitch-new-ownership-editor-david-hudnall.html

wow voice media group sold them right before i started working there

It seems Southcomm bought up a bunch of alt-weeklies from the Voice media Group, then determined years later that they weren't going to become richer the way they were running them, and so they are now selling them off slowly (they still have Nashville Scene but let go of the editor and others; they sold Washington City Paper and Kansas City Pitch)

voice media group never owned washington city paper. it was started by the people who launched the baltimore cp.

this is depressing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SouthComm_Communications

True. That's right Washington City Paper got sold long ago to Chicago Reader, and later to Creative Loafing and then to Southcomm. Tronc.inc (that bought and later shut down Baltimore City Paper; along with what it did elsewhere) and Southcomm have not been helpful to the alt-weeklies

nope! neither has wrapports (owners of the reader). media executives are the worst.

i’m giving up

WHAT

at every turn this year i felt either implicitly disrespected by the publications i wrote for and/or the writing and editing process itself was so horrible and full of second-guessing that i could never enjoy the work that came out of it. i couldn’t even get a band i like into a year-end list which is just the latest way in which i feel my taste and my approach as a critic and my work aren’t “correct”

just gotta figure out something else to do

More to say after lunch but short answer: hell no

i don’t feel valued as a freelancer and has been proven countless times over the past four years, no one would ever hire me. so why put myself through it xp

which band? :(

i'd rather not say

i know it's extremely dramatic to announce this in a thread on ilx but writing it to myself wasn't enough

we need good people fighting critical orthodoxy from within so this is a shame