There are many things to be mad - or sad - about in the world at the moment. The state of music journalism is probably not that high on many people’s agenda today. It is most certainly not life and death, I know that. But if you’d like something comparatively trivial to ruminate on this morning, perhaps this could be in the running.
As I mentioned last week, I am not attempting to be a journalist here with this weekly newsletter. What I do is not only free from the churn of release schedules and related expectations, but it it is also not governed by sales, or advertising, or - really - anything commercial. There is the option to subscribe for a fee, which is a kind (and very appreciated) way to support my work here, but I’d hardly call that a high rollin’ commercial enterprise.
For seventeen years I have been a publicist working within heavy music, and for the last handful of those years, I have been severely disillusioned by the direction music publicity (and marketing and journalism) has been heading in. Things have changed a lot in the last seventeen years, and I can’t honestly say that I feel like it’s for the better.
I don’t think that the state of this part of the music world can easily - or reasonably - be extracted from the broader state of the music industry, or even more broadly, the information and entertainment industries. When everything around us is leaning towards faster, more accessible, more bitesized, more brain numbing nuggets of information, delivered in 30 second bursts, long form articles in printed form are severely threatened.
I should say up front that I love print media; I think in the right hands it is an art form all of its own. Sometimes in the wrong hands it is also that, to be fair. I have loved music magazines since I was young - the Melody Maker, NME, Kerrang!, Q, Select, and as I became an adult with increasingly diverse taste Terrorizer, Decibel, Zero Tolerance, Metal Hammer, The Wire and others crept in. In my teenage years I would cut out pictures of bands to stick on my school folder, and I would keep stacks of magazines for years and years, always on hand to refer back to.
Not all journalism needs to be on paper to be beloved. Throughout my tenure as a publicist, websites and other online portals have taken a more central role in providing an outlet for bands, and become a vital mode of discovery. We rode out the tempestuous wave of music video premieres, including a truly bonkers phase where multiple, simultaneous, geographically exclusive premieres would be attempted at once. That was a weird time, but throughout it all, many strong opinions and cherished voices flourished.
Exclusivity is such a strange thing to ponder on for too long, even outside of video premieres. I now encounter it most in my work booking for a festival where exclusivity may be negotiated around announcement timelines or other related performances. But I have been embroiled in some very tense conversations about exclusivity for magazine content over the years. This feels absolutely unhinged to think about now but one time a senior member of staff at a metal magazine called me up on a Monday evening as I cooked my dinner to yell at me for breaking an imagined exclusivity deal. He’d negotiated no such deal, but he still interrupted my evening to tear strips off me.
Interestingly, he didn’t give the same treatment to a male publicist who committed the same perceived crime. Facebook isn’t much good for much of anything these days, but due to a long message history I have just been able to go back and read some messages about this absurd situation. He threatened to pull the feature because a “much smaller competitor” had run an interview with a band before they had. I cried at the time - it was very stressful! I had to call a label I had just started working with to tell them that this feature was at risk, and I didn’t know how to resolve things because this man would NOT STOP SHOUTING AT ME long enough to tell me what he actually wanted to happen next.
There was a period when some magazines, for the smallest of features on the most fledgling of bands would insist upon photo exclusivity. There was a time when a label demanded I insist a magazine either pull a review or send it to someone else to re-write it days before it was due to be sent to print because they didn’t like what had been written. I probably cried then too, but remarkably the magazine did send it to be re-marked and re-written. I still think about this incident, two or three times a year at least. Sometimes the power tips towards those with the pen, sometimes it tips towards those with the chequebook who are looking to book advertising. I generally just felt seasick in the middle.
I don’t think asking artists, promoters, labels etc to advertise is wrong to be clear - after all, if the magazine is hitting their target audience then it will benefit them too. But along the way the conversations about editorial and advertising have become so entwined and it has increasingly contributed to my disillusionment about the job I’m here to do. Where once I would seek out champions of the sort of music that I represented, and work with those people year in, year out to help bring the great word of great music to the masses, those conversations dwindled considerably.
There are less publications paying great writers to write and so their passion, their calling - dare I say it? - their vocation - becomes a sideline, a hobby. Something they do to keep their hand in and their whistle wet. I fondly recall poring over magazines in my youth, most drawn to articles and reviews that either featured my already favourite artists, or that were penned by journalists I respected. The curmudgeonly curiosity of Chris Chantler, the scathing wit of Dom Lawson - these were my companions, my guides, on the neverending quest of discovering new music.
The world has changed in immeasurable ways since I was a teenager, and although there is plenty to rail against, it seems futile to wish away all the advances in technology that make music magazine publishing a near-fruitless endeavour for all but the most deranged of folk. Also, I think that perspective depends very much on what sort of fruit you’re looking for. No doubt - like me - the die hards would really rather not think about money; if there’s enough to keep the lights on then they’ll keep doing what they’re doing. If they’re still reaching people, making an impact, changing the course of things then that is the fruit that is the sweetest.
I recently read Novelist as a Vocation by Murakami, in which he talks of a novel being a highly inefficient way to communicate an idea (and yet…). I think much the same of music journalism; these days there are much quicker and more efficient ways to sell a music fan something, or to communicate what this album is about, or who it is for. That is the technology that I mentioned a moment ago. But all those other ways of communicating do not have the steadfast resolve, the dedicated knowledge, the deep understanding of a seasoned expert channeling their thoughts through their fingertips, onto the page and out into the world. As I say, it’s an art form all of its own.
But I’ll tell you what isn’t an art form! Listicles masquerading as articles, charts and rankings (with minimal context) that make up the entirety of a feature, cheap round-ups that rely heavily on ‘for fans of’ guidance. This is cheap fodder to wow an algorithm, not to shape the course of someone’s love affair with music. It brings me back to a question that I have been asking - to myself and aloud to others - about how much people should be given what they purport to want versus given what someone else decides they should have?
People love those lists! I hear online editors cry in disgust at my lack of knowledge of SEO and engagement metrics. But just because they will scroll through a list whilst they poop or wait for the bus, it doesn’t mean that it feeds their inner desire to make a connection to music, to an artist. It is cheap entertainment, not deep listening magicked into clever penmanship.
It upsets me. Because I know how much of a difference a good review or a bad review can make. Why is this power placed in such flippant, careless hands? What worth does a positive review have if it’s been purchased as part of a marketing package of online, offline and advertorial content (explicitly or not)? Oh, well it’s actually worth plenty… to morale, sales and future touring opportunities, and that’s just for starters. The power may not rest as heavily as it once did in the realm of magazine journalism, but it still has the capacity to make a difference.
I don’t want print magazines to go away. I don’t want long form journalism to go away. I believe in the power of storytelling. I am convinced that in the right hands any artist’s tale can come alive and make for compelling reading. I also believe that people should be paid for doing this work - fairly, too. That paid positions and salaries are dwindling in this field is a knock-on effect of the way that the music industry (and the magazine industry, and the space where they overlap) has been ruptured by technology, our on-demand expectations and our ceaseless need for interaction, no matter how low value it may be.
I don’t have a cheerful conclusion to offer, I am not sure I have any kind of conclusion at all. I don’t know how to correct this - it is a symptom of a much broader problem that minds bigger and brighter than mine have been puzzling over for years. As individuals we have to find a way to take responsibility for the impact that we have when we choose the lowest common denominator, grey matter pies that are being fed to us. We don’t have to eat that.
The good news is that there are still good writers out there, still some good magazines and even still some adventurous minded souls who believe that we can ride out this bumpy storm and bring the average music lover back round to reading about music in a way similar to the generations that have gone before. But I can’t help but think that this will require a shift in our culture that is gargantuan in scope. It goes hand in hand with the shift in our thinking about streaming I believe. Is it a step too far? Is it a lost cause? I have no way to know. What do you think? I figure we’re gonna have to work on this particular problem together if we’re going to stand a chance of solving it.
Yours in bleakness… that’s all I have for this week.
~Becky
P.S I am on tour with Thou at the moment. If you’re in any of the cities below, then we’ll be there soon. Come and say hi and tell me about your favourite music magazine.
I think one of the most overlooked aspects of what the music press did, particularly in the heavy end of the spectrum, was act as a foundational part of the community. That's just gone now - social media might seem to be a replacement at a surface level, but it is insubstantial to the point of uselessness when it comes down to forging an *actual* community.
Music magazines might pretend that they're about reviews and features and establishing the canon of what is good and what is bad within their music scene. But to me when I am the audience for that publication, it was about establishing a shared thread of understanding about how that scene unfolds. That isn't to say that everyone who reads a magazine has the same groupthink about how good or bad a record or a band is, but the kind of person who bought Kerrang! versus the kind of person who bought Metal Hammer versus the kind of person who bought Decibel were lines in cultural sand that helped people understand themselves in relation to the art that they consumed.
If you look at Kerrang! now, it's all about the exclusive merch drops (whatever you got to do to pay those bills, I guess). I find it a bit comical that they will describe an online feature as a "cover story" because they think giving it the veneer of a printed article gives an article some kind of legitimacy, when in fact it just underlines how little faith they have in the writing itself to be valuable regardless if it is on a screen instead of a page.
I guess this is a very long winded way of saying, having been on the inside of several print publications and experienced the pain of what happens when ad sales requirements bristle against critical words, I don't lament the passing of mags so much as I lament their absence as a lighthouse in establishing a community.