By Julene Snyder
In the beginning, there was
Crawdaddy, Creem and Rolling Stone. Then,
before you could hum the chorus
to "Let it Bleed," rock critics were
everywhere. There were the academics
(Robert Christgau, Eric
Weisbard), the wunderkind-turned-moguls
(Cameron Crowe), the madmen
(Lester Bangs, Richard Metzger),
the cultural chroniclers (Ann
Powers), the fan-focused (Gina
Arnold), the semi-notorious (Jim
DeRogatis) and the label-friendly
hacks (you'd didn't really think I'd
put a name here, did you?).
You'd think that Web journalism's
explosion would bring a new crop of
influential music journalists.
It hasn't. Instead, it's brought
hundreds of music Web sites
pumping out hundreds of thousands of words
- mostly mediocre words. The
question: Is anyone paying attention? The
new Madonna record saw reviews
everywhere from Wall of Sound to
Sonicnet.com. But did all those
online record reviews have a thing to
do with the album's success?
There are signs that the industry
has begun to wonder if the world
really needs dozens of Madonna
reviews. Last week, MTVi - the online
division of Viacom's MTV Networks
and parent of Sonicnet - laid off
more than 100 employees in a
major reorganization. (Full disclosure:
I've written record reviews
for Sonicnet.) According to a recent
Industry Standard article, those
layoffs were due to the company's
plans to "consolidate its editorial
and technology staffs into one
division. One staff essentially
will create editorial for MTV.com,
VH1.com and Sonicnet." MTV.com's
group president, Judy McGrath, told
Inside.com's Craig Marks (formerly
an editor at Spin) that one result
of the reorganization will be
the centralization of music reviews,
remarking that, "There's really
no reason to have four separate Nelly
reviews."
Not surprisingly, critics themselves
aren't as matter-of-fact. "As the
business itself consolidates,
the media is also consolidating," says
New York Times pop music critic
Ann Powers. The Times writer also
thinks that the sites' existence
as part of the industry they cover
leads to a lack of dissenting
opinions.
Powers says she's distressed
because much of the discussion about the
role of music criticism is strictly
about filtering and taste-making:
"(There is an) extreme focus
on consumerism online, on buying and
selling. Well, it's not that
easy to monetize commentary and social
context. It's much easier to
monetize a guide that's going to say,
'This is good, and this is bad.'
I'm sorry to see so little interest
among people who are really
invested in the online world in the side
of criticism and journalism
that I think is more interesting."
But the issue might not lie with
a dimunition of content but with a
shift in who's creating it.
Marc Schiller, CEO and co-founder of the
marketing firm ElectricArtists,
thinks that the most important reviews
these days are coming from the
fans themselves in places like mailing
lists, message boards and chat
rooms - the places where fans talk to
one another in communities that
they've created themselves. "These
communities can create a buzz
in velocity that's incredible," he says.
"For the first time, there's
a layer that the labels have to take into
account early - the fans."
If so, it's a sea change from
the way things have worked for years in
the music industry. The relationship
between writer, publicist and
record label has always been
a symbiotic one: The writer needs access
to the artist, the artist presumably
wants to be famous, and the
publicist is supposed to rack
up as many positive reviews as possible
so that lots of records are
sold and everybody can make a lot of
money.
But hey, none of this is rocket
science; putting the fans at the
front-end of the process might
turn out to be the best thing that's
ever happened to the business.
In the immortal words of the late,
lamented Frank Zappa, "Most
rock journalism is people who can't write,
interviewing people who can't
talk, for people who can't read."
03 Oct 2000 BEAT SHEET: Who Needs Music Critics (on the Web)?
THE INDUSTRY STANDARD'S B E A
T S H E E T
http://www.thestandard.com