The Latest Elegy for Music Journalism and Middle-Class Musicianhood
Sometimes professional failure isn’t your fault.
A couple of weekends ago, at a party in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, I found myself in a semi-circle of smokers towards the back of the yard. We were all “music people,” talking about the recent past and grim future of our professional and social worlds. There were freelance critics with day jobs, musicians with harrowing tales of scraping by on tour, an indie-label publicist who’d been laid off, a middle-school teacher who’d rather be making music full time, and a few publication staffers who wouldn’t be shocked if they were kicked off the carousel at any moment. After some commiseration and stories of “the good old days” (which ended sometime around 2018, I think), I for some reason thought it necessary to state the obvious: None of this is our fault. We could all cheers to that.
I thought of this moment last week when I heard the news about Brooklyn Vegan’s layoffs, along with big cuts to rock-focused outlets like Alternative Press, Revolver, and Goldmine. I’m not the first to note the loss of Brooklyn Vegan’s aggregation and curation of new songs as a hit to my own music discovery process. What these publications provided was more like service journalism (and fan-service journalism) than pure criticism; this—combined with the fact that they covered heavier genres where fans are particularly loyal—made it seem like these outlets were positioned to survive by serving their respective niches.
But in the end, it so often comes down to some rich guys who no longer find it novel or culturally advantageous to own such publications. In this case, those rich guys are, insanely, the Madden brothers of Good Charlotte, whose empire includes the livestream platform Veeps—which at some point got bought out by Live Nation, the conglomerate forever plaguing the music biz. So really the takeaway is: Live Nation and a second-tier 2000s pop-punk band casually murdered one of the last-standing blogs of the indie-rock era. It makes me so angry I’m out here half-seriously quoting “Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous”: “If money is such a problem/Well, they got mansions, think we should rob them.”
Anyone who funds music publications—or indie labels, or any endeavor in the arts space that’s unlikely to scale massively—must be doing it for the love and the belief that it needs to exist. Maybe that’s an old-world way of thinking about arts patronage, but the ultimate goal should not be never-ending growth. The point is to sustain creativity. Long before there were record labels, or even recording technology, wealthy elites and noblemen commissioned new works from classical composers in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Before that, baroque composers like Bach and Handel were employed by European monarchs and city councils to perform at official events and cook up new works constantly. For a second, I thought: How is pleasing a finicky viceroy all that different from coddling a tech-bro investor? At least the viceroy didn’t fall back on traffic numbers.
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