The Latest Elegy for Music Journalism and Middle-Class Musicianhood

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. 

You can trace the benefactor model back to the Middle Ages, when the Catholic Church became the single largest funder of non-secular art (think sacred chants, masses). We’re talking about a vast amount of time here, upwards of 500 years, where if you wanted to make your living as a composer, you were working for the church. Obviously technology progresses much faster now, but it can help to step back and consider history in this way. Pop-music journalism has only existed as a career path since the mid 20th century, somewhere between the founding of the Village Voice in 1955 and Rolling Stone’s founding in 1967. Jazz and classical criticism predates this, but we are talking about just a handful of generations that grew up seeing big rock magazines on newsstands. I suppose I was lucky to have existed for any of that time, but I just keep thinking of the episode of 30 Rock where people with newly irrelevant jobs—a travel agent, a rock saxophonist, the CEO of Friendster, a TV writer—are forced to hang out under a bridge after being shunned from society. 

Sometimes I’ll go looking for pockets of time when being a writer or a musician was much worse, some decade where it was literally impossible for people to make a living due to external forces or the volatility of the world. Curious, I asked Google, “What have been the worst periods of time to be a musician?” Alongside the atrocities of Nazi Germany, where compositions by Jewish musicians were outlawed, and Afghanistan under Taliban rule, where playing and listening to music was effectively banned, sat our current time period. The AI dubbed it “The Post-Streaming & Layoff Era (2020s–Present)” and defined the issues as widespread revenue collapse, media devastation, and the rising costs of touring. All of this comes with massive caveats that reflect AI’s recency bias and analytical blind spots that equate war and genocide with mere collapse of industry. I’m sure being a musician in medieval times was way worse, what with the random beheadings and all, but there aren’t a thousand thinkpieces about it. Even still, the fucking AI that’s gunning to replace us knows it’s impossible to make a living out here right now.

That is, unless you live in a European country like Finland, Germany, Sweden, or France, where music and art are viewed as public goods and funded by the state. Or maybe even Canada, where there are more state-sponsored creative grants and no threat of Trump arbitrarily cutting arts funding. Again, a big-picture perspective helps to reassert that none of us—the underemployed music critic, the laid-off indie publicist, the singer-songwriter making pennies off streaming, the small venue owner finding it harder to pay bills—did anything wrong. We are simply living in the wrong place at the wrong time, and being forced to watch as tech billionaires slowly ruin the internet and the planet. 

Still, it’s taken me years not to blame myself for setbacks in a career that exists at the intersection of two flailing industries. After my layoff from Pitchfork in 2024, I kept having to challenge my own negative thought patterns: I was cut alongside practically half the staff, in some kind of corporate restructuring that fundamentally changed the publication; how could that be a reflection of my own personal failure? I also had to reject the line of thinking that goes something like: With enough posting and pivoting, you can successfully monetize your own creativity—you’re just not trying hard enough to optimize your brand on social platforms. But the 2020s version of my job—music content creator—isn’t one I want. It’s wonderful to decide to make something that goes against the grain of the moment (see: Hearing Things), so long as you’re prepared to build slowly and make not-much money. 

Which brings me to another point: We need to destigmatize day jobs and side hustles that have nothing to do with our creative fields. I would rather the world be filled with weird and wonderful art from the local postman doing it in his basement at night, rather than the bankrolled pro whose goal is to create something anyone could enjoy. I’m thinking of a line from a recent Baffler issue on writing as “the profession that doesn’t exist”: “A side hustle can be treated as evidence that one has not been ‘successful enough’ with her creative work to survive on it as her sole source of income.” Why can’t we reframe it as a radical act of autonomy, to essentially be your own patron? Why do we always assume the grass is greener? Or that every job must involve our creativity, as if it’s going to disappear should we save some for ourselves? 

Everyone I know with a “dream job” in the arts or journalism seems somewhat miserable, and I myself was miserable at mine for years as I watched the corporate squeeze take hold. So why even try? Lately I’ve been telling friends that I want to be an events coordinator at a nursing home when I grow up, mostly because an author I like said the work-life balance works for them, and I can’t be chained to a computer all day. 

In the spring, I was on a panel with some Gen Z music bloggers, all of whom operate social-first platforms. The topic of pay-to-play came up, and most of the panelists admitted to accepting money for featuring songs in their TikTok and Instagram videos—the condition being that they have to actually like the song, in which case it’s easy money and mutually beneficial. I view this as payola; they view it as making it work however they can. In some ways I admire their practicality, and in others I think it’s another death knell for criticism. In this regard, Gen Z may never see it like millennials do: We grew up in the ’90s, when magazines had big budgets and real influence and actual standards, and we were basically tasked with inventing online music journalism as we started our careers. Then, when publishers and advertising departments couldn’t keep up with the whims of tech companies, we were dismissed, and pretty much all the jobs worth having dried up. Millennials got a taste of the old boom times before it was gone for good. Gen Z grew up in a cultural void, so I can’t really blame them for throwing out the rulebook. 

On the flipside, I’m watching friends and peers of my own media generation get the boot and, instead of doubling down, we’re considering alternate jobs based on mindless but necessary labor, the sorts of things that AI can’t replace. My buddy who just got laid off from his #content gig (a longtime critic with a thriving newsletter) said he’s considering buying a pressure washer and spraying down driveways for money, which is probably the best idea I’ve heard in a while. I mean, think of the perks: Lots of fresh air, exercise, reliable income, and plenty of time to listen to music.