What Does It Even Mean to Be a Music Critic Now?

Hearing Things is partnering with the grantmaking and learning initiative Critical Minded to publish the following adapted selection from Liner Notes: A Critic’s Notebook, a new collection exploring the changing landscape of music criticism through essays, conversations, and reporting from critics of color. The complete issue, accompanying the report Beautiful Struggles: Critics of Color and the Pop Music Landscape, and companion podcast are available at Critical Minded.

Every summer since 2019, I’ve taught a six-week undergraduate culture writing elective at New York University, helping students translate their opinions into criticism that braids analysis, context, argument, sensory awareness, and the confidence to state a clear point of view. Occasionally, a student shows up who seems instinctively attuned to the craft of writing about music. But with music critic gigs in dismal supply, few could comfortably imagine themselves doing it full-time. In 2025, the course was canceled due to low enrollment. 

I also teach feature writing at NYU and, in the spring of 2025, I had that class read dream hampton’s 1998 Vibe profile, “Jay-Z: The Life.” The piece is a masterclass in empathy and accountability, an early portrait of Jay-Z as a complex figure, emotionally detached from the community impacted by his street hustling. The nine graduate students in the course—mostly women of color in their 20s—appreciated not only hampton’s prose but her critique of the Brooklyn rapper’s nonchalance. Some students were surprised, noting that today’s writers couldn’t get away with such a candid analysis of a high-profile celebrity. Which outlets would even allow it?

Criticism hasn’t disappeared, of course, but the concept of “the critic” has never felt more nebulous. A generation ago, pop music critics built their careers reviewing albums, interviewing musicians and covering local scenes for national magazines and alt-weeklies. Black critics throughout the 1980s and the ’90s regularly analyzed and contextualized hip-hop stars as they came of age. But the infrastructure that once supported work like hampton’s no longer exists. While mainstream outlets like Rolling Stone led broader discussions about pop music, publications like The Source,  XXL, and Vibe emerged to bridge the gap, serving as testing grounds where writers could legitimately challenge artists about their art. Decades later, some of those same publications that showcased high-level criticism have become artist-friendly aggregators with diminished resources and authority. 

Many of us who still practice traditional music criticism now see it as just one element of a broader writing portfolio. We’ll write an album review, moderate a panel, or produce sponsored content for artists. But where “the critic” once felt essential to preserving music as an art form, it’s clear the role has become more perishable. A once stable, esteemed title has steadily collapsed into a side hustle for many (including myself), with a select few critics working at music-forward publications (Rolling Stone, NPR, Pitchfork, The Ringer) or holding staff and contributor positions at legacy outlets (The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, The Atlantic).

I casually surveyed two of my former NYU students and a mentee, and they shared a similar concern about whether there’s still value in calling yourself a music critic these days. One student hesitates to claim the title outright: “The fact that I don’t spend most of my time covering music puts me on the fence,” he wrote to me. Before graduating, the student applied for fellowships and staff writing positions at magazines and newspapers, hoping to land a job that would allow him to write about music full-time, to no avail. “For most people I know, music coverage is something they do outside their 9-to-5.”

The sad truth is that, at present, most readers do not read, let alone engage with, legitimate music critiques. Meanwhile, amateur reviews are everywhere, sprawled throughout a vast, decentralized space. Part of the problem is that criticism involves, well, being critical. Inevitably, we find ourselves in a tug-of-war between the artists creating the work and listeners who think their favorite artist deserves more recognition or praise. That tension is historically productive, pushing all sides to evaluate what they value in music—and allowing traditional critics to influence audience taste, place albums in a cultural context, and combat fan bias. After all, many of the best critics developed their voice not through formal journalistic channels but through obsessive listening, reading, and the slow accumulation of knowledge. Those habits are harder to cultivate, however, in a system where the economic incentives point elsewhere. What does it mean to now call yourself a critic if the ecosystem has radically shifted?

I came up in the mid-2000s, during the blog era, when digital media began to drastically increase in popularity but print was still king. I worked alongside editors and writers who treated criticism as a serious craft, and wrote plenty of clumsy reviews before I learned how to write competent ones. The experience forced me to take the work of criticism seriously, and I learned how to articulate an argument about music rather than simply react to it, eventually writing for The Village Voice. Even when I wasn’t writing straight-up album reviews, I was doing the work of a critic because the publications and editors I wrote for made space for honest critiques about music, regardless of the article format.

Sharing my taste felt intimidating, but it showed me how vital critics are to synthesizing the world around us. Unfortunately, publications that served as training grounds in the ’90s and 2000s have either shut down (The Village Voice, MTV News) or undergone significant changes. The old system provided aspiring critics a place to develop their voice, learn from mistakes, and be guided by experienced editors; now, those opportunities are limited. Universities and arts programs that nurtured criticism are facing their own financial setbacks, as schools prioritize fields deemed more sustainable. A crucial part of learning criticism is reading and deconstructing older reviews for knowledge and context. But some aspiring critics see subscription-based models as a barrier to entry. One of the students I surveyed said the pay-to-play model “makes reviews less accessible and undermines their impact as conversation starters.”

Writers now work in a landscape where independent creators and publications alike fret endlessly about advertisers, fan armies, and access: Critics in 2026 must now meet the demands of a media world that prioritizes marketable on-camera personalities. Conversations that used to mainly appear in mainstream print now happen on podcasts, YouTube videos, Substack newsletters, and as fragmented micro-analyses on social media threads. In turn, anyone interested in writing about music for pay, including seasoned journalists, is expected to move across multiple media formats—but the pay-to-play model introduces new complications. 

As much as it pains many of us to admit, while these digital creators often lack the methodology and ethics needed to be deemed true “critics”—they tend to thrive in the same environment where written criticism is increasingly disregarded. Perhaps the most popular and polarizing of them all, Anthony Fantano, transformed his public radio show The Needle Drop into a YouTube channel that’s gained over 3 million subscribers since 2009. (For context, NYT’s “Popcast,” an audio and video podcast hosted by the paper’s veteran writers Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, has just over 100,000 YouTube subscribers.) Rolling Stone named Fantano one of 2024’s most influential creators. That same year, Spin profiled him, arguing that “there is a strong case for him as modern music’s most successful individual critic, with a reputation tied to no entity but his own.” That type of viewership suggests that fans and audiences want some form of discussion and engagement around music.

Many critics have adapted, and a small number have successfully built independent audiences. The aforementioned “Popcast” examines pop music releases and industry trends. Other podcasts like “Pop Pantheon” and “60 Songs That Explain the ’90s” revisit older music while discussing contemporary artists. YouTube and TikTok have welcomed a new wave of independent commentators who deconstruct songs and albums in short-form videos and interview artists. Their reach often surpasses that of traditional publications, but the cultural authority once held by critics has dwindled, along with the media institutions that supported them. 

This democratization of criticism, while helping to reduce widespread elitism, has created new tensions. On the one hand, this openness has made music discussions less exclusive and less intimidating, removing the long-held stigma of the critic as the grizzled malcontent opining from their lofty perch. But the apparent mainstreaming of expertise has lessened the role critics once played in shaping public discourse. This shift naturally changes how younger writers view and adopt the “critic” label— a fear affirmed and echoed by music writers who’ve been forced to abandon the kind of criticism they want to pursue because of editorial restrictions, widespread layoffs, industry politics, and a dearth of paid gigs for which criticism is valued and well compensated. “Critic” often sounds too narrow and, in some cases, too negative. For others, the title feels unearned or too sacred to claim.

For Gen Z’s aspiring critics, there’s no real standardized pipeline—and not much of an informal one, either. But the idea of the Renaissance critic isn’t entirely new. Black critics have always had to carve out space in an industry dominated by white men. In their case, “music critic” was an expansive label, not limited to solely writing about music. Black critics of the past were versatile journalists and thinkers covering the arts, community, and politics, often working as documentarians and artists themselves, treating their work as extensions of their daily lives and identities. The late Greg Tate not only critiqued rap and rock but also composed original music with his collective, the Black Rock Coalition. Nelson George authored screenplays and liner notes. Black criticism was a collective effort, affording writers both cultural and tangible currency—they could make a living doing it. “Critic,” in that social climate, became a badge of honor in an exclusionary media landscape. 

Tate discussed this on a NYT panel titled “The Vitality of Black Critics,” recalling how Amiri Baraka’s writings shaped his own understanding of music criticism: “[T]he opportunity to talk about the music is of course the opportunity to bring our whole lives to who we are,” Tate explained, “and it’s also the reason that most of us who were writing in the ’80s and [the] ’90s really became, or were, multidisciplinary artists. We never thought that criticism was the be all and end all of what we had to offer.”

Indeed, many of our luminaries wore a thousand hats. Today’s critics—many of whom came up in stable digital media environments—may have stumbled into an echo of this reality in the media’s new gig economy. The critic-as-creator paradigm, in turn, reaffirms the eternal romantic bond between art and criticism. So is the music critic truly dead, or simply experiencing a crisis of ingenuity? The truth likely exists somewhere between a fatalist view and the exceptionalist Renaissance model.

Despite the bleak prospects, none of this means criticism is obsolete. Criticism is ultimately a product of sustained curiosity and care; music criticism persists because it offers the type of context and friction that fandom alone cannot. It complicates the neat narratives that dominate social media, distinguishing itself from “conversations about music,” which can and do happen anywhere. Written criticism is, in fact, a specialized skill that not everyone can do, though they can learn. While the job will likely continue to become more niche under the new media structure, contemporary critics are arguably still multidisciplinary artists, as Tate defined, practicing some form of criticism, even if it is largely a labor of love.

Hearing Things is a proud Critical Minded grant recipient.