“The music industry is dead, what’s the point of going into a dying industry?” This was the sentence I received in response to a question I answered regarding my career choice. Inspired isn’t it. However the utterance of this acid tongued individual did cause me to resurrect concerns that I had once struggled with before as to the security and validity of embarking upon a career in journalism, specifically music.
In recent years the music industry’s landscape as a whole has found itself to be dramatically altered. The Internet being the prime cause for such an acute change, from illegal and free downloads to Internet communities such as myspace and blogging. All of these have played a vital role in what many see as the demise of the music industry, but perhaps they are mistaken, the music industry and is components are not dead they are evolving.
The Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) released their quarterly statistics in August of this year, detailing the circulation figures of various consumer print publications – the findings looked bleak for music titles. Weekly rock title Kerrang! suffered a 27.9% fall over the last year bringing the number of copies sold worldwide to 60, 290. This is quite a harsh decline when considering that in 2005 Kerrang! had risen by 24%, making it the world’s biggest selling rock music weekly.
Q Magazine, the UK’s best selling monthly music title had high figures of 158,271 in 2005. The report revealed that Q has been falling 13.1% year on year whilst the perhaps the biggest and most iconic player in music titles, NME has declined by 17.4% this year. So, the horizon looks pretty glum for the world of print, however what is more important than all of this is the traffic figures for NME.com. Since June 1st 2008 to June 30th 2008 the sites users grew by 747,00 bringing the total number of users up to 3, 501,326.
When asked about the internet being the culprit to such as decline in print publication figures our very own Rich Thane said: “Yeah definitely. People just don’t have patience anymore. Why wait a month for the next edition of Mojo or Q to come when you can hop on Google and have your favorite bands every move logged on their Myspace? Or some kids web-zine that he writes from his bedroom in Baltimore you know? Myself and a friend who both ran separate blogs started the Line Of Best Fit. We have very similar tastes, and more often than not would tend to write about the same kinds of stuff. So we decided to pool our resources and merge into one site.” This notion of patience and accessibility is exactly the reason why web based publications such as DiS, Pitchfork and TLOBF are flourishing. Their main strength being their contemporaneous nature, daily music news updates either on-site or sent directly to your inbox mean that by the time mags such as Q come to press they are virtually out of date.
NME looks more and more like Smash Hits with every issue and its circulation figures are falling as previously mentioned. Yet it remains relevant only due to its historical status. Its ability to propel a new act to stardom is still a strong belief amongst many in the industry. When asked about the relevance of NME today, Something in Construction record label founder and ex-A & R executive David Laurie said: “Having a Single Of The Week in NME will not sell you out a limited run of singles as once it would and a rave review does not sell out a tour so it is not as relevant as it was 15 years ago, however it is still super important as an industry tastemaker and a gateway to more press coverage, getting your band away.” However the Internet is slowly but surly proving to be all the more superior with the exposure of new music. When MySpace was born in 2003 it launched the careers of many acts such as Lily Allen, just by being a free platform for artists to advertise themselves to potential consumers. Of course the internet has come on leaps and bounds since then, the blogosphere is ever increasing and many of you lovely readers I am sure have blogs of your own or trusted blogs you read on a regular basis.
The role of the journalist as a gatekeeper or middleman relay between the artist and the consumer is almost redundant. As Laurie says “Word-of-mouth is still easily the best way for a label to sell an album and the only thing you can’t buy. Getting print press no longer seems to sell an album – not in isolation. And first adopters, music geeks now have an infinite number of knowledgeable “friends”, whose unbiased opinions are freely available in the blogosphere,
So why go into music journalism? If print is dying such a slow and painful death and the listeners can acquire the same if not better music knowledge than a journo on the net, what’s the point? My response – Oh I don’t know, free cds?
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Hmmmm… interesting article. I’m not sure music journalism is dead… It’s probably dying in its old form. The rise of sites like us, DiS and Pitchfork with their championing of new music, is great.
The print media will never be able to mate the faster moving nature of the web – NME have tried, yet their website is awful. It’ll shift, but there’ll still be people buying Mojo and the like, if only because they’re not interesting in new stuff quite so much.
I actually quite like having a nice fat music mag to read, but I buy them less and less these days. At the end of the day they’re actually quite expensive, which doesn’t help them, and magazines like Q and NME just don’t really have much at all in the way of in-depth long-form reviews, which is one of their main functions in my opinion.
That said, I think there are things that the magazines can do well – having them as a thorough on-paper guide to future gigs is very nice. The thing is, I think, that putting out a magazine on a national scale is a damn expensive business, which tends to make such publications inherently corporate, which doesn’t necessarily result in the kind of content people are really after.
I agree with Rich, the format has just moved from the physical to the internet, there will still be music journalism. I just wonder about the career opportunities available, whether there will now be fewer paying roles, and we’ll now see a lot more small scale ‘do it for the love of doing it’ music writing for free (or actually, maybe its always been like that, I don’t really know).
As for the question: why do you write about music? My response would be because I want to communicate with other people. I don’t really connect with the gate-keeper position some people like to take up, (I’m not even sure if this mentality is wide spread or exists at all), I just want to say why I like/dislike something or what I see/don’t see in a song, album, scene etc. and have people read my point of view. Maybe that’s a little self-important, but I do like hearing other peoples opinions too, I like the dialog and the exchange of ideas and other ways of seeing things I might not have thought of (and inspiring that in other people).
I agree with Andy’s second paragraph.
Its the same thing as business. Why pay when you can get something for free? its why freelancing as a writer/photographer etc is harder now than ever- so many people will give things for free that they dont need to pay. People find their own favourites that come close to their opinions, and stick to them as a trusted source.
From going to a limited choice to infinite choice means it is harder to find well written material, and that the limited number of users is spread- ergo reader numbers will be down.
NME’s lowest common factor journalism just doesn’t work any more for more literate readers. It hectors and bullies people who don’t know better. The reliance on major label bands also alienates- not to mention ‘pretending’ bands are unsigned for a few weeks before announcing they got signed (as they did with ordinary boys back in the day)….
There will always be a need for something to read in a dentists surgery.
I don’t read music magazines because they’re shite.
I think people will still seek out informed opinion, but they just won’t wait as long to get it anymore. It’s interesting to see how, for example, Uncut magazine has been steadily increasing its online activity, particularly with blogs. I think the big magazine brands will survive if they keep up with the times.
I think access is the thing the magazines should be talking up, that only they can bring you the personalities alongside the music that’s freely available, but then that puts them squarely in league with the people they’re meant to be critiquing because they know that the NME is the big music brand for casual music fans and is still the most immediately visual magazine, so if you have ambitions of reaching that bigger audience you have to make some plans in that direction. The monthly magazines that have adapted the best are those who specialised in longform pieces that weren’t necessarily set to instantly changeable trends, and I think that’s going to become apparent in the near future – I don’t know if anyone’s seen the new look Q yet, but whoever designed The Word should sue.
I think after everything else the role of a good blogger is primarily to mimic the vibe of sitting around with (virtual) friends going “did you hear about…? Oh, have you heard this band?” and hoping your enthusiasm and positioning rubs off on them.