the usefulness of disliking music, as a writer or as a listener etc.

i have never held a consistent or logical position on these things, it seems to me to miss the point somewhat.

I identify with this a bit, I think this issue - how affected one is by hype etc. - is one in respect of which it's hard not to have really variable reactions, like one day to be supremely unruffled by it and the next to be filled with righteous indignation.

I guess because ultimately it's less about one's attitude to music than one's relationship with tribes.

It's probably one of the areas of music awareness that gloms onto politics most easily.

Well actually the first part of lex's sentence more than the second at any rate - by virtue of the first part i'm not sure if there's really a 'point' as such to miss.

the point is more to do with how one responds to music? having a rigorous world view misses the point that being a music listener is an unpredictable and messy affair (cf kogan's boney joan rule)

oh okay.

My reading of boney joan (which doesn't at all contradict the above) is that it's about the inadequacy of concepts vis a vis experience, that two voices can both code as being like a babbling brook and that can mean totally different things, because analogies for music can never exhaust it.

But most people (who understandably aren't as rigorous as frank) try to deny the above and fashion their post facto rationalisations of music enjoyment to be as predictable and as neat as possible.

So I don't think it's totally wrong to say e.g. "if you like this then logically you should like that, why don't you?" (or something similar) (rhetorical strategies which presume a certain consistency and orderliness to people's taste and enjoyment) because in general people's experience of their own music enjoyment is that it is self-consistent. Our conversations here tend to assume it as a given, in fact.

I pretty much refuse to do interviews b/c I more times than not I end up getting annoyed with the artist for doing the above plus sounding like dog latin.

i've only had this a couple of times - you just have to avoid the questions that are obviously going to lead to pat answers. i've grown to really enjoy doing interviews tbh.

same, still hate transcribing though

Actually yeah that may be the bigger issue. Basically anything involving set up, preparation, back-end work etc is irritating for me. Whereas reviews are like: sit down, write it in one go, submit.

I never really devoted myself to being a pro music critic sufficiently to get many interesting interviews anyway. One glorious exception was Sabrina from Mis-Teeq - who wasn't pat at all.

i might have said the same, many years ago! i learned to do it b/c you have to do it to make a living as a journalist (not just a music journalist), and in the process learned how rewarding it can be.

tbh - this is not meant personally - i am not wholly down with people swanning in to do the fun stuff and airily going "oh i don't like the rest of the job". though i guess this is kind of like me not understanding why professional journalists hated other people writing for free, back when i did that. then i went freelance and ohhhhh boy do i get it now. (though at the same time if i hadn't written for free then, i wouldn't have this career at all.)

transcription is the absolute worst obv

Is there some ethical imperative to do unenjoyable tasks beyond the usual Protestant one?

Or is it a more general issue with people dabbling in journalism who have other careers?

i think it's more a concern w/ the state of journalism and that it's easy to find people willing to share their thoughts with the world but rare to find people willing to actually tell stories

like, there's a very real value provided by journalism

of course, that doesn't defend 90% of vaguely journalistic puff-piece interviews, but still

I'm not sure that interviewing necessarily equates with storytelling and reviewing necessarily doesn't.

The state of music journalism as a career and the state of music journalism as a body of work are heavily related and mutually interdependent, but they're not the same thing.

In respect of the former, I would think it's more ethical of me not to be stealIng work from poverty line freelancers and then doing a half-assed job of it.

people who work for free undercut people who do this as a profession, basically. re: dabbling, i dunno, i did journalism as a side thing for years while having a proper job and i can't really blame anyone for choosing to actually earn some ££, but i'm sure you can think of an analogous situation in law whereby someone swans in to do the most fun, easy part of the job but airily dismisses the legwork that you do because it's, y'know, your career

I'm not sure that interviewing necessarily equates with storytelling and reviewing necessarily doesn't.

right but there's information that informs the public that can't be obtained through any other means

i guess i was gonna make a point about how being forced to include interviewing as a thing i did actually made me a better writer/journalist/reviewer, even though when i started out it was something i disliked, wasn't comfortable with, thought tedious etc. indeed learning to love it has been as much personal development as career development!

I'm not dismissing interviewing. But if someone told me that they decided not to become a litigator because they cannot stand document discovery I would sympathise.

The above makes absolute sense to me; to be clear, me saying I don't really have the temperament for interviewing was a self-criticism rather than a criticism of journalism or journalists. The same things that I struggle with there are things I struggle with in work.

my point was that i thought i didn't have the temperament for interviewing 5 years ago! but it's funny how wrong we can be about ourselves.

and obv the things i'm most satisfied about are precisely those things i wasn't sure i had the temperament to be able to do - far more satisfaction than filing a good review, which i've always known i can do

I mean all I want to do at work is draft snarky argument-winning correspondence to the other side, which is basically the litigation equivalent of review writing.

I mean all I want to do at work is draft snarky argument-winning correspondence to the other side, which is basically the litigation equivalent of review writing and posting on ilx.

this is a total tangent/aside but document discovery is possibly the most horrifying white collar job there is IMO

Insert strikethrough in the obvious place above.

Yes.

"people who work for free undercut people who do this as a profession, basically."

Are you seriously trying to argue this point, Lex?

how is that disputable

people doing work for free lowers the economic value of the work in question

well, it is like arguing with the existence of the ocean. the trick is just making your work that much more valuable

there's no trick to it, it's just a simple trick!

people doing work for free lowers the economic value of the work in question

― Shakey Mo Collier, Thursday, December 8, 2011 11:49 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Permalink

But that matters only to the people who aren't any better than those doing work for free. Which is what deej is echoing, I think.

lol "only"

economic value is often not assigned by quality btw

for ex. shitty MP3s are free, higher quality formats may cost money - guess which one is more popular. and guess which one also drags down the actual overall market value.

or to put it in journalism terms - shitty blog posts articles by anybody for free, and people read it because it's free. fewer people read a competing site requiring payment, they don't bring in enough money to pay writers, writers who want to be paid have to compete for a smaller number of spots. and get paid less, because the site has less money coming in.

this scenario has been played out on a macro scale so many times over the last decade, denying it is like climate-change denial, it's just bizarre.

yeah but what is he supposed to do about it?

like, might as well complain that you die one day. boy that sucks!!

what is who supposed to do about it, Lex? Lex can't do anything about. rennavate can't do anything about it either, but maybe he should stop making denying reality.

making

I think the general point (writing about music for free lowers economic value of music writing) is correct but I don't know that it's as clear-cut as that suggests either, primarily because free music writing and paid music writing are not identical in content or medium.

This is where the poor-quality free MP3 versus CD analogy doesn't quite work - that's more like reading a newspaper online for free online but with annoying pop-ups versus paying for a print version.

Certainly some blogs and non-remunerative publications aspire to be precisely as tedious and narrow-minded as their remunerative counterparts, but beyond those, "free" music writing is part of a broad continuum of non-journalistic writing that includes people posting on ILX. In some senses, ILX competes directly for its readers' attention with paid publications: rather than read an article about Amy Winehouse's life we might read the ILM RIP thread instead.

Would we propose, therefore, that the existence of the latter is a negative historical development?

Lex raising the issue of dabblers in my profession (law) and how I would feel about them was kind of useful in this regard: it doesn't actually happen in Australia (and I assume this goes for the UK as well) because the admission and compliance requirements involved in being a lawyer are far too onerous for anyone ever just to "dabble" in it, except as a career-withdrawal strategy (i.e. after they've done it full-time for a long time).

This has the effect of helping to protect standards, but it's also criticised for reducing competition, making the industry hidebound, conservative, and effectively turning the legal industry into a partially closed shop (especially at the Bar).

Imagine a universe where all music journalism (in the broadest sense) had similar professional standards regulations: where you could be sued for offering a written opinion on a record without holding the appropriate qualifications and a licence to write through a paying publication. What would the effect of this be? I expect it would mean that:

(a) publications could charge a lot more while still commanding an audience;
(b) journalists would be paid better;
(c) standards of writing would be higher in many senses, particularly technical standards;
(d) breaking into the industry would be harder;
(e) the writing and opinions would by and large be more conservative, slow to change and divorced from public opinion; and
(f) the diversity of writing and opinion would be constrained.

Some of the above effects would be positive, some negative - as is typical in respect of issues of industry regulation.

Whatever the arrangement, there will be good and bad writers and good and bad lawyers.

Obviously no-one is actually proposing the above ITT, I'm just using it as an illustrative example of the kind of tensions that surround the issue of music writing's creep beyond the boundaries of professional journalism.

Every time you talk with your friends about music, you are stealing from professional music critics.

(a) publications could charge a lot more while still commanding an audience;
(b) journalists would be paid better;
(c) standards of writing would be higher in many senses, particularly technical standards;
(d) breaking into the industry would be harder;
(e) the writing and opinions would by and large be more conservative, slow to change and divorced from public opinion; and
(f) the diversity of writing and opinion would be constrained.

all of these things were true for journalism prior to the internet, sans "regulations"

Well yeah exactly.

I will keep in mind that, when I publish essays and reviews on my blog because I don't publish enough freelance stuff anymore for a number of reasons, I'm contributing to the corruption of professional criticism.

lol I'm not telling anybody not to write or whatever. everybody do everything!

what about comparing it with musicians? i got picked up to do paid work because i did a bunch of free work first. its the same as rappers w/ mixtapes. i'm sure there are rappers who think, if yall werent giving this away for free, we could all bank off of it, but its just the way the industry is now; you have to churn out a lot MORE content bcuz of the internet, so you have to make your ideas go a lot further

At this stage, complaining about people writing for free is pointless.

But it has become a vicious circle. Of course, the obvious way for paid-media to fight the hobbyists is to make their coverage better. But the proliferation of free media has shattered the audience, slashed paid circulations, destroyed advertising bases. The need to bring in revenue means chasing what circulation there is, and that leads a great many editors to commission what they believe will bring in casual readers - hence the endless puff interviews. That's not so much of a problem when you have the pagination to run the good stuff as well (I remember Graydon Carter justifying the awful VF cover stories by saying that's what bought him the right to run the long pieces about Afghanistan or Wall Street), but now that - especially in newspapers - pagination is getting pegged back, we're in a world where if you have two music pieces a week, you'd be a fool to make one of them Lex on underground women rappers in the UK. You want Coldplay and Kylie. And publications are going to start appointing editors who give them that, rather than editors who have a genuine interest in going off the beaten track.

Free writers are only one tiny part of that, of course. They're only one tiny part of how the internet has ravaged mainstream journalism. And, really, in terms of the massive decline of the past three years, the effects of the crash outweigh the effects of the internet.

I like hype, even when the debates are lame and the bands are terrible and the personalities involved are all loathsome there's something entertaining about watching people getting involved in arguments with one another or just watching these ludicrous made-up genres dropping off the production line. The context can be more fun than the music sometimes.

It's probably the same reason why I'm more likely to watch a turgid game between two frumpy midtable football clubs in the league I follow rather than a potentially amazing televised game taking place in a country whose league I don't follow, it's nice to have the oxygen of some kind of debate/story/soap opera.