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

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.

for the most part I actually DO hear music in a vacuum, or in my own contexts

Do you go to clubs? If you go out dancing and the DJ's playing a load of records and you like a lot of them, are you doing so in a vacuum? The DJ isn't insulated from the discourse and neither are the dancers.

Do you go to clubs? If you go out dancing and the DJ's playing a load of records and you like a lot of them, are you doing so in a vacuum? The DJ isn't insulated from the discourse and neither are the dancers.

― Matt DC, Friday, 9 December 2011

Perhaps what I mean here is, for the most part I have no preconceptions about most records I hear or buy because I don't know what they are until after I have heard them. I haven't read anything and no one has talked about them to me - and sometimes I have read or heard something about a record, but only become aware its the same record after I have heard about it and found out what it was

This technically might not be a vacuum but it is hearing something without amy idea who it is by

I know that is also a context - but...not in the context of this thread (written stuff, and discussed stuff)

"What do you think of X?"

"No idea never heard of it"

"Its just finishing now"

Yeah I suppose so, was more pointing out that critical circles/debates can seep through even when you aren't paying attention to them.

This was actually my point upthread!

I've never heard Drake or Metronomy but I know all about them.

and I've certainly never paid any attention to anything said about either

tbh it seems pretty logical people are not paid simply for offering their opinion about a record...it isn't actually worth anything

not least when you can read here or a friend's facebook post or a blog.

a lot of the papers or mags have this stink of catering to the diminishing and increasingly alien (at least to me and everyone I know) pool of people who still need them.

ItHappens otm basically...but how bad a thing is this anyway?

Well, as an employee of paid-media, I do fervently believe that writers with years of experience, well developed research and writing skills, good contacts, an understanding of context, the knowledge of how to connect with an audience and the ability to bring those things together in one article are more likely to provide a piece of reading that entertains and informs than someone sharing their thoughts from their bedroom.

I think album reviews, these days, are little more than a sop, something for advertisers to place ads against. But the money that they bring in is what pays for the time and effort and good writer can put into a worthwhile piece. Someone writing for free likely can't devote several days to chasing down the interviews and researching the best possible story.

No offense, but "someone sharing their thoughts from their bedroom" reminds of Brian Williams getting miffed at bloggers "in their bathrobes" scooping him. It's such a stereotype.

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.

― Tim F, Thursday, 8 December 2011 04:11 (Yesterday) Bookmark Permalink

Haha, I get the feeling I'm the only one who read that and didn't have a clue what Tim was referring to...

yeah that's really offensive, i have NEVER scooped brian williams (xpost)

xpost Using exaggeration to make a point. If bloggers genuinely scoop paid journalism, then fair play to them. And often they do - not having the turning circle of a supertanker means they usually are first on to new things. What's more, only a fool would delude themselves into thinking that someone who gets paid for writing is ipso facto a better writer than someone who doesn't. But I think the point about being able to do in-depth journalism without financial resources behind them holds as true for good music writing as it does for traditional news writing v citizen journalism. Even Pitchfork hasn't truly been able to do that - its core is still reviews and thinkpieces. They haven't exactly thrown themselves into reported pieces. When the best bloggers are able to monetise (errgh) their relationship with their readers to such an extent that they can do whatever they want is the day that traditional paid-media music journalism really dies.

also, while i do think quality of thinking/writing about music (sticking to reviews & thinkpieces rather than investigative story-finding) doesn't correlate to paid/unpaid writers...the best unpaid ones should absolutely be paid! so many excellent writers have moved from unpaid blogging to paid journalism over the past 10 years. (and without the motivational force of being paid, a lot of excellent writers tend to fall out of the game, consistently not find time for it etc.)

um idk where i was going with that i typed it kinda piecemeal, i think the short version is "yes, duh, good music writers should be paid"

Big Society Music Journalism

I think album reviews, these days, are little more than a sop, something for advertisers to place ads against. But the money that they bring in is what pays for the time and effort and good writer can put into a worthwhile piece. Someone writing for free likely can't devote several days to chasing down the interviews and researching the best possible story.

― ItHappens, Friday, December 9, 2011 9:26 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Permalink

lets not pretend it was better prior to the internet. i honestly thought 99% of music writing was awful; it was the internet that helped me find writers who i felt were actually talking about things in a way i could relate to

I C+P'd the wrong thing i think. oh well

It also helps that nowadays a music blogger doesn't have to describe the music very well: they can just give you a link and you can listen to it for yourself.

xpost - Wouldn't disagree with that at all. I'm not sticking up for puff interviews and crap "humour" and cursory album reviews. Just for the things that paid media does do better - which is give time and resources.

lets not pretend it was better prior to the internet. i honestly thought 99% of music writing was awful; it was the internet that helped me find writers who i felt were actually talking about things in a way i could relate to

implication here is that you actually think music writing is better (ie, less than 99% awful) on the internet...? this is baffling.

i think he means there's more good stuff and/or the good stuff is easier to find, even if the overall percentage of good stuff is lower....which is almost undeniably true for MOST mediums and artforms post-internet

bingo