Will music criticism survive?
Will music criticism survive?Mano Sundaresan, Rob Harvilla, Danyel Smith, Robert Christgau and more on the future of media’s most endangered form.
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‘The slop era may be great for criticism’By Nick Catucci
I published my first album review in The Boston Phoenix in 1999, as I was entering my junior year at NYU. That summer I commuted from my dad’s place in Providence to an internship at the weekly, where I opened music editor Matt Ashare’s mail and clipped reviews from the paper to send to publicists and labels. Matt, who had to explain to me that the Phoenix stickers I was putting inside the envelopes were actually return address labels, had recently started writing for Rolling Stone, filing reviews of Elliott Smith and Link Ray shows at the Middle East in Cambridge. I hadn’t been in proximity to anything as cool since I was in a band in high school. I gave Out Loud by the Boom Boom Satellites three stars. For years, music writing was my art, my career, and my identity, and I was not even that successful at it—never wrote a definitive book (or any book), never published prose as memorable as Joshua Clover’s or Greg Tate’s. But music writing has given me so much. A creative imperative, confidence, friendships, a sustainable income, a start to my career. Today, like most weeklies—the wellspring of a lot of great music criticism, not to mention critics—the Phoenix is long dead. I doubt any dailies outside of The Washington Post and The New York Times employ full-time critics (and the Times has not posted a listing to replace its recently departed music editor, Caryn Ganz, maybe because Jon Caramanica is podcasting and making videos even more than he is writing). The traditional album reviews still published at Rolling Stone and elsewhere, meanwhile, are seemingly birthed into an attentional void—unless they are set upon by hordes of infuriated stans and pulled apart like Aunt Gladys. Only Pitchfork shapes the discourse: Elder millennials (who still read) and Gen Z (who still listen to new music) alike grew up on it, and the combined power of their attention gives the ratings meaning; fans care about them, artists care about them, and Anthony Fantano cares about them.
Pitchfork is a miracle—a shelter for real criticism and new writers. But I don’t mourn the three-star capsule review. Crafting a piece of writing around an idea rather than a rating generally produces better work, and on today’s internet, it’s ideas that travel, not content optimized for search or social. My last foray into criticism was an essay not so different from something Chuck Eddy might have let me publish in The Village Voice 25 years ago, and I was deeply gratified to see people actually respond to it (even if many of them were bursting through the windows to tackle me on the lawn). The best criticism now comes in the form of an extravagantly long profile or microscopically close read of a song or multipart study of a city or career-spanning pan or a Playboi Carti take that references “predominantly minor and Phrygian harmonic structures.” But where can one consistently go to read this kind of criticism? Have the platforms—Substack, YouTube, TikTok—that swept aside the gatekeepers made criticism better or worse? Will any of today’s teenagers who love music and writing as much as I did ever be able to call themselves a “music critic” and pay rent doing it? These are the existential questions I put in a written survey to 22 writers and editors who represent a (highly incomplete) cross-section of music writers, past and present. Tomorrow we’ll send part two: The best music critics, according to music critics. Is the audience for written music criticism disappearing? Or has it stabilized? Or could it even potentially grow, the way the market for vinyl has been growing for the last 20 years?Tom Breihan, senior editor at Stereogum: I’ll be honest, man, I don’t fucking know. My boss handles all the business, and I try not to even look at the web metrics. The big shift in just the past few months is that most of my stuff is paywalled now, but I know there’s still at least a decent-sized audience who reads it and engages with it. I’m subscribed to a bunch of paywalled sites, too. Theoretically, the actual money that people are willing to pay will offset any loss of overall readership that music reviews might have, as long as people are willing to keep paying. Scott Lapatine, founder, editor, owner, and Instagrammer at Stereogum: There have been so many factors contributing to its unquestionable decline—the death of alt-weeklies, the shift to streaming, the rise of video creators, Google Zero—and I do not see it growing. But I think it will remain a niche interest, and that’s fine. Not every medium needs a mass audience to be meaningful. Steven Hyden, writer at Evil Speakers: Text-based, ad-supported websites are clearly being phased out; paywalls might keep some of these places in business, but for individual writers with any sort of following, Substack (or one of the equivalent platforms) is a real godsend. It has been for me, anyway. I’m relatively new to Substack, but it already has paid me better than any staff job I’ve ever had. A lot of people are going to be left behind in this model, though. If you don’t have an audience that’s invested in your work, it’s going to be very hard to make it. Robert Christgau, Dean of American Rock Critics: I continue to make a living at it, which is all that matters to me as far as the job is concerned. Mano Sundaresan, editor at Pitchfork: I think it has stabilized but could grow, especially if there is proper infrastructure and incentive for more readers to start blogging and involve themselves in the practice of music criticism. Sasha Frere-Jones, writer and musician: I doubt it but here we are in the NBA Finals after 53 years so … Mark Richardson, rock and pop critic for The Wall Street Journal: I think it’s reached a floor in terms of the shrinking audience, and further erosion will be because of the lack of interest in the written word generally (the generational shift there, as people who prefer to read things vs. watch videos die off), rather than having to do specifically with music criticism. Jeremy D. Larson, deputy director at Pitchfork: Traffic is down, sure, but it’s down across the board, and that’s also kind of an AI thing. Interestingly, Pitchfork is rather immune to the AI Apocalypse. The power of music criticism has diminished since the 1990s because it’s no longer a consumer guide (e.g. You don’t need a critic to tell you whether or not to spend $14.99 on a CD, because practically all music is practically free) but it’s all the consumer websites—the what-to-buy pages—that are getting their lunch devoured by AI Overview. I wonder if the great saving grace of written music criticism is that it actually doesn’t have a market value anymore, and it is just part of a holistic, deeper engagement with music for those who seek a better, stronger relationship to music in their life. Grayson Haver Currin, writer: I do think there is a core audience, and I think the core audience can expand if we do it well, as writers and editors. Not to toot my horn or yours, but the longform profiles we have been doing at GQ are proof of this, in some way. These massive, massive stories that go all the way are appealing to people who want context, who want better understanding about something they love or possibly even hate. Music journalist turned content executive/creator at a digital service provider: I think the audience has stabilized—it’s just across different platforms than we’re used to. As streaming services and AI make music delivery and creation more soulless, music journalism and other forms of storytelling that deepens one’s understanding of and connection to music will become more and more important. Jason King, dean at the USC Thornton School of Music: There remains profound value in the human to human contextualization of music particularly given the sheer volume of music content that is released everyday. Writer and editor currently working in tech: A few years ago I would have said no, but the slop era may be great for criticism. Readers want someone to tell them what’s worth their time and why. Also, people seem to be reminded, for now, that human judgment matters. Criticism might actually be the exact right product for this particular cultural panic! Steffanee Wang, editorial director at The FADER: I feel like music discussion is actively happening every day, at record levels, on Reddit, Substack communities, X and even in TikTok/IG accounts where normal people are writing about, reading, and critiquing albums. Longtime music writer for big and small publications: The audience for writing in general is declining, even if we’re bombarded with more text/words than ever nowadays. The market for vinyl has grown because people like things. Kieran Press-Reynolds, columnist at Pitchfork: It’s hard to say as someone who’s only been in the game for a few years, but it feels like there’s still a huge appetite for music writing. I mean, just look at the tumultuous mishmash of kids on RateYourMusic and Twitter and Discord writing capsule reviews and brawling over opinions. Hating Pitchfork is basically a personality trait for some young people. Video music criticism is booming and there’s a cluster of music writer Substacks and new blogs, along with a fresh generation of critics who clearly will do whatever it takes to make this career work. The issue will continue to be how many people pay for this stuff, what unique service music criticism can offer. There are so many bad opinions online that specialist, educated criticism will surely survive and be something people crave. Rob Harvilla, writer and podcaster at The Ringer: Anecdotally it sure as hell seems like the audience will always be there—people love music! people love arguing about it!—but there’s just fewer and fewer reliable places to get paid to argue about it.
What, if anything, has been lost since the earlier days of music criticism? What are writers doing better—or worse—now than in the past?Steven Hyden: A lot of music writing now isn’t fun at all; it’s not fun to read and it doesn’t seem like it was fun to write. When I got started [in the early 2000s], a lot of critics were either aping music writers from the 1970s or the novelists they read in college. Now a lot of young music writers seem influenced by the term papers they wrote in college. Matt Mitchell, editor-in-chief at Paste: Music criticism is worse now because it’s being taught in schools. We need more poets covering albums, not journalism majors. Jeremy D. Larson: What I don’t miss is the sarcasm, irony, and arch benevolence. That stuff has aged so poorly to me, that kind of self-conscious, Gen-X holier-than-thou “Record Store Guy” character that you can find in a lot of early Pitchfork and Spin. It’s so embarrassingly male. I love how sincere and emotionally available writers are now, I love how personal the writing is from my generation and a younger generation. Danyel Smith, author, contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine, and creator/host of Black Girl Songbook: What’s been lost are systems of learning and collaboration—the spaces where people got great at writing about music. What’s been lost is:
These places have been murdered, actually. ... Continue reading this post for free in the Substack app
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