(UWIRE) The Internet has changed the world in many ways. For better or for worse, the Web has made thousands of obvious alterations to almost every aspect of industry, culture and commerce.
These are not new developments. Students in college have all grown up with the Internet and have watched it grow in turn – gradually taking over the world in which we live.
The music industry is perhaps one of the facets of society most affected by the Internet. The illegal downloading, leaking and file-sharing controversy started by Napster in the late 1990s and semi-foiled by Radiohead in 2007 are obvious examples of how the Internet can both help and hinder an industry.
Still hotly contested, this issue that confronts what Jim James calls “da biz” isn’t the only way the Internet is changing the music industry. It would simply be ignorant to not count the world of music journalism as a facet of the music industry.
Publications like Rolling Stone, Creem and numerous other come-and-gone publications have long-shaped the course of music as much as any record label has. Rolling Stone has been there from the beginning of the rock movement, and more recent publications – Filter, Paste, Magnet, Alternative Press and others – affect the industry.
There is an even more recent addition to the field of music journalism that, with the help of the Internet, is changing the way that the field lays: the blogosphere.
The Internet is peppered with dozens of music blogs run with varying degrees of quality and professionalism. At the helm of the blog revolution is Pitchfork Media. This blogging giant has been around since 1995 and has reshaped the world of music criticism ever since.
Online blogs like Pitchfork have long been criticized for being trite and amateurish, but there is no denying that a lot of people read them. Advertising on such sites is a growing business that is putting the blogs in direct competition with magazines for ads and audiences.
“Our ad revenue has dropped considerably,” said Eric Miller, the head of advertising for the Philadelphia-based Magnet Magazine. “Times are tighter now than they have been in a really long time. It kind of sucks, and hopefully it doesn’t bring us down.”
There is a stark contrast in the style of writing employed by magazines and blogs. A blog might be preferred by some readers because it gives easy-to-digest snippets of information that can be read conveniently in a short time. If the preference is for long, researched, insightful stories that fill fans in on their favorite artists, magazines provide a better route.
“Now with the blogs, it’s just everyone fighting to be the first to get it online. It doesn’t matter if it’s true,” Miller said. “That’s not what (Magnet) is about. Blogs take things that aren’t news and make them news. They lack journalistic integrity and don’t check facts. It disvalues the people who are trained.”
The differences between blogs and magazines also appear in the quality or length of the articles.
“They certainly have a sense of immediacy,” said Alternative Press editor-in-chief Jason Pettigrew, in regard to blogs. “But they leave no space to grow. It’s like when you eat an exotic food and you don’t like it right away, but after a while you say ‘it grew on me’ – they don’t have that.”
The immediacy with which bloggers approach their updates affects the quality of writing and further pits blogs and magazines against each other.
“They think, ‘Forget the best, who got it first?’” Pettigrew said. “That’s the problem with them.”
“It changes how people approach everything,” Miller said. “It dumbs everything down. It levels the playing field, and that’s not a good thing.”
The low quality and lack of perspective of blogs are not all discouragement and woe for the magazines, however.
“Blogs don’t affect our writing,” Miller said. “If anything, they push us to do longer stories that are researched and that people will want to take the time to read.”
The competition waged between blogs and magazines is apparent, but how does this tug-of-war for advertisers and audiences affect the artists being written about?
“I’m sure some bands like it much better because it gets the word out faster,” Miller said.
“But there’s no mystique left in records. It used to be we would read the liner notes on the albums to find tidbits about the band.
“It used to take a month to make a song, get it to a label and have it pressed to a 7-inch single. Now, artists can record a song and put in on the Internet and have it reviewed on the same day.”
And while the immediacy of the Internet has its privileges, there are possible dire consequences as well.
“It’s a double-edged sword,” Pettigrew said. “It’s probably easier to get your record reviewed by Pitchfork than by Rolling Stone, but you have to take your good criticism with your bad.”
Pettigrew cited an artist named Travis Morrison who released an album in 2004 called “Travistan.” The album was reviewed by Pitchfork before any other publication could get to it, and it received a 0.0 on the blog’s complex rating scale. This hindered Morrison from getting the album distributed or publicized, and the incident damaged his music career.
Neither the blogs nor the magazines are backing down from this competition. Both will continue to practice and hone their art in their own ways for a long time to come, at least until something new comes along to challenge them both.
“The Pitchforks of the world are a different thing,” Miller said. “But they’re a good thing. They help bands, so that’s a good thing. Maybe I’m just an old romantic, though, because I think that magazines will be around forever.”
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