SEO, ‘billie eilish, tame impala, lizzo, and more,’ the accelerating decline of music journalism, and more
from the gbogn vault: a gripe about the industry of music news
this post originally appeared on gbogn dot substack dot com’s deceased parent website, gbogn dot com, on october 25, 2020. one of, like, three times i’ve ever felt like a real music journalist was when the central sauce podcast did a segment where they dissected this piece—but unfortunately, like just about everything else journalistic in the year 2024, the link to that episode seems to be dead. i swear it happened though!
it’s the year 2020 [editor’s note: this part is no longer true], and, unfortunately, all the music blogs you love have pivoted from thoughtful essays, profiles of your favorite artists, and critical evaluations of new music to just fuckin’ sharing full paragraphs of artists’ names. go ahead and ctrl+f search ‘and more’ on any music blog and you’ll find tons of disposable news stories announcing music festivals, charity compilations, livestream events, zoom reunions, guest verses on new records, and, most unconscionably, who all tweeted tributes to a recently deceased peer. there seem to be more listicles than ever, capitalizing on containing more than one eye-catching, SEO-juiced name than a straight profile or review can offer. headlines are literally all just ‘___, ___, ___, and more do something,’ followed by a subhed that’s like, ‘___, ___, ___, and ___ are also among the artists doing this thing.’
we’re not even attempting any nuance with this—we’re just standing on a street corner frantically shouting the names of as many artists as we can, hoping you’ll stop and listen if you hear the right one. I’m not even talking about an old-timey town crier here, I mean this is like conner o’malley soaked in sweat with that charles manson look in his eyes, wading into traffic in downtown hollywood announcing his new screenplay. we can’t even trust you to just find these lists of names on google (let alone checking our website), we’re blasting this shit constantly across all social media channels (how many twitter handles can you fit into 280 characters?)—and in case you miss those tweets and IG stories, we’ve got a newsletter with subject lines announcing, you guessed it, ‘___, ___, ___, and more can be found inside this email!’
I get hundreds of emails every day, and it’s rare that one of them doesn’t beg something of me—artists and publicists begging for coverage, writers begging for freelance work with the occasional and completely reasonable plea for a full-time job. ‘I’ll get back to them in a sec,’ I tell myself as I stare at a paragraph of text on another music website completely made up of proper nouns, trying to decide which ones are popular enough to warrant the extremely limited space in a headline of our own. as has sometimes been the case lately, before I can respond to these emails the festival for which I’d written that news post gets postponed another year and instead announces a live stream lineup featuring a completely new paragraph of proper nouns for me to write about.
as I’m putting these news story together, of course, dozens of other publications are writing the exact same posts with a slight variation on the artists listed in the headline, their editors also ignoring hundreds of emails begging for their attention. I often think about how this period in music journalism will look a decade from now—we’ll certainly have a much easier time remembering which year we saw billie eilish, tame impala, and lizzo at a major music festival, but we’ll probably have a hard time reading up on a record it took us ten years to finally listen to, and which received little to no attention from the press assuming it isn’t by the type of artist whose name gets listed between commas in a headline.
from my vantage point as an editor of a music publication, it feels like it’s discouraged to pursue features and other meaningful stories considering the fact that they attract significantly less traffic to our site the moment they’re published than a ‘blank, blank, blank, and more’ post. yet every time I check the site’s analytics I see a handful of visitors browsing features like this from weeks, months, or even years ago, while a post about bonnaroo’s 2020 live stream event has aged like a growlers lyric.
I think it’s these harsh conditions which have necessitated a new genre of content lately: the ‘track by track.’ with so few outlets with which to go in depth on their new music, artists seem to be more and more willing to spill hundreds of words in writing for a publication—effectively doing our jobs as writers for us—going into detail on each song on their new album just so some record of it exists. admittedly, I’ve been a proponent of this form of journalism for a few years now, only because I’m too busy embedding dozens of elegiac tweets into an extremely morbid news post aiming to harvest clicks off the death of a celebrity to spend time on the phone with these artists looking for coverage. but don’t think I don’t feel guilty about the thousands of dollars I feel we owe musicians if they’d ever sent an invoice for all that work.
I guess my only takeaway from all this is that people seem to have learned to click on links for different reasons than they used to. in a post-social media landscape I suppose it makes sense that our curiosity leads us to read who all will be playing a festival we’re probably not going to, much in the same way we click through pictures on facebook of a party we didn’t attend. but it’s strange to think how fluidly we transitioned from clicking a headline listing a name we’re interested in learning more about, to clicking through to the article merely to see that name appear again in a smaller font, surrounded by other names we’re less interested in seeing, and information that’s mostly unrelated to that individual name.