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The state of music criticism
Michelle Santiago Cortés asks the experts.
When layoffs happen, like the ones that recently hit the editorial staff at Bandcamp, writers and industry insiders take the moment to lament the sorry State of Music Criticism. The truth is that Music Criticism suffers from the same set of circumstances that have corroded the worlds of arts and culture writing more generally: It’s hard to make a living as a full-time writer, those that do are under enormous pressures from traffic KPI’s and SEO races that demand more breadth than depth, more PR and less, well, criticism. On the other hand, the public’s taste for music writing has also changed–especially when and how they want to learn about new music or gain new insights from music they already love. Music criticism is taking on a wider range of formats—from TikTok videos, podcasts, newsletters, to blogs.
I reached out to over a dozen music critics and industry professionals for their thoughts on The State of Music Criticism: What got us here? What new opportunities are emerging and what flaws are being brought to the surface? What is changing, if anything, about the value and social role of music criticism? And most importantly: What is at stake when music criticism–the kind that grates and inspires and dissects–fades out of view?
Mano Sundaresan: writer of No Bells blog and podcast producer for NPR
“...The market seems to indicate that music criticism, at least in the traditional, album review sense, does not matter anymore. (The writer Nadine Smith tweeted at me recently that if Pitchfork died, the album review might, too.) Layoffs and publications folding is making it increasingly difficult to find a home for an article about music, let alone freelance full-time. It's probably losing relevance generally. [...] Your favorite music publication probably has a record label, or maybe makes money off a festival featuring artists it covers. I think we're seeing the extreme of that right now with people, some of them former or current music critics, being tasked with doing the work of Explaining This Stuff via artist bios and other label-backed ventures. [...] What'll be lost on a generation lacking robust music criticism is a real challenge to their presumptions and perspective. When you scroll through Hip-Hop Twitter or any of these big IG pages ‘dictating the conversation’ all you see is paid promo and positivity. Nobody is being honest. Nobody is contextualizing this stuff. Music criticism, even the positive kind, should be abrasive, like sandpaper, continually molding your understanding of art.”
Geeta Dayal: music journalist and critic, author Another Green World, a book about Brian Eno
“I continue writing because I feel that I have something unique to add to the discourse. I focus on a lot on lesser-known figures, and on history, the history of music. And it's a unique niche that very few other people are writing about. I've been doing this for 20 years. And I also feel that it's important being a woman and also a minority, to use my voice to write about the arts, because there should be diverse voices. And that's another thing we lose. Writing about the arts isn't just fluff. It is not just frivolous things. The arts are actually a deep part, they connect so much to culture and politics, and history, and technology, and so many other things in our society, that music is something that has been a part of civilization. Since the beginning, sound has been a vital part of our lives. Not just musical sound, but all kinds of sounds.”
Drew Millard: writer of the Nersey newsletter
“…There are a lot of structural issues that led to music journalism ending up in the place it is now, but one thing I'd like to highlight is that ‘fan armies’ began cohering around the time I started coming up, and they quickly figured out that you could use Twitter to yell at whoever wrote a mean thing about your favorite artist, and the artists figured out that they could, in fact, direct their fans to yell at whoever wrote mean things about them. (This has its origins in Lil B's invention of the ‘ Force’ as well as Gamergate discovering they could get advertisers off Gawker.) Obviously, online harassment is an issue that has affected individuals in basically every field around and its effects have been felt in different ways in each field. In music criticism, I think that the specter of fan harassment has potentially driven would-be critics off, as well as caused critics to be overly effusive towards popular artists in an intellectually dishonest way that flattens ‘the discourse.’...”
Caryn Rose: freelance writer of the Jukebox Graduate newsletter
“Good arts criticism–not just about music–is important because its job is to put the music in context and as a result, broaden the listener's enjoyment and understanding. It feels hopeless because everything boils down to a score or a ranking or a number when those details are the least important part of any piece about music. When you have the entirety of recorded music available to you for free or for a very low cost, having someone who has the skills and the vocabulary to articulate what the piece of art is doing or where it stands in the entire cultural conversation is even more important–these are the people who can help guide listeners (and notice I said "can" "help" and "guide," because not everyone needs help, one opinion is just one opinion, and criticism can provide anything from a nudge to a major “aha!” moment. But when publications offer to pay someone $150 to write 2,000 words, and those words can put a writer at risk of an artist with millions of followers deciding to send their fan armies after someone for an opinion you're not going to get the best and smartest people. You're going to get whoever's willing to do that work. Also, the absolute worst part of music criticism today is the lack of time. No one is doing their best work after one or two listens when a release drops at midnight and you have to get a piece written as quickly as possible because someone else will have something online sooner.”
Molly Mary O’Brien: music writer, blogger, podcaster
“...Taste is such an interesting thing, because it's totally subjective, and yet with criticism, you have the opportunity to use rhetoric to convince people your personal taste is something they should care about. At this particular time of massive corporate consolidation and AI-generated, SEO-slackened content strategy, the future of music criticism will need to be more personal and voice-y than ever before. I think the age of 'institutional' writing voices is over, and music writers need to focus on what makes their individual perspectives unique. To quote the KLF's excellent book The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way): ‘Why don’t all songs sound the same?...Although the chords, notes, harmonies, beats and words have all been used before, [the artist's] own soul shines through; their personality demands attention.’ The KLF were writing about music, but I'd argue the same principle goes for music critics. People should let their personalities demand attention!”
Slava Pastuk: writer and author of Bad Trips: How I Went from VICE Reporter to International Drug Smuggler (2022)
“...One of the reasons I think Needledrop and Akademiks are the new faces of music criticism, because they establish their taste as personal. […] Add the fact that P4K has undergone a ‘second-chance’ review system in recent years where they return to old reviews and sometimes ‘update’ them, throwing the entire reason of their existence into question. Why would I listen to what a publication has to say about a piece of music if they're just going to change their mind about it later once they assign a new writer to it? [...] Overall, I think music criticism is in the best place it's ever been. Anyone is able to broadcast their personal love for a piece of music, which makes discovery more engaging for anyone who is actively searching for something to listen to. The reason ‘music websites' are failing is because all websites are failing...”
Katelina 'La Gata' Eccleston AKA Reggaeton Con La Gata: music critic, historian, and entrepreneur
“…I like to believe that critics critique because we appreciate the work and the artistry presented. I, professionally, do not give my opinion to things that do not matter, not when so many artists are fighting for attention that so little and many others may deserve…Critique is based on years of scholarship, research, and education–Now that everybody has a mic, thanks to social media, there is an influx of uneducated and harmful opinions that don’t have a basis in the truth. I think music criticism and cultural criticism coincide, and considering how journalists and sensationalism have been attacked in recent years–I think it’s fair to say we’re headed in an uncertain direction that ought to scare all of us. I think in this age of disinformation, there is a little bit of both that is occurring regarding music and cultural criticism.”
Tony Lashley: founder and CEO, Marine Snow
“Critics at their best define new forms of value outside of what we've been subconsciously conditioned to like via nature or nurture and are able to think about and define value over much longer time horizons than the whims of the dopamine-dependent average person. Free market default values can be defined as the preprogrammed values of capitalist society or evolutionary biology that we all implicitly agree upon. [...] Critics help counteract both the short time horizons and the default values of the free market, resulting in a more fair playing field for artists and makers of cultural objects. The free market is subject to a lot of problems—information cascades, binary voting and a lack of nuance, drifting towards default values—that result in unfairness. The intentionality and thought of critics can serve as a powerful check and balance to the free market, just as the wisdom of the crowd can serve as a check on critics.”
“...A lot of readers of music criticism actually want a framework for talking about the album to other people, which is why people get so worked up when you call Travis Scott "boring:" it doesn't align with how they see the artist, so they can't assimilate your analysis into their view of their work. Looking at the state of music criticism well, I'm a rap blogger so I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by SEO, starving, hysterical, naked. As the capacity and capability of music media shrinks in sync with revenue streams, it's easy to see that The Critic may soon go the way of the passenger pigeon. Despite that–Maslow got a lot of things right, but I've always believed art is not at the top of the pyramid of needs, but the bottom. Humans make art everywhere, under unimaginable circumstances, with no expectation of legacy or accolade. As long as people continue to make music, music criticism will exist, even if only in the nonlinguistic gesture of an emptying dancefloor.”
“Criticism matters because music matters and because it’s the most compelling cultural practice we’ve developed to try to square the difference between individual artistic works and the outside world around them. Without getting too theoretical about it, every art object puts forward specific claims about beauty, truth, and intention that operate internally to the work itself as an autonomous object. Yet all art objects (and musical works especially) also exist in the world, functioning by and through social practices that inevitably color how they’re interpreted. Good criticism lives in this tension, recognizing that each cultural work contains a vision for its own potential in the space between the features of the work itself and the surrounding traditions with which it aspires to speak to. The task of the critic is to respond to this difference (what Theodore Adorno would call the artwork’s “double character”) with as much honesty and conviction as possible. [...]
While criticism is more read today than ever before, it’s also more functionally wed to social platforms to its detriment. Hopefully this moment of a perceived loss of relevance is short term, and the kind of criticism that has lived on social networks can finally die and be reborn in ways that are more rigorous and rewarding for writers, readers, and fans of all sorts.”
Matt Perpetua: writer of Fluxblog since 2002
“...From my perspective, [music criticism] is the best it's been in years because writers are making their own blogs, newsletters, YouTube videos, podcasts, TikToks, books, curation on streaming, etc. It's a bad time if your goal is to make (not very much) money working for legacy publications, corporations, and startups, but a great time if you want to express yourself. To me, it was much more bleak when all my younger colleagues seemed convinced the only respectable thing would be to get a junior staff position at some publication or another instead of finding their own paths…I think overall music criticism and music journalism are in a situation where we collectively need to remind audiences of the value proposition, and do so on the terms of modern audiences, not just the way it was done some other time. Gotta evolve, and gotta give people something real and useful.”
Claire Shaffer: freelance writer and archivist
“Music publications these days have an incentive to by-and-large only cover either what's already popular at this very moment, or what they think will or should be popular in the near future. (And in the latter case, they're usually taking cues from either the latest viral TikTok sound or the latest proverbial horse that the major labels are betting on, because smaller artists don't have those resources to cut through the noise of streaming payola.) You just don't see the kind of esoteric curation or deep dives into lesser-known artists/labels/genres/scenes/traditions that Bandcamp is known for. I fear that these layoffs are just the latest example of consolidation within the music industry that'll lead to fewer and fewer modes of artist discovery or appreciation, both for journalists and for people genuinely interested in finding new music.”
Sam Valenti IV: Ghostly founder and CEO and All Flowers Group
“As music listening and discovery has evolved since the mainstream web, so has the question around who gets to decide what's good. The role of critic, once an accepted staple of the space, has been moved from more regulated print to online, and now also as a form of conversational and historical video. The desire for context and story demands great historians, both professional and amateur. Finding ways to encourage and support these voices will be paramount to the next generation of music fans.”
Emilie Friedlander: co-host and producer of The Culture Journalist
“When I first started, at Vice, for example, around 2015, I was tasked to be the editor in chief of their electronic music website. Back then Vice had three music sites, three music publications, and vice.com also covered music. Over time, one by one, those different sites closed and then vice.com started mushing together [different verticals] and there was no longer a food site and it was no longer a music site, either. So it was mushing together the food writers and the music writers.[...] And then at the end, towards the end of my time at Vice, which was the end of 2021, we were told we couldn't cover music at all. And if you did cover music, it would have to be Taylor Swift or something like AstroWorld, and the terrible tragedy that happened at the Travis Scott festival, but it would have to be either this big crazy news story, or the same big stars that are guaranteed to get clicks. But most music journalists got into music writing because of the independence side of things and a sense of advocacy and that aspect has just been completely gutted. And I think Bandcamp was widely seen as one of the last bastions of that being possible. And so that was why it was so disappointing.”
Zach Schonfeld: freelance journalist and writer of 24-Carat Black's Ghetto: Misfortune's Wealth
“I think the state of music criticism and the state of music writing as a career are two very, very different things. Because I think the state of music criticism is strong in the sense that I read, great pieces being published, sometimes in professional publications like Pitchfork, and Vulture and Bandcamp Daily. And I read a lot of great music writing on people’s Substacks or on blogs, on people's individual blog posts and a lot of the time, they're not getting paid for it. But there's just so much great writing and thinking about music happening. And the reason obviously, is because so many major publications have laid off arts writers and have devalued arts criticism as a career. So many great publications have shut down, especially music-focused publications [...]. I think the state of music criticism is strong, but the state of music journalism as a career path is bleak. It's very bleak. It's very hard. You know, there are very few full time jobs that exist for music journalists in 2023. And there seems to be fewer every month. So, you know, it's easy to write about music and publish it yourself. But it's very hard to make a living doing that, that's what I find dispiriting.”
PLAYBACK
Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.
“Glossy” Book about Emily Weiss to get a TV adaptation for Amazon (Variety)
Will Barbra Streisand, Britney Spears and Jada Pinkett Smith memoirs satisfy? (The Guardian)
Bad Bunny Announced his 2024 North American Most Wanted tour (The Independent) and pre-sale for registered fans started October 25. Brace yourself for a Ticketmaster bloodbath.
MIXTAPE
Good links from the Dirtyverse.
Crump’s Illusion, Brock Coylar on the self-mythologizing Substacker of Dimes Square (Intelligencer)
From our Discord: “We Thought Amazon Killed Local Bookstores. We Were So Wrong” Texas Monthly on the indie bookstore boom; The Stratospheric Rise of Lionel Messi’s Pink Jersey (New York Times); and Remembering Louise Glück (Paris Review)
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