Trkane's Blog

The internet has changed the way people consume music; for anyone that has iTunes installed on their computer, this is common sense. With programs emerging early on in the decade such as Napster or Limewire, peer-to-peer file sharing networks put more of an emphasis on the single, rather than a focus on a 10 to 14 song album.

The pop industry has had no problem endorsing this. In fact, singles have been a huge part of pop music ever since records became available for purchase. Seven inch singles have always been popular; Penny Lane existed independent of a full album, and I know for a fact that Los Del Rio didn’t move that many full length LPs when “Macarena” came out. Recently, Katy Perry’s “California Gurls” was all over the radio months before her album Teenage Dream hit shelves. Cee-lo Green’s incredible “Fuck You!” is released as a one-off single with no full-length album in sight, and has spread like wildfire across music blogs and Twitter alike.

The Smashing Pumpkins have taken a new approach to releasing media in a way that makes sense in the ultra fast-paced information age. Teargarden by Kaleidyscope is a 44-song project that is released one song at a time through The Smashing Pumpkins’ website. Two-song limited run physical singles are released through the publishing label “Martha’s Music.” They trickle-in, they show up by surprise, and as I type this in September of 2010, the project is 6-songs in.

This isn’t a first for The Smashing Pumpkins. Experimenting with the short release has always been a big part of the band. The massive “The Aeroplane Flies High” box set collected all of their singles throughout the Mellon Collie era, and more recently, they released the internet-only acoustic-oriented American Gothic EP without much buzz. “Superchrist,” a single that was played on their “reunion” tour, was later released as a single online, and physically through a compilation put out by Guitar Center.

This was the smart way for Billy Corgan and co. to release the Pumpkins’ most recent project, Teargarden by Kaleidyscope. The music medium has changed so much, that the general public doesn’t have time to sit down and absorb such a dense album. With the singles being free, people can look forward to the new singles that The Smashing Pumpkins are putting out with no financial gamble of paying for a full-length album that some felt that they paid with 2007′s Zeitgeist.

Corgan could have released this 44-song juggernaut as a four-disc box set, sold it for $40 and left the remaining die-hard Pumpkin’s fans with shallow wallets and scratchy heads. Instead, by leaking track by track, by focusing on the individual parts, Corgan is releasing something that is eclectic, spontaneous, but well thought out.

By releasing an album this way, the audience has time to adjust, time to get used to the album or time to say, “yeah man, this really isn’t for me” as tracks are released. Like Radiohead’s In Rainbows was an experiment in the way we distribute our music, Teargarden by Kaleidyscope is an experiment in the format which it is released in the years to come.

So far, the singles have been hit or miss. The riff-rock that people long for is there in “Freak,” but, it is missing that Jimmy Chamberlin hi-hat stomp, that drum attitude, the bad-ass tom-fills, that attitude that Jimmy is behind the set and just killing it. It has always been apparent that Corgan is the songwriter of the band, and has dominated as far as string instruments go in the studio, but this collection really shows what Chamberlin’s 20+ years with the band added to Billy’s stacked guitars and clever lyrics.

Instead, we have 19 year-old Mike Byrne, a freshman at Berklee College of Music whose recordings with the Pumpkins feel clunky and dreadfully need another 10 years under his belt. This isn’t Byrne’s fault – I mean, who hires someone so young to play in a seasoned rock band? A prime example is the first single off of Teargarden, the epic “Song for a Son,” where Byrne isn’t killing it, he is struggling to get through it. Although his rags-to-riches, “I worked at McDonalds to pay for school and got into The Smashing Pumpkins” story is inspiring, his drum parts sound like, well, a 19 year-old freshman at Berklee is writing them.

Mike Byrne, probably a nice guy, just isn’t cutting it

Corgan is really starting to show how clever he can be in his bare-bones songwriting. With a deceptive sense of simplicity, the progressions and melodies in “Spangled” and “A Stitch in Time” are good for the same reasons that musicians love The Beatles.

I think some of these songs will stand as some of Corgan’s best songwriting. Three out of the six songs (“Spangled,” “A Stitch in Time” and “Song for a Son”) are sound and written very well. Still, in some instances, Corgan is stuck in that old Pumpkins’ 100-guitar sludge attack for songs like “Freak” and “Astral Planes,” and for the first time (yeah, not even on Zeitgeist), it is starting to feel pretty old. Perhaps if Corgan was working in better company, these releases would be as effective as the potential that they show.

With Teargarden, it is important to take a look for the album for what it is in the always-evolving realm of music. Teargarden is an exercise, a new way to release an album, which essentially cancels out the idea of an album. Surprise release dates replace the daunting deadline for musicians pushing for a big label release. This puts music journalists and listeners on level playing field upon the release of the single. Pitchfork or Rolling Stone won’t tell us what they think of the singles before we’ve heard them.

With the possibility of the art of the full-length LP going down the drain, I start to feel kind of sad. I remember the first time I heard Siamese Dream by The Smashing Pumpkins. It was a fall afternoon. I was sitting in my bedroom, going through records that looked cool off of my dad’s shelves and shelves of album. Siamese Dream caught my eye, but how could it not? The twin girls in the pale sunlight in easter dresses, the cool logo, that awesome name. “Cherub Rock” roared into gear, and oh my god, these guys are the one’s that wrote “Today”? I didn’t want any song to end and I couldn’t wait for every new cut to begin. Ironically, the guy behind this experience is the same one that is taking steps forward to evolve, to abandon the full-length. It is an undoing, a sad thing to see, but with Twitter, with the information age, Billy, I understand.

I saw “Gimme Shelter,” the documentary about The Rolling Stones’ 1969 concert at the Altamont speedway in San Francisco, for the first time a few nights ago. For those of you that haven’t seen the movie, I thought it was great and definitely worth a rental. Today, I think it stands as one of the best documented visions of just how out of control and outright scary things can get when a crowd can’t be controlled.

The first concert that I was absolutely bat-shit excited about seeing was Tool when I was 13. My father and I logged onto the Ticketmaster website at exactly 10 a.m. the morning they went on sale and ordered the best seats we could get: floor, general admission. I had heard tons about Tool’s stage show: amazing video screens, wild visuals and lights that made the experience for many people, well, almost religious. At this age, seeing a band that tackled interesting subject matter, had dark, edgy videos, explored some intense polyrhythms and showed some pretty amazing musicianship would obviously enlighten me and be a life changing event.

Tool live in 2002

Eagerly anticipating what would clearly be the greatest show of all time, I did chores all summer to pay off the debt that would surely be worth it, looking forward every day to the first day of school which was conveniently the day of the concert.

The day finally came and my dad and I left Ypsilanti for Detroit about two hours before we really needed to. We left the parking lot to wait in line at the box office far before the tailgaters got there. There we found ourselves with about 40 other hopefuls hoping to get a place right on the barricade. After security (this was only a year after 9/11), we found that the 40 hopefuls turned to about 80 and we weren’t about to have the premium spots we once had, but after the crowd settled in, we only ended up about three people from the barricade. I could live with that.

Mike Patton of Faith No More and Fantomas fame took the stage with his band Tomahawk to open up the show. I was surprised initially at the reaction to what I thought was a very good set by a band that was fronted by a respected figure in the alternative community. It had been no more than two or three songs when people started throwing cups towards the stage, the audience would sporadically mouth off against Patton in angry bursts, whether it was “You fucking suck asshooooole!” or “TOOOOOOOOOOOOL,” the band just took it like it was business as usual. The internet would later confirm that this had been going on all tour.

Tomahawk left the stage and stuff started to get serious. No sooner did (Tomahawk’s drummer) John Stanier get off of his drum throne that the crowd started to push forward. An exercise in balance, strength and will then ensued. By the time Danny Carey’s drumset had been unveiled, the crowd had gone into a roar, and I literally felt like I was in an ocean of people; the floor felt like it was moving. The security guards watched as the crowd swayed back and forth and my feet had no choice but to follow wherever the mass pushed us next. One of the security guards shined a light on a guy that looked like he might be taking a picture as I felt my father’s hand grab onto the back of my shirt, not for his own balance, but to make sure that I didn’t get lost in the whole mess of things.

What would happen next would change the way I viewed concerts and people getting together in large groups for years.

The lights of the stage started to glow and you could sort of see people walking towards the stage. I remember the crowd screaming and then I remember the pain in my back from feeling someone being shoved into me at the exact moment that bassist Justin Chancellor thrust into the first downstroke of the song “Sober.”

I remember looking back at my father and seeing a normally calm and collected man just as scared as me. We were falling. I repeat, we were falling on top of everyone else. But unlike any other set of dominoes, this collected mass pushed back, and just as soon as my body tilted at a 75 degree angle, it was right back at 90 with the floor.

Like I said, the shows can get a little rough…

Guys around us were pulling off their shirts and the guy’s sweat in front of me soaked into my shirt. I was getting to know these people in ways even their spouses might not understand. Someone clawed my arm to get out. My sandal came off. It reappeared in someone’s hand. Is this how everyone felt at that festival in Denmark when all those people died watching Pearl Jam? Am I going to die?

I can honestly tell you that I don’t remember anything about Tool’s performance up until my dad managed to rip me out of that black hole of people. I was too busy trying to breathe, trying to just keep with it.

I went home that night, and I asked myself what the attraction was. What was it about being in front of a band like that made people want to smash each other? Even worse – why doesn’t the band bother to do anything? Am I listening to a band that is condoning violent activity? These questions still bother me, and this is still happening.

Whether it was the time I got kicked in the back of the head at a Queens of the Stone Age concert, seeing someone try to crowd surf in the 29th minute of a Mars Volta jam, or the time some guy shoved into me during the last song of a Sigur Ros gig (I couldn’t make this shit up…), it always brings me back to that first, terrifying six minutes I felt in front of Tool.

Seeing “Gimme Shelter” brought it full circle. The mass of people bumping up against one another, pressing towards the stage made me crawl in my seat. Seeing them all flee back towards the hills from angry Hell’s Angels when it seemed like there was no room to be had me more anxious than any horror movie I’ve seen. Ever.

One of the final scenes of “Gimme Shelter”

The crowd mentality isn’t something to be taken lightly. We could all learn a lot from going to the back. Let those who really need those front seats have their fun – the short, the old, the young. I have glasses for a reason and we can all bring binoculars. We don’t hit others in the supermarket and if we did we would be in jail for it. Why does amplified sound make for a valid exception?

We must learn to treat people like people in all situations.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Steve Albini’s essay “The Problem With Music.” The essay was published in an independent punk magazine and has thrived on the internet since its publication. For nearly 20 years, the essay has stirred up a lot of people’s perception of the music industry. I remember reading the essay when I was 13, almost a decade ago, when I was heavily into Nirvana and reading every piece of literature that I could about them. Their producer that brought that really raw – but awesome – sound to In Utero had a lot of street credit, and from what I read from his essay, brains. It was almost a universal fact for the general public that if you were signed to a record label, you were getting paid tons of money and your life was set. Albini pulled this curtain back and showed just how wrong the listening world was.

As Albini (the very qualified producer of albums such as In Utero by Nirvana or Surfer Rosa by Pixies, and engineer for almost 2,000 recordings) states, the life of an up-and-coming artist isn’t such an easy one. Record labels make an artist’s life very difficult in order to produce something that is marketable for them – and take a huge cut of what they are producing in the process.

Steve Albini

Written nearly 20 years ago, the article stands over time and has been a cautionary tale for bands over the years on signing with major labels. But something the majors never expected was how technology would forever change the way the record is released. As music evolved in this gap between the early nineties and now, Albini must have felt such a bittersweet feeling about the way artists have been producing records, but if he wrote this essay today, the outcome would be totally different.

DAWs, short for digital audio workstations, made home recording for artists affordable – and most importantly – possible. Currently, it is possible for any artist with about $1,500 in equipment and knowledge on how to record music to make a recording that is respectable enough to pass around as your “demo”. Pro Tools, Cubase and recently Apple’s GarageBand have all paved a path in creating new records for anyone with a microphone, a recording interface and some ingenuity. While Albini can’t stand digital recordings, he must feel some sense of pride that musicians are able to do something such as this. In the time that I pursued music in the local scene, there has been only two times that I walked into a professional studio, and that was very early on. Since then, it has been all about home recording, where to place the microphones, and depending on myself and friends to act as producer on whether the take was good or not. Our musicianship improves drastically.

As for labels – they must be shaking in their booties right now. The main advantages that bound bands to major record labels included their: money to give bands equipment and recording time, connections to get the band booked and promoted across the country and the ability to distribute the record. With the internet being such an integral part of society today and technology evolving in a way that allows bands to do some of these things with the click of a mouse, record labels are becoming more and more obsolete in function.

Consider the classic example of Radiohead’s In Rainbows. Most of the music community knows the story – Radiohead’s website announces one day that their new album is complete and it will be available the next day in MP3 format, and you can pay – brace yourself – whatever you want for it. The idea would revolutionize the way music was released forever – this is music marketing history in the making, folks. The record, aside from being awesome musically, did better than anyone could expect – Radiohead refused to release how many copies of the album were downloaded, but speculators guess that there were tens of millions albums downloaded.

The In Rainbows download screen. Fans could pay whatever they wanted for the album.

The step was a bold one, but one that needed to be made. Since the Radiohead release, many bands have done similar releases, including Nine Inch Nail’s The Slip, Girl Talk’s Feed the Animals, and most recently, Liz Phair’s Funstyle, an album that she only felt comfortable releasing in an online fashion, warning fans about the songs that she hesitated to release:

“These are all me. Love them, or hate them, but don’t mistake them for anything other than an entirely personal, un-tethered-from-the-machine, free for all view of the world, refracted through my own crazy lens.”

Phair’s honesty and openness is what the internet release is all about and exactly what record labels fear: the artist has complete creative control and a say in what their product is. Would Phair’s Funstyle get picked up by a major label? Hell no. But these are her visions, her ideas and for once, we get to see how an artist really pictured their music; we don’t see the vision of a 50 year-old big-wig worried about the content of the song or what the target audience will think.

So your band isn’t as big as Radiohead and you know you need the promotion? Perfect. The internet is still a cozy home for you that is going to embrace exactly what you are doing. There are blogs that cater to whatever niche that you are playing to, whether you are a jazz-fusion guitarist or metal so heavy that Ronnie James Dio (R.I.P.) wouldn’t even want to hear it. People seek out for new music on the internet, and if you are smart about it, there are ways that they will find it, and if they find your album and it is free, they are going to demand to see you locally or want to buy a t-shirt. It is that simple.

I can’t tell you how many local groups I have seen lately doing the free release. In my area of Ann Arbor, Michigan, local bands We Are the Union, Natural Monuments and Monument, Monument have all had success in releasing free albums, and it is obvious that their audience has expanded because of the offer of free or reduced cost recordings with no label to hold them back.

The point is, musicians have more opportunity than ever. They are taking music into their own hands- and if it means that they have to become the producer, or they have to become the record label, that is just fine. Fugazi did it nearly 25 years ago and had a career and catalog that was just as exciting as the DIY ethics that they endorsed then – I would say it is time that the rest of the world of rock – and pop, and hip-hop and jazz – catches up.

I’ve heard them all. Everywhere. In magazines, on TV, from Bruce Springsteen and out of my little brother’s mouth. It is OK to listen to the throbbing bass-to-snare beats, the whirling synthesizers and the catchy melodies. It is OK to turn it to the local pop station in anticipation of hearing “Poker Face” or “Alejandro”. No one will die, and I won’t blame you for being into it.

However, I get pretty bummed when the general public wholly mistakes crazy outfits as art.

Listening to pop-radio with my girlfriend on a long trip, I honestly couldn’t tell Lady Gaga from the others at first. I confused her for Kesha, I confused her with Rihanna, with Britney Spears. This isn’t a mistake. Lady Gaga has brilliantly marketed her simple songs to have people mistake her for something more than what she really is: a musician that entertains and whose singles will be chuckled about when we think back on the year 2010, kind of like how I feel when I see my Smash Mouth CDs being turned away again and again at the used record store.

Lady Gaga’s songs are not complex. The progressions are simple, the melodies seem natural. The lyrics don’t do much more for me than anything else on the station, and honestly after reading them on the liner notes, I’m laughing at a few points. Lady Gaga has somehow convinced America through her conceptual sounding titles and her reworking of her follow-up E.P., “The Fame Monster” into a musical production in her live concerts, that there is something more to interpret from “Bad Romance”.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve listened to her albums all the way through. I’ve heard her songs over and over again on the radio to the point of wanting to pull my hair out just like everyone else. I am not judging this based on seeing her on magazines or glimpses that I’ve caught of her on T.V. through her dark music videos. The production on the album is good, and the songs are crafted in a way that millions of people around the world will buy her albums. The numbers don’t lie, three times platinum in America, 4 times platinum in England, Gaga is a hit. Although Gaga may look like a female version of Bowie, she certainly doesn’t have as much to say.

“That shit’s is ugly
Just want your sex (want your sex)
Take a bite of my bad girl meat (bad girl meat)
Take a bite my me
Show me your teeth
Let me see your mean”

Early Gaga promo picture: Weird, yet, not too weird…

Not exactly prime Bowie material, and I don’t feel like David Byrne could have scribbled these lyrics at any point in his career. What is it about Lady Gaga that makes people think of her as an artist?

A pretty weird Bowie in the 70s

She is brilliant with her image.

Consider Lady Gaga when she first came out. “The Fame” cover introduced us to the artist before “Just Dance” was even heard by many people. I remember my brother asking me maybe a year ago if I had heard of her; as someone that didn’t have cable and never listened to the radio, I had no clue.

“The Fame” shows audiences just being introduced to Gaga that not only is she pretty, but she is mysterious, too. We always see her blonde hair, her great body and her wonderfully white teeth. These features are plastered all over the cover before really introducing the outfits that mainstream America knows her for today. People that are already listening to her music get that, well, yeah, she’s young, she’s hot, and I guess she’s sorta weird.

OK – so I’m a rocker dude… why should I like someone like this?

Dudes spinning vinyl, dirty jeans, Gaga bursting out of her pink blazer – This is how America was introduced to Lady Gaga visually. Note how the director refuses to go too far into the deep end with this one – Lady Gaga is selling the sex, and the video kind of reminds me of Jimmy Eat World’s very successful The Middle. It is as if Beavis and Butthead could be heard in the beginning few frames of this video, “Woah dude, thith ith cool“. Hot Topic stores around the country are ordering boxes of t-shirts.

Gaga’s career has launched off of this basis: if you can’t get everyone with catchy tunes, appeal to them visually until they accept the catchy tunes as OK and buy the record. My point: all of my friends that are into Lady Gaga. She’s mysterious, they say. She’s, like, artsy, her songs have depth. These are all assumptions that go along with her image of “I wear different, outlandish outfits because I am 24 and I know something that you don’t.” Most of the instrumentals on her latest release heavily relied on other writers and performers.

My rant is a simple one. I am not trying to say that Lady Gaga is not talented. I wouldn’t dare say that she has a bad voice, can’t play piano and knows a thing or two more than me about fashion. What I will say is this – If you listen to a song by Lady Gaga on the radio and love it, by all means, buy the record. I hope if you do, you also give the other musicians in this wide genre a chance, because Lady Gaga is bringing nothing more to the table than them.

As someone who enjoys writing about on a regular basis, understanding the function of what I am doing is, well, important. What do people get out of this blog?  Why do we need digital music journalism, anyways? I decided to take a look at popular publications, and see what they are doing in relation to the web, and how this might affect the print publication.

Over the next decade, the shift in the way we receive information will be dominated by new technologies. With iPads, and cell phones with applications that can browse news, the way that music and news about music is consumed is more widespread than ever. All popular print publications maintain a web-publication and news sites are responsible for updating as much as they can on the web. The quest for information in the digital age has left users constantly updating or checking who has updated. The attention from the public will depend on who has the good information, not necessarily checking one reputable source daily.

Although it may not be obvious, the same principles are present in the world of music journalism. Music journalism became popular in the 1960s with magazines like Creem and Rolling Stone. In the ‘60s, when these publications began to publish, music journalism documented things that were huge for the publications’ audiences, and music meant much more than performances, album reviews or gossip. Devon Powers, a writer for the blog PopMatters had this to say about music journalism’s importance.

“As popular culture increasingly is our culture, it continues to harbor the best, brightest and most entertaining of our creative consciousnesses. And yes, because it comments on everything we are – social, economic, religious, personal – it is also political.”

While the way the internet hasn’t changed that much about the way that music criticism is conducted, the way that emerging news is consumed is a different story. Online-only publications such as Pitchfork Media and Stereogum have steered an entire generation of Spin and Rolling Stone readers away from magazine racks and onto the internet.

Although the small decline in sales of these print publications might have been shocking at the time, the decrease is obvious in retrospect. The internet has the capability to illustrate music news in its most complete form. Whether it is embedding videos to show what happened in a performance, or an MP3 of an artist’s latest single, these basic techniques show the advantages that the internet has over print.

Print has tried to compete with the internet by including interactive CDs. However, most people just end up right back on their computer before plugging in the new interactive CD-ROMs. Rolling Stone has tried to include singles, or CDs with a variety of songs with their magazine, but this drives the cost of the magazine up. The same goes for Guitar World magazine and numerous British music publications.

 

Image of CD-Roms that have been popular in Guitar World and Rolling Stone magazine

The obvious advantage is in digital media is that the production is quicker and easier. Most importantly in any production-based industry, the product is also cheaper. If a publication has enough of a name, the content almost comes to them – artists ship out albums to review and publicists will shop interviews to magazines. Print media has enjoyed this convenience as well, but online websites no longer have to pay for materials to print.

A digital outlet can reach millions of people daily without using anything but webspace. They don’t have to hire a staff to physically print the magazine – the crew basically comes down to those responsible for writing the content and those responsible for designing the format.  This creates an immediate advantage for the internet in that they can provide more information more efficiently for less cost. From a production standpoint, digital media absolutely makes the most sense for music news and features.

The internet and anything that connects to it has created the ideal environment for news – It is quick, timely and convenient for everyone that is using it. And for a new generation of readers, many of which have never paid a cent for music, it is the perfect environment. Depth can be added to features through video, photo galleries and MP3 files that normally couldn’t be obtained in the print medium. However, what is the correct way to harness this power?

One important idea in digital journalism is how much content is being produced for a given audience. With a medium that is basically limitless in the content it can host, audiences can be overwhelmed with the sheer amount of information that is hosted on a given page.

Bree Nordenson is the author of an essay called “Overload!” which focuses on how much information is available in the digital world. Through a lot of observation and research, Nordenson’s essay sheds some light on the current news climate:

“As the AP noted in its research report, ‘The irony in news fatigue is that these consumers felt helpless to change their news consumption at a time when they have more control and choice than ever before.’”

Nordenson brings up several valuable points throughout the essay, including the pointless news articles that were supposed to be entertaining. We’ve all seen these articles online – the one’s whose headlines we might stop and wonder “who the hell would read this?” or, even worse, not even notice.

Dean Starkman points ou some of the same problems in “The Hamster Wheel.” Starkman talks about the increased need for tons of information in the news environment. One statistic that really bothered me as a working writer was that although The Wall Street Journal has not increased the number of staff whatsoever, the amount of stories that they have been producing has nearly doubled since 2000. This doesn’t even include countless blog publications that are hosted by the site, which could drive that number way up.

In my own experience with print publications, blogs and websites can be the go-to spot for leftover articles that wouldn’t necessarily run if there wasn’t a site. While this can be great for articles that are important to only a few people, it can create a lot of clutter for those trying to find something. Let’s put it this way: After pitching a flop of a feature, an editor said “Eh, well, I guess we could put it up online.”

Starkman mentions articles that have headlines like “Sheriff plans no car purchases in 2011,” and “Ben Marter’s Home-Cooked Weekend,” the story of Ben Marter making an omelet. If you haven’t heard of Ben Marter before, it is because “Ben Marter is communications director for a congresswoman.” The amount of people that want to hear about Ben Marter’s weekend of cooking at home are probably pretty small, but this piece of information will always add to the clutter of the website.

A lot of online music publications are guilty of the same “overload.” For example, many of the updates on Pitchfork Media ’s website come from Kanye West’s tweets – his updates on the social networking website Twitter. Specifically, a controversy about West’s new album was raised online after West tweeted that his album was “banned” because of the album cover. When later investigated, West’s record label said that they told him that they would rather not issue the album this way, but they would stand behind him if he indeed wanted to keep the cover as-is. There was really no story there, but it took up the audiences time and was treated as news. With this timeliness, we also pay the price of creating a filter ourselves – A magazine article would have been better for West’s Twitter controversy because the media would have gotten to the bottom of the story by then. There might not even be a story by then – at the time of this publication, West’s album is coming out, and will feature four covers, one of which is the “banned” edition.

A few of Mr. Wests more… inspired tweets.

Thus, a well-maintained and updated website is valuable, however it isn’t as valuable as a well-maintained, updated website that shows restraint on the kind of information that it is publishing. Notable examples of recent over-posting include Brooklyn Vegan’s posting on a venue returning money to fans who bought tickets to a concert that turned out to be for people 21 and over. The audience that this news would appeal to is very small – At a venue that can only hold around 3,000 people, the likely number affected by this switch might be in the hundreds. Maybe. This isn’t Miley Cyrus at Madison Square Garden – That would have been completely newsworthy. Articles like this might draw the attention away from the reader if they understand they will have to weed through stories like this daily.

Rolling Stone is an example of publishing a reasonable amount of information online. While the publication breaks very important, emerging stories on their website, they also only put key articles from their print publication online. This model is very effective for hybrid publications. By putting immediate news online and saving the more thought-out features for their print edition, they are adding value to both publications – depth to the print magazine and timeliness to the webpage. For example, when researching this article, I wanted to look up a feature article on a band called the Black Keys. At first, what I thought was a bad in-site search engine turned out to be a good form of marketing – Rolling Stone didn’t publish the feature online, and I had to go dig out my print copy to reread it. And I enjoyed the crap out of it, again.

Almost as important as news content is the design of these websites. Although Brooklyn Vegan does have a lot of information (sometimes 8 or so articles daily), it is still a very popular music blog. This is partially due to the localness of the material – It is mostly centered around New York City area, but its clean design makes a person feel very welcome at the webpage.

You know exactly what the page is upon entering – the memorable headline simply reads “Brooklyn Vegan – Music, Photos and News from a Vegan in Brooklyn”. Like most blogs, the design is very vertical – Scroll from up to down to get your information.

BrooklynVegan’s site makes a lot of content easy to navigate

It does have a nice navigation bar that helps you weed out the news you don’t want quickly – “Metal” has a page all to itself, aside from the general music page. This was a smart idea by the poster – a lot of people that listen to the metal genre only listen to metal, in the same way that many people from way down south only like country. Understanding the design of these pages also means understanding those who will access them in the future.

Aside from a well-maintained site with appropriate content that is easily to navigate, there are some other things that make digital sources of news effective. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting released a report in 2009 on the best practices in digital journalism. The content that these practices were evaluated on were in eight different sections.

The first section focused on involving the reader. Essentially, the section established that users were being included in a project through technology. Some sites invited users to vote on things electronically or comment on pages to enhance their experience, along with the experiences of other users.

Out of the four aforementioned websites, most of them took advantage of involving their readers. Rolling Stone was by far the most effective, mostly through inviting readers to answer questions for polls, and they are allowed to comment on virtually everything on the website.

 

 

 

As you can see in the picture above, the ability to add comments has actually added depth to this article. The reviewer, David Fricke, obviously got the point and gave a decent review, but this fan who had seen My Morning Jacket over 25 times was able to correct him on something that he couldn’t have known. This doesn’t make the reporter stupid – David Fricke is one of the oldest music writers at the magazine. The user’s comment simply added another level of depth and commentary to Fricke’s posting.

The worst example of involving the reader would be at Pitchfork Media, whose website offers no form of interactivity. Only through Twitter can an audience interact with the publication.

The music news community isn’t very well tailored for participation. Although many websites offer comments, even fewer offer polls or for readers to become involved. Participatory stories, such as CNN’s iReport idea, are unseen in the music community.

The closest thing we have to this is NPR’s First Listen section. This is the best feature online currently for discovering upcoming music.

Here is a user comment left on the NPR website. I think she tied up the average user’s sentiment nicely – NPR is the only place to get current stuff like this. It also influences people to buy the album, because they are simply streaming the music, not downloading it.

Rather than review albums critically, NPR puts a small write up of an artist that is releasing an album, and then allows the audience to react to the record. It is very timely. This is usually the first time an audience has heard the whole record because all of the releases are put up at least a week before they hit shelves. The power in this format is that you are capturing an audiences reaction to a particular album in real time. This is very much like an online “listening party,” except you can discuss the album without interrupting listening, along with giving a community of reactions, rather than one person’s own reaction to a record.

NPR’s Amy Schriefer had this to say about the cost and running NPR’s program:  “There is no specific budget for this series.  We are not paying for access to the music, nor are we compensated for featuring it (that would be payola).  It is just staff time for writing, editing and producing, which is part of our usual production budget. NPR Music is a non-profit, editorial organization, so we have a lot of freedom to play what we think is good.”

And more and more, this digital option allows great opportunities that weren’t there before. This September, instead of closing doors on production, Paste Magazine decided to go completely online. In a statement posted online to their readers, Paste said:

“Today Paste Media Group announces, with deepest sadness, the suspension of the Paste magazine print product.

Struggles with mounting debt were made public last year when our readers responded with generosity to save the magazine. But the prolonged downturn of the ad market has forced a hiatus. All subscribers have access to the digital version of their magazines through the June/July issue on PasteMagazine.com. Paste, while considering strategic alternatives, is focusing on its digital assets, including PasteMagazine.com.

We thank all of those who have shown such tremendous support to a vision of independent media focused on Signs of Life in Music, Film & Culture, including subscribers, advertisers, writers, photographers, illustrators, publicists, record labels, movie studios, book & game publishers and others in the press.”

I don’t necessarily think the switch was a bad thing for Paste. Sure, their print publication is out of the picture, and yes, the decision was made out of necessity, but with only their web publication to focus on and a name that people recognize, things can only get better for Paste.

If there is any one thing that I learned in writing this entry, it is the sheer vastness of the possibilities for music journalism on the internet. Like any other news, music journalism is just starting to realize how it should function in a digital format. It isn’t simply a written page copied, pasted, and formatted into HTML; Digital music journalism has to breathe – it has to be linked, it has to have multimedia to really thrive. Although these sites have been criticized for different reasons, they are all doing things right, whether it is the content that is online or the way that they filter the content. And if any of these sites really have it right, the users will be there to tell everyone about it.