As music has become ubiquitous, music critics, and the magazines they write for, have become collateral damage, bypassed on the digital highway by cheap and instant gratification. It’s not that expert insight has become irrelevant in an era of crowdsourced feedback. It’s just that, at $0.99, an impetuous decision gone wrong is simply no big deal. Besides, you can listen to full songs by just about any artist by searching free streams and MP3 blogs to find out what they sound like.
The subject hit home at a panel I was on Tuesday at the Future of Music Coalition Policy Summit in Washington, D.C. The subject pretty much gave it away: “Critical Condition: The Future of Music Journalism” The participants were veterans from the Chicago Tribune, Daily Swarm, Jazz Journalists Association, Idolator, the Independent, National Public Radio, NewMusicBox, Pitchfork Media, URB magazine, Washington City Paper and the Washington Post.
During the Q and A, an audience member from NPR asked panelists to put aside the question of compensation for the moment and come up with concrete ideas about what music journalism will look like in the future.
My response: Music journalism should live on the same devices where we listen to our music — be that a computer, cellphone, MP3 player, tablet or home entertainment center. In other words, perhaps the same technologists who are making the reviews section in music magazines obsolete are capable of saving music journalism.
Say you like to read Pitchfork‘s new music coverage. Imagine a “Pitchfork Player” app for Windows, Mac and cellphones that would present relevant reviews for each artist, album and/or track you’re listening to from your own library, or even from a streaming service such as Pandora. Such applications would have to analyze your entire music library or identify streaming songs on the fly — both of which are possible and have been done by other apps.
“I don’t know what would be involved with it from the technical end of it, but as an idea, that definitely sounds interesting,” said Pitchfork managing editor Mark Richardson, adding that Pitchfork readers have largely embraced the site’s policy of embedding Lala albums next to album reviews, which started in March. “It makes sense, going the other direction, so you can access criticism of records from the music [listening experience].”
Pitchfork's reviews are already organized into a database by reviewer, artist, album, and/or song, and could be associated with currently-playing songs on home and mobile devices.
Several large-scale approaches already associate music with relevant text. The All Music Guide and Muze (owned by Rovi, formerly Macrovision), Gracenote (owned by Sony), and Listen.com/Rhapsody (owned by Real and Viacom) have long supplied artist bios to mobile, computer-based and streaming applications. Yahoo Music includes lyrics on the web, and the TuneWiki app can display the lyrics to songs you’re listening to on your iPhone.
But there’s a massive, almost unquantifiable amount of professional music criticism that’s difficult or impossible to access as you listen. Richardson confirmed to Wired.com that Pitchfork’s reviews database includes categories for reviewer, artist, album and song. The same database approach could be applied to reviews from newspapers and magazines — including those from folded or out-of-print publications. At that point, it would be a mere matter of writing the code to display the reviews at the proper time.
There’s also a revenue aspect to device-integrated reviews. If listeners spend more time looking at their music applications, they can be exposed to visual in addition to audio advertisements. Meanwhile, gaming apps and guitar-based videogames, MTV and YouTube have shown that people sometimes pay more attention to music when there’s a visual element associated with it. And of course there’s the ancillary benefit of more listeners getting more enjoyment out of more music, which can only be good for the industry at large.
Of course, copyright comes into play whenever music and publishing industries are involved, and compiling reviews from multiple sources into a single application presents complications. The first step could be for publications to develop their own reviews software, apps and plug-ins. Many music fans already know which publications they trust when it comes to music anyway, so they wouldn’t mind getting their reviews from a single source (or perhaps an alliance of sources, such as MBV). After all, we’re talking about music here, not the news. Reading subjective coverage from a single biased writer can actually be a good thing, when it comes to music.
Listeners could also subscribe only to their favorite reviewers. You could select only reviews from certain Pitchfork writers to show up, for instance, ignoring the ones who annoy you. Or, selections from the entire works of legendary rock critic Lester Bangs could be coded to appear as songs play (assuming someone manages to put it into database form).
In addition to reviews, recommendations could become part of this system. If you give the thumbs-up to what a particular writer said about a particular album, the app could recommend more stuff you should listen to. Perhaps it won’t be long until we’ll be able to install iTunes Genius, The Lester Bangs Edition.
