in our lives, information had value. This is no longer the case. When information was disseminated at pace, through print media, there was arbitrage opportunity. An audience could be won and held by how close you could get them to the artist, by the depth and refinement of your editorial comment, or at base, your ability to break music news first. As music and information are now the same thing, and ubiquitous, relaying and relating them no longer confers authority, and you are left with a culture of comment.
This is not the end of the world, as plenty of great writing—especially in the last few months—is out there as commentary, and driven by pop music. But there is loss for the writer who assents to feed the beast: when your first impulse is to apply music to other ends, whether promotional, editorial, or academic, you can no longer interpret it emotionally. You cannot live with it. Music has not “become content” because of the Internet, dislocation in the music industry, or the changing attitudes of listeners: it is so debased because it is being aggressively harvested by music publications, as fuel to keep their advertising blast furnaces running. Even the best writer today is also a stoker.
If you look at the stranglehold critics have on the dissemination and interpretation of early-stage independent pop music, that is not a victory for the budding musician, who might receive real, semi-profitable attention earlier in life than in the past, but is unwittingly forced (or opportunistically decides) to play by their rules. Musicians conform to or at least consider the style and imagery dictated by these sites, rather than develop and express what is inside them, and trust (or disregard whether) it will be recognized. That is an intellectual fiefdom.
There is more.
