when people have grown up as followers chasing likes when at the end of the day you are seeking artistic validation.... Things get muddled. Yes big tech is laughing because they know the deeper psychology which has taken place. They gave you an illusion of easy to do but truly hard to succeed even more from the prior analogue era. It is all redundant balderdash with people going deeper into this temporal digital drowning pool. It will get worse till people take themselves out.
Great article Darren and some nice linkery to the other articles all of which I’ve now consumed too. In fact Scuba’s podcast pointed me back at your article in the first place.
As it stands I’m happy with everything. I consume and create music made with and without AI - that’s fine. I buy James Blake records. I get things pointed out to me by trad algos and genaialgos. I feed my own trained Claude agents with my other algofeeds and scrobbles so my pop can eat itself. I stream widely, consume multipodcasts, buy cassettes and vinyl from indie shops and bandcamp, revisit my CDs go to gigs and when it suits buy merch.
Everything is good and nothing is broken. Hometaping isn’t killing music.
Whilst I’m here some other unrelated comments - Otoboke Beaver are much too good for Foo Fighters audiences. I wish artists would stop scrawling on random shit for an intern to shove into my lps - how dead are autographs? Also, it’s not funny pressing ambient or electronic albums at 45 and not telling anyone - this is basically guerilla retrochillwave marketing. Lastly, punny names like these might have been funny once but render you immediately unconsumable: Kurt Vile (my sides), King Creosote (oh stop it), Com Truise (laugh, I nearly broadened my base), Chet Faker (medic!). I like Joy Orbison though.
Great stuff Darren, thanks as always. If you'd like to be a jazz messenger and spread the word about the Jazz on the Beach radio show and Substack, that would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks Darren, great post and recommendations. I have to admit I was quite angered by Blake's post. In my 25 years of professional music journalism, I haven't witnessed or even just heard of someone getting paid for a review by a label. I've never received such an offer, nor do I know of someone who ever got one. That's just utter nonsense. Also, everybody knows we've lost any gatekeeping, trendsetting or tastemaking power long ago.
There is so much to criticize in this industry, yet this is clearly not an issue even worth discussing. But this hits a deeper point you're alluding to in your piece as well – an environment where no one trusts anything to be authentic is only desirable to those that create and profit off inauthenticity.
Exactly that Stephan. I may write another piece about JB's post as I actually feel for him a little bit. I honestly suspect this was a bit of an angry outburst, and judging by what he's posted since, I think he's been made aware that the comment re: reviews was ill considered. But yeah, it is nonetheless triggering to anyone I know who has written reviews and generally spent time in that whole space not because it pays well (if anything at all!) but because they love music.
As both a Blake fan - have bought (with my own money) physical copies of all his LPs, and have paid to see him live - and as someone who has done music journalism as a component of their living since 1990, I feel fairly conflicted here. Most of what I've read that he's said over the past couple of years about how the music business works, or doesn't, has been refreshing, honest, insightful and long overdue. And like you, Darren, I suspect that there was some specific incident that made him want to lash out in that way. But Sean DIS's post was bang on. He hasn't cited any evidence, and, like Stephan, I can count on the fingers of no hands how many times I have encountered incidents of journalists being offered bribes in order to write reviews. True, I've had the sometimes dubious privilege of working, mostly, for some of the longer-established and more traditionally professional titles and publishers over the years - and maybe there are corners of the digital wild west where such behaviour is rampant, of which I remain blissfully unaware. And it would also be reasonable to call out the practice by which music companies were (maybe still are? I don't know, it's been a long time since I've done that type of work) able to get better placement or more coverage by paying to send a writer and/or photographer to a far-flung or exotic location to do an interview (though even that element never had any impact on reviews). So either he's been on the receiving end of some particularly shady practice (likely from titles where the coverage created has minimal impact or value), or is aware of some real outlier experiences which he has deliberately chosen to not disclose when asked for details (despite being the one to raise it in the first place), or he's allowing his anger at something else to overpower what I have always believed to be his strong common sense and fundamental decency. There are enough real problems in this world that we need to be dealing with - creating fake ones may be on-brand for our times, but it isn't helpful. And by saying what he's said, he's only undermining any last lingering bits of trust that readers might have in independent reviews, and journalists in general - thus appears to be siding with those who decry every bit of reporting they don't like as "fake news". To say I expected better of him would be putting it mildly.
And to your overall thesis here, Darren: isn't this just all further evidence that the music business - like the media - lost the plot in the 1990s? The writing was on the wall when record labels queued up to provide magazines with, first, cassettes and then CDs to stick on their covers. When it was occasional (I'm old enough to remember C81) perhaps there was good mutual value in it, but eventually both industries lost out. Music became something you got free with a magazine, and eventually magazines had to have a free CD on the cover before people would think they were worth paying for. Add in the magical thinking that led to most newspapers and magazines adopting the view that it was a smart move to make all your work available for free online, and it's little wonder that both industries have struggled. Anyone who essentially spends most of their time implicitly telling their customers that their product is not worth spending money on is probably going to find it difficult to continue to generate income from that customer base.
Your summary of the damage his post causes by way of endorsing that "anything I don't like is therefore fake news" is certainly one I'd not really considered the full impact of, but you are right.
Again though, I tend to feel this was less a carefully considered attack and more of an in-the-moment outburst, one which I suspect he'll be doing damage control on for some time yet. That or he will go full Laurence Fox and turn into a conspiracy-touting wally whom people ultimately feel sorry for. I pray the former.
In term of the industry losing the plot in the 90s, I think it is a bit more nuanced than that. Ultimately I view this less as "OMG the industry was INSANE to have gone down this path" and more "they did what anyone else would have done in. that position". They were decisions made in a moment of madness; they were well considered and at the time, likely made huge sense. It's just that we fast forward to now, and all those conveniences are exposing the true down side as these companies essentially make it clear that they do NOT have anyone's interests in mind but their own.
And doubtless someone can say "come on you should have seen that coming - they're big corporations after all" but again, that feels like hindsight being 20/20.
However the main thing now is for the industry as a whole to show some brinksmanship and realise that Big Tech is not aligned in terms of interests, and that the smartest thing would be to use the immense soft power that these artists, labels and rightholders have, and move away from these platforms as a whole.
Apologies, Darren - I hadn't meant to imply that that was a complete answer! But I do think setting the price of the product/service at zero is a move fraught with far more risk than a lot of people wanted us to believe back at the dawn of the internet era.
There are further things to say about JB too, but I want to respond to your final paragraph - this is your page, not his! In short, I couldn't agree more. And I sense that, perhaps, now might be a time when it might be possible to assemble enough people who are willing to try it who could give the effort some momentum. Over the years I've been involved in a few, shall we say, skirmishes with publishers, where groups of freelance contributors have tried to get them to reconsider some pretty appalling contracts - and it's always been difficult to get enough people on board to make a difference, because, often, enough people fear that raising an objection will make a client publisher say, "Right, then, that's the last time we're giving you any work." With Big Tech it's different, of course: but lots of people will worry about the negative consequences of any kind of action, from activism to disengagement. I've not had an account on Facebook for about 15 years, Twitter for 10 (never had any of the more recently launched ones), and I don't feel in any way like I want to revise that decision: but it comes at a cost, which in my case is the almost total invisibility of my self-published work. So when you use the word "brinksmanship" you are absolutely spot on, I think, because people considering joining some kind of collective effort will need to consider the risks. But the one lesson I learned early and saw repeated every time I've been involved in one of these episodes is, even if you don't feel like you emerge at the end of it with a win, you never regret standing up for yourself against people or institutions that are trying to do you down.
Your point about these being big corporations is an interesting, and possibly key, one. Back in the '90s that wasn't the case, and a lot of the companies that leached off music (and media, and other industries) to build their "disruptor" products/services managed to win some cachet with certain people by successfully positioning themselves as insurgents and upstarts who were on the side of the many (eg, music fans, who maybe felt they'd been ripped off by the record biz after replacing all their LPs with CDs) against the big bad few (the stereotypical overweight bloke with a fat cigar sitting behind a desk in a record company, cackling as he counted piles of cash he'd made by ripping off gullible artists). Alas, they have become so successful that they are now the megacorp establishment that they once said they were here to replace. That's useful, as is the growing antipathy evident across multiple parts of many societies against so-called "AI" (which, as an industry, hasn't managed to position itself in the same us v them way as social media initially did, despite following a pretty much identical playbook) and the fact that so many of the people at the heads of these new megacorps have been so quick and eager to align themselves with political and social movements that are anathema to people who work in creative fields or who care about art and music and culture.
I agree with you but want to add that the last time I've been sent somewhere by a record company to interview someone must have been like fifteen years ago or something. (In the early Aughts, when I started, that was still standard practice – and it might have led to more favorable coverage sometimes, though not reviews. But that is SO long ago it feels like trading war stories.)
Yes, I just had a look back over stuff and I think the last time it happened to me was in 2010. I was never very sure whether that was down to my choices or a lack of opportunity.
The Internet Enclosure Movement and its Discontents, in three articles
when people have grown up as followers chasing likes when at the end of the day you are seeking artistic validation.... Things get muddled. Yes big tech is laughing because they know the deeper psychology which has taken place. They gave you an illusion of easy to do but truly hard to succeed even more from the prior analogue era. It is all redundant balderdash with people going deeper into this temporal digital drowning pool. It will get worse till people take themselves out.
Great article Darren and some nice linkery to the other articles all of which I’ve now consumed too. In fact Scuba’s podcast pointed me back at your article in the first place.
As it stands I’m happy with everything. I consume and create music made with and without AI - that’s fine. I buy James Blake records. I get things pointed out to me by trad algos and genaialgos. I feed my own trained Claude agents with my other algofeeds and scrobbles so my pop can eat itself. I stream widely, consume multipodcasts, buy cassettes and vinyl from indie shops and bandcamp, revisit my CDs go to gigs and when it suits buy merch.
Everything is good and nothing is broken. Hometaping isn’t killing music.
Whilst I’m here some other unrelated comments - Otoboke Beaver are much too good for Foo Fighters audiences. I wish artists would stop scrawling on random shit for an intern to shove into my lps - how dead are autographs? Also, it’s not funny pressing ambient or electronic albums at 45 and not telling anyone - this is basically guerilla retrochillwave marketing. Lastly, punny names like these might have been funny once but render you immediately unconsumable: Kurt Vile (my sides), King Creosote (oh stop it), Com Truise (laugh, I nearly broadened my base), Chet Faker (medic!). I like Joy Orbison though.
As you were.
Great stuff Darren, thanks as always. If you'd like to be a jazz messenger and spread the word about the Jazz on the Beach radio show and Substack, that would be greatly appreciated!
Happy to do so old bean! Hope you're well!
Hi Darren, just to say your newsletter is great - keep on keeping on!
Thanks Mathew! Really love that you're enjoying my thoughts and ramblings 👍🏻
Thanks Darren, great post and recommendations. I have to admit I was quite angered by Blake's post. In my 25 years of professional music journalism, I haven't witnessed or even just heard of someone getting paid for a review by a label. I've never received such an offer, nor do I know of someone who ever got one. That's just utter nonsense. Also, everybody knows we've lost any gatekeeping, trendsetting or tastemaking power long ago.
There is so much to criticize in this industry, yet this is clearly not an issue even worth discussing. But this hits a deeper point you're alluding to in your piece as well – an environment where no one trusts anything to be authentic is only desirable to those that create and profit off inauthenticity.
Exactly that Stephan. I may write another piece about JB's post as I actually feel for him a little bit. I honestly suspect this was a bit of an angry outburst, and judging by what he's posted since, I think he's been made aware that the comment re: reviews was ill considered. But yeah, it is nonetheless triggering to anyone I know who has written reviews and generally spent time in that whole space not because it pays well (if anything at all!) but because they love music.
As both a Blake fan - have bought (with my own money) physical copies of all his LPs, and have paid to see him live - and as someone who has done music journalism as a component of their living since 1990, I feel fairly conflicted here. Most of what I've read that he's said over the past couple of years about how the music business works, or doesn't, has been refreshing, honest, insightful and long overdue. And like you, Darren, I suspect that there was some specific incident that made him want to lash out in that way. But Sean DIS's post was bang on. He hasn't cited any evidence, and, like Stephan, I can count on the fingers of no hands how many times I have encountered incidents of journalists being offered bribes in order to write reviews. True, I've had the sometimes dubious privilege of working, mostly, for some of the longer-established and more traditionally professional titles and publishers over the years - and maybe there are corners of the digital wild west where such behaviour is rampant, of which I remain blissfully unaware. And it would also be reasonable to call out the practice by which music companies were (maybe still are? I don't know, it's been a long time since I've done that type of work) able to get better placement or more coverage by paying to send a writer and/or photographer to a far-flung or exotic location to do an interview (though even that element never had any impact on reviews). So either he's been on the receiving end of some particularly shady practice (likely from titles where the coverage created has minimal impact or value), or is aware of some real outlier experiences which he has deliberately chosen to not disclose when asked for details (despite being the one to raise it in the first place), or he's allowing his anger at something else to overpower what I have always believed to be his strong common sense and fundamental decency. There are enough real problems in this world that we need to be dealing with - creating fake ones may be on-brand for our times, but it isn't helpful. And by saying what he's said, he's only undermining any last lingering bits of trust that readers might have in independent reviews, and journalists in general - thus appears to be siding with those who decry every bit of reporting they don't like as "fake news". To say I expected better of him would be putting it mildly.
And to your overall thesis here, Darren: isn't this just all further evidence that the music business - like the media - lost the plot in the 1990s? The writing was on the wall when record labels queued up to provide magazines with, first, cassettes and then CDs to stick on their covers. When it was occasional (I'm old enough to remember C81) perhaps there was good mutual value in it, but eventually both industries lost out. Music became something you got free with a magazine, and eventually magazines had to have a free CD on the cover before people would think they were worth paying for. Add in the magical thinking that led to most newspapers and magazines adopting the view that it was a smart move to make all your work available for free online, and it's little wonder that both industries have struggled. Anyone who essentially spends most of their time implicitly telling their customers that their product is not worth spending money on is probably going to find it difficult to continue to generate income from that customer base.
Your summary of the damage his post causes by way of endorsing that "anything I don't like is therefore fake news" is certainly one I'd not really considered the full impact of, but you are right.
Again though, I tend to feel this was less a carefully considered attack and more of an in-the-moment outburst, one which I suspect he'll be doing damage control on for some time yet. That or he will go full Laurence Fox and turn into a conspiracy-touting wally whom people ultimately feel sorry for. I pray the former.
In term of the industry losing the plot in the 90s, I think it is a bit more nuanced than that. Ultimately I view this less as "OMG the industry was INSANE to have gone down this path" and more "they did what anyone else would have done in. that position". They were decisions made in a moment of madness; they were well considered and at the time, likely made huge sense. It's just that we fast forward to now, and all those conveniences are exposing the true down side as these companies essentially make it clear that they do NOT have anyone's interests in mind but their own.
And doubtless someone can say "come on you should have seen that coming - they're big corporations after all" but again, that feels like hindsight being 20/20.
However the main thing now is for the industry as a whole to show some brinksmanship and realise that Big Tech is not aligned in terms of interests, and that the smartest thing would be to use the immense soft power that these artists, labels and rightholders have, and move away from these platforms as a whole.
Apologies, Darren - I hadn't meant to imply that that was a complete answer! But I do think setting the price of the product/service at zero is a move fraught with far more risk than a lot of people wanted us to believe back at the dawn of the internet era.
There are further things to say about JB too, but I want to respond to your final paragraph - this is your page, not his! In short, I couldn't agree more. And I sense that, perhaps, now might be a time when it might be possible to assemble enough people who are willing to try it who could give the effort some momentum. Over the years I've been involved in a few, shall we say, skirmishes with publishers, where groups of freelance contributors have tried to get them to reconsider some pretty appalling contracts - and it's always been difficult to get enough people on board to make a difference, because, often, enough people fear that raising an objection will make a client publisher say, "Right, then, that's the last time we're giving you any work." With Big Tech it's different, of course: but lots of people will worry about the negative consequences of any kind of action, from activism to disengagement. I've not had an account on Facebook for about 15 years, Twitter for 10 (never had any of the more recently launched ones), and I don't feel in any way like I want to revise that decision: but it comes at a cost, which in my case is the almost total invisibility of my self-published work. So when you use the word "brinksmanship" you are absolutely spot on, I think, because people considering joining some kind of collective effort will need to consider the risks. But the one lesson I learned early and saw repeated every time I've been involved in one of these episodes is, even if you don't feel like you emerge at the end of it with a win, you never regret standing up for yourself against people or institutions that are trying to do you down.
Your point about these being big corporations is an interesting, and possibly key, one. Back in the '90s that wasn't the case, and a lot of the companies that leached off music (and media, and other industries) to build their "disruptor" products/services managed to win some cachet with certain people by successfully positioning themselves as insurgents and upstarts who were on the side of the many (eg, music fans, who maybe felt they'd been ripped off by the record biz after replacing all their LPs with CDs) against the big bad few (the stereotypical overweight bloke with a fat cigar sitting behind a desk in a record company, cackling as he counted piles of cash he'd made by ripping off gullible artists). Alas, they have become so successful that they are now the megacorp establishment that they once said they were here to replace. That's useful, as is the growing antipathy evident across multiple parts of many societies against so-called "AI" (which, as an industry, hasn't managed to position itself in the same us v them way as social media initially did, despite following a pretty much identical playbook) and the fact that so many of the people at the heads of these new megacorps have been so quick and eager to align themselves with political and social movements that are anathema to people who work in creative fields or who care about art and music and culture.
I agree with you but want to add that the last time I've been sent somewhere by a record company to interview someone must have been like fifteen years ago or something. (In the early Aughts, when I started, that was still standard practice – and it might have led to more favorable coverage sometimes, though not reviews. But that is SO long ago it feels like trading war stories.)
Yes, I just had a look back over stuff and I think the last time it happened to me was in 2010. I was never very sure whether that was down to my choices or a lack of opportunity.
I checked again: For me, it was in 2013, so not much later.
never forget: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9I62SVMsAJQ
🤣
i can't take anyone seriously who hates the saxophone that much