Choosing to focus your pupils on this is bad for the business interests of the attention economy. Right now, you could be watching four videos and two adverts, so in a few ways, reading this is an act of resistance.
However you ended up scanning your eyes across these words, that’s half the battle won. Now, to keep you reading…
This likely isn’t the first time you’ve heard this but: Music Journalism Is In Crisis.
The broader media landscape lost over 3,800 journalism jobs in 2024 alone – and music writing, with even smaller profit margins, is being hit hard too. The media industry is awful at crying wolf, and whilst major media organisations continue to thrive (some even get rich far right benefactors happily losing £3m a year to keep them churning out bile inducing “news”), you probably have noticed an increasing number of websites shuttering or being deprioritised by multinationals, finding themselves becoming a sub-section of men’s mag (hello Pitchfork!). Just like investigative reporting has been gutted by economic forces, music journalism faces identical pressures: chasing engagement over insight, volume over quality.
A lot of this doom-mongering is half-wrong. Much like CD sales reached an all-time high during the Napster-era, my website Drowned in Sound’s audience grew from a million in the mid-2000s supposed ‘peak of blogs’, to three million music lovers by the time we went on pause in 2019. If there was a death of media, it wasn’t because of a lack of interest, as an arena-sized audience rocked up everyday to read about FKA twigs and Janelle Monáe on sites like ours.
So why go on pause if so many people were visiting? Unlike Jessie J, it was all about the money-money. We went from a £100,000 a year business supporting a small team in 2008 (around this time I got an advance of ad revenue and helped launch The Quietus) to struggling to pay one part-time reviews editor to run the three album reviews we were publishing in 2019. Our traffic was up but the value of an advert alongside text on the internet had plummeted from roughly £3 - 8 per 1000 pageviews to 25p. While political newsrooms consolidate into content factories, music journalism has been fracked even more aggressively.
My refusal to shift to doing 80 clickbait news-rehash stories a day to try to bring in Google traffic probably didn’t help, but doing that also required resource and would dilute everything else we published. I wasn’t interested in drive-by clicks, I wanted to – and still want to – build a community that is obsessed with music and try to airlift a few records a year into their collections.
I love how the internet has evolved, and enjoy getting music recommendations from excited 20-somethings on TikTok or falling down Reddit holes like anyone else, but the internet hasn’t been great if your preferred medium is typing rather than talking to camera.
We didn’t “pivot to video” when YouTube was supposedly going to kill music journalism – we merely became a curator of music videos. This door ajar approach to meet people where they were was much-like our weekly MySpace Top 8 feature (a great idea spearheaded by Kev Kharas who you may now know as the singer from Real Lies) and our DrownedinSoundcloud Tumblr.
We also experimented with a podcast back in 2005, which even won some awards, but the economics of playing any music on it soon meant we had to stop (I coulda-shoulda become the Joe Rogan of music interviews, ahhhh hindsight…).
Yes, these ideas may smell musty and dated but they met the moment. These concepts also did what great music journalism has always done by acting as a companion, a tour guide or a trusted friend.
I could have given up many times over the last 25 years. However, Drowned in Sound didn’t throw the towel in when Spotify took off. Instead, I worked for them for free, compiling a monthly playlist for their official blog in the years when they still were technically in beta but raising millions (no, I didn’t get any share in that!). We then made a weekly playlist long before New Music Friday, and I later ended up setting up Independent Music Monday with some support from the record distributor [PIAS], to try to give acts from outside of the major labels some juice in the algorithm. Mostly, it was an attempt to get one slot a week for independent music on the homepages of these major streaming platforms (reader, they did not go for it!).
Despite our resilience and audience growth, I’ve found myself on music industry conference panels, discussing the death of music journalism since 2002, and as recently as January this year – although nowadays it’s about whether record reviews and new music editorial is still “relevant”, which is a very post-cancel culture way of framing the discussion.
If you hadn’t got the gist of this piece by now, reports of music journalism’s death are greatly exaggerated but they’re not inaccurate or misleading. The economics of running any publication that publishes words online or in print – or in audio-visual formats – is harder than ever. For music writing, this means smaller teams, little budget for freelancers, less bandwidth to parse the 120,000-150,000 tracks released every day, and having to be subservient to our algorithmic overlords for words – like these! – to find their way to you.
Being beholden to broken, Trump-supporting “social” media platforms that all media has become reliant on means leaning into the worst instincts of “internet posterbrain” to game the attention economy – the same forces that turned political discourse into rage-bait and music criticism into content. It requires tenacity, and at times complicity, in operating on toll roads that lead to a broken bridge between writer and reader, publication and audience. It requires sometimes doing things to drive engagement, like posting a simple question or a meme as if you’re a wedding DJ reaching for a reliable floor filler, rather than treating your gran to some Pharmakon or Four Tet.
Disclaimer: Sorry for the clickbait title, but this could be an academic essay entitled something dry like “Music Journalism As Infrastructure” but that lacks the intrigue or friction these platforms demand if I want to write to you, my fellow music fan.
Drowned in Sound flickered back into action two years ago as a solo project, alongside my day jobs doing comms consultancy, and managing The Anchoress and Charlotte Church. The site that once published three reviews, an interview, and some news stories each day, is now a weekly newsletter and podcast about music’s future. It’s not what it could be, but with 1% of our readers paying-it-forward, I’m able to rebuild after a few years off.
