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Critics Need To Remember It’s All About The Song

GUEST POST by Ethan Stanislawski: Critics have always loved to focus on albums. Isn’ that the BeatlesBroken_record greatest contribution to the music industry: m
aking the album the center of the pop music world? Critics may see it this way, but fans have always placed more emphasis on the single, no matter what the genre or relatively popularity of a band. Rolling Stone published its 500 greatest songs list a year after it published its 500 greatest albums list, and even then there were many tracks included solely for their impact on album rock. This disparity has been going on for as long as there’s been rock criticism.

The disparity is fine when critics have a larger than life status. But the heyday of Lester Bangs and Robert Christgau..

is long gone, and as new media has empowered the opinion of the fan, it
has simultaneously emphasized the single and devalued the album via the
mp3 format. This is not a post about the death of rock criticism –
expert, informed opinion will always have value – but in order for rock
criticism to maintain its vitality, it will have to realign its
priorities with that of its readers. It can start by correcting a
decades-old problem and shifting its priorities to the song.

If editorial motivation isn’t enough, try financial motivation. I’ve worked on music blogs for 2 years, and have put considerable
toil into my music reviews and up-to-the-minute news posts. But very
few of my posts have taken off as consistently as my posts of new audio
tracks or video streams. This should be no surprise, as mp3 and video
blog aggregators like the Hype Machine and el.bo.ws have gotten some of
the best traffic on the web despite the relative paucity of their
actual content. Here on Hypebot, Bruce recently reported on a study that says 80% of music fans don’t read professional reviews.
A significantly larger fraction, even as many as recommendations by
friends, is turning to online recommendations from websites like
Facebook and iLike. This is the area where music criticism has a lot of
room to grow.

We’re a long way from the days when there were
only a handful of bands to consider, and when a handful of people could
tell us if a certain band was cool or not. Nowadays, there are too many
bands, and too many people judging them, for traditional methods of
criticism to stay prominent. Combine that with fans who barely listen
to whole albums anymore, and you can see how track reviews become more
important. Of course, old-fashioned knowledge is still crucial for
making a name for oneself. But in the future, maybe instead of saying this sounds like band X, critics will include a link to something
by band X. Thus, the critic can use new media to inform fans in
nontraditional ways. Rather than destroying the critic, new media has
the power to make the critic a crucial, unprecedentedly effective
educator.

Or they can stick to telling us why Tha Carter III is good or bad.

Ethan Stanislawski is a recent graduate of the University of Chicago who currently writes for Prefix Magazine.

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2 Comments

  1. “But in the future, maybe instead of saying this sounds like band X, critics will include a link to something by band X.”
    Ethan, there are blogs and destinations all over the web that already do this, including ours: http://www.betterPropaganda.com.
    In fact, we’ve been living this “future” as a central philosophy for the last 5 years. Epitonic (a site we share a founder with) did it for five years before us.

  2. Ken, I’m not saying there aren’t a number of sites that are doing this already. What I am saying is that most music sites that focus on criticism still place a disproportionate emphasis on traditional album reviews. This is still the bread and butter of the mainstream music media, and still the standard convention on most prominent music websites as well. I welcome more music sites doing this in the future, including sources like Pitchfork and Spin that still overemphasize albums.

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