Video: Twitter & The Death Of Rock Criticism
THIS IS A MUST WATCH: At the 140 Characters Conference, Rolling Stone and Idolator critic Christopher R. Weingarten shared a witty and all too true overview of how music blogs, album leaks and Twitter are changing the role of the music critic. “Crowdsourcing killed indie rock…because people have awful taste…”. Watch it, chuckle and weep, then check out his fabulous Twitter min-album review project 100TimesYes.
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a great retort to this here
http://musformation.com/2009/06/rock-critic-becmoans-twitter-since-he-is-out-of-a-job-bitter-and-shortsighted.html
This guy is like a hairy indie rock Perez Hilton. Settle down, champ. Ralph’s still needs grocery baggers.
wow. sounds like this guy doesn’t want to lose his job. Is it a problem to not know a song that tops billboard if that song sucks and will be gone in 4 weeks?
I think his point is more that we’re losing our American cultural identity through all of this fragmentation in the music industry, and that’s something to be alarmed about.
Excellent speech. I started following #diditleak the moment he mentioned it. Haha.
Blah blah blah…been there, done that. Doing that. Deal with it. Good rock criticism probably died sometime in the late 70’s or early 80’s anyway. I’m looking for someone to tell me things I don’t already know.
a couple of you here aren’t really getting his point.. its not that he is scared of losing his gig…
That’s actually not a very good retort. I wrote a rather incoherent response on his blog, so I’ll try to do better here. It essentially descends to ad hominem attacks, and then targets him as some dinosaur of the old media, when that’s almost exactly the opposite of what he’s saying. He fully embraces the new technology, and even praises it for wiping away the old class of entitled “god-like” music critics.
What he’s concerned for (rightfully so, I feel) is the musical tunnelvision that can easily occur when everything is so narrowly tailored to your tastes. I could easily live my entire online life between Pitchfork, Stereogum, and Brooklyn Vegan and never hear a single hip-hop song (Pitchfork tries, but really, they work from the same “blog-friendly” list as everyone else). Getting out of your comfort zone gives you a chance to find new things that interest you, and the modern “taste-specific” focus (it also existed in the magazine world, but it’s much more effective now) just creates little islands of taste. From your island, it may look as though the other islands are useless (or non-existent), but that’s just a isolated existence.
I thought this was a great listen. However, the industry is changing and this guy should be focussing his energy on delivering good writing and convincing the masses that quality beats quantity
Let me take you slightly away from al this…go to http://www.amazon.com…search…ofege/melvin
I caused the global economic crisis….ask me why
oh, this guy is sooo full of bs… shortsighted and just not able to follow the changes.
Get with the times.
He is totally right. Totally.
And I write for AAJ.com and AAJNY.
The creativity factor of our cultural is going down the toilet.