What is all this?

This might get a little self-indulgent. Forgive me.

I was a music writer. From some band fansites as a kid to a local indie magazine to a punk rock webzine to the college paper, a national indie magazine, some stuff on the side in my job at the metro paper to freelancing for the Onion AV Club. That's not meant to impress you, and if anything I never really hit it as a career. But man I loved doing it.

Well, most of it. There's some problems with how music journalism works that became too apparent over time. And they can pretty much all be boiled down to one axiomatic truth: Money ruins everything. Think about what dreadful graveyards of the soul you can find at LinkedIn or Threads, and you'll have a good idea of how it works. 

You depend on brands and labels. The constant churn of new reviews is more or less unsustainable without constant free promotional albums from labels. And that means no matter how much you work at diversifying, what you write is in some very real way determined by the labels. There's ethical problems lurking behind that, but even if you don't feel compelled to pull punches, you have a pressure to review all sorts of unremarkable middle-of-the-road dreck. Does anyone benefit from that? It's a soul-crushing exercise to find a new way to tell someone "this is unremarkable paint-by-numbers genre work" three times a week. Readers aren't served, spending that little shard of their memory on an album they could have safely never heard about. The bands and labels get stuff maligned by a writer who just might not be the right audience. 

The craft of music journalism sucks ass. Driving clicks and engaging readership has perverse incentives. Hot takes and rage-bait get too much attention. There can be a pressure to get in line behind whatever's hot just to protect one's credibility. Worst of all, there's a trend within the craft to write in a way that centers the author, not the music. Snark, florid prose, and a drive to appear clever take center stage. The music itself is just a prop.

You get addicted to novelty. Listen to enough junk -- and there's plenty of junk out there -- and you'll watch peoples' art melt into a background of genre cliches and start to privilege anything that sounds different at the expense of whether it's good. This can happen to listeners, too. Let your streaming service send you too deep down a particular rabbit hole and you might never escape, never diversify, and never take a chance on anything new.

I don't have a solution. But I know that what I loved about music writing was talking about something new with the enthusiasm of an old friend sharing something exciting. And cutting money out of the picture seems like the best way to do it. A lot of the work there has been done for me -- AI slop, unpaid writers, and the death spiral of freelance rates have made it more or less impossible to make money on this ever again, even if i tried. So I'm doing it for me. That probably means an irregular update schedule, writing about albums that are new or just new to me, and trying to push my boundaries beyond my comfort zone. And while I'll risk being a readership of one, I hope this approach sparks some of that old excitement in you, too.