As cut-backs in movie and book reviewers happen in more and more publications, cultural critics are left to scratch their head over what’s to be done and how to shore up the field.  This story line kept popping up before the recent layoffs, going back to the pros vs. bloggers wars that have been played out in the last few years.  No surprise that this is going to continue to play out and that there’s continual hand wringing over it- one of the best articles was this one from the Hartford Courant.  I also particularly liked this review from the New Republic, which notes the pitfalls of the life of the reviewer and some sage ideas about how to maybe save and cultivate the profession.

—Jason Gross

While Radiohead itself is being cheeky about how much dough they’ve piled up over their latest album, Paste magazine’s similar pay-what-you like experiment has definitely paid off.  Editor-in-chief Josh Jackson maintains that they added 30,000 new subscriptions thanks to this gambit.  I’ll have more details in my year-end round-up for music scribing but for now, you gotta be impressed with numbers like those, especially when they’re dropping most everywhere else.  Yet another lesson the music industry has to teach the print industry?

—Jason Gross

After the Rolling Stone debacle with RJ Reynolds, there’s now news that another ad in XLR8R magazine has pissed off experimental composer Dan Deacon and for including him in a Greyhound ad, which DD fumed about in an angry, explicit bulletin post on MySpace. Laptop act Wzt Hearts weren’t too thrilled about being in the same ad either, asking in a bulletin board if they could sue the company for this.  Mags are doing trial and error experiments figuring out how to get cash for a dwindling ad rate base and this can probably be chalked up as a failure but expect to see other experiments like this as they try to figure out the changing landscape.

Speaking of composers, you might have heard that Karlheinz Stockhausen just passed away.  Though I admired his early work (especially his early electronic pieces), I was also kind of disturbed by the cult that was built around him, sometimes at the expense of other composers.  How many times have you heard a mindless blurb that someone was “influenced by Stockhausen” without much understanding about what that means?  I hashed some of that over in a blog post last year.  I also have a hateful letter he sent me years ago- I guess I’ll have to dig that out and frame it now (or at least put it on Ebay). For now, this is an interview he did in 1997.

—Jason Gross

Actress/musician Rebecca Moore cares enough about the NYC music scene and the peril it’s in.  Not only is she a very active member of the Local 802 Musicians’ Union and purposely got herself arrested in protest just after the Tonic club got closed down earlier this year, but she also penned an interesting article in the 802 publication Allegro with some worthwhile proposals about how musicians could or should get a voice in Gotham politics.

—Jason Gross

More and more, I’m seeing that one branch of the entertainment industry is trying to beat down the Net demons that threaten their bottom line by following the lead of another biz branch.  Usually, it’s the music biz that provide clues and leads for film and TV now but the latter have been wising up too, putting content online without strings (or at least many strings).  The best recent example is MTV giving away South Park episodes, all of them, for free.  No doubt, they’ll be stuffed with ads but it seems to run counter to everything that the major labels believe in now.  And as the Slashdot article notes, this kind of strategy hasn’t hurt The Daily Show when they did something similar. 

It’s questionable that the labels will pick up on this quickly (hell, look how long it takes them to adapt to technology in their own biz) but one heartening step is the ‘cut the fat’ program that EMI is said to be implementing now.  This confirms what many of us knew: that the big labels were throwing money around like crazy, with no thought as to whether any of it really made sense or not, acting like grade school kids with credit cards rather than a record company.  The danger though is that they’ll think that this ALONE is gonna solve their problems.  It’s a step in the right direction but until they get their digital house in order, these labels ain’t gonna see the financial returns they want.

—Jason Gross

First an AP story then a Yahoo follow-up and a Slashdot reprint of the results have a small echo chamber screaming that the Zune is beating up on the iPod this season.  If you take a closer look at the Slashdot comment section through, it seems reasonable to figure that the books were cooked against Apple, giving Microsoft and Zune the advantage.  And so you see the dangers of a misguiding story being repeated, believed and then pointed to all over the place (i.e. Iraq war justifications).

—Jason Gross