What does Blender’s demise mean for the music biz?
By now you know Blender has joined the unfortunate ranks of music magazines that have gone under. I had pretty mixed feelings about this myself. I’d written for them before, plus I knew people who worked there and liked some of the list-making and funny/snarky features that they’ve done. On the other hand, like Rolling Stone, I usually hated the covers (the subjects and the photos) and didn’t think some of the wild energy matched say Creem in its heyday. Nevertheless, its passing is a big event, with lots of ramifications in the music business.
One sign of that came from a missive that Signal to Noise magazine (“Journal of Improvised and Experimental Music”) sent around to its writers this weekend. Signal to Noise, as the editor noted, is about as far part from Blender, in terms of coverage and tone, as a music magazine could be. Nevertheless, the editor knew that this was an important moment in music journalism, wondering aloud ‘if it could happen to a powerhouse like that, are we gonna be in trouble too?’ Good question.
And the sad answer is yes, this does spell trouble all around. Part of the problem is online strategy. No Depression readily noted that this is what killed the print edition, even though they’ve been able to revive themselves online. Harp pretty much acknowledged as much too, though they were also reborn now as Blurt (and coming out in print now too).
Similarly, when I stopped by the Spin offices a few weeks ago, a big meeting was going on where they were talking about their online strategy and how they could best target their audience nowadays. It’s obviously a conversation that needs to be had but I was also kinda worried that this kind of talk needs to accelerate or have happened a while ago.
And what about the writers involved? Some of the staff at Blender will go to Maxim but others won’t. Similarly, freelancers will have to find other gigs in a market that’s rapidly shrinking. Sure, they can blog to their heart’s content (like here), but for many of them who rely on it as their first income, this is pretty troubling. We as readers stand to lose some important, thoughtful voices in this field or will have to hunt around to find where they land elsewhere.
(As a side note, this also poses an interesting problem for Press/PR people. Where they’d once know to include a big dog like Blender on their list to work with, they’re gonna have to turn to online sources more and more. You might think “that’s great for blogs and more sites are gonna get taken more seriously!” Not quite though. Even online, there’s hierarchies and favored destinations so basically, what’s gonna change is that a new set of noted gatekeepers are gonna rule the roost on the Net)
Let’s go back to Signal to Noise‘s worry about Blender and think about this—if Blender can collapse, who might be next? We think of magazines like Rolling Stone or Vibe as the government did about AIG—they’re too big to go down. One big difference is that if the magazines are able to go under, there’s not gonna be any bail out for them.
“So what?” you might say about publications. “They can just go online.” After all, the Christian Science Monitor‘s done that and after closing their print edition, Seattle P.I. did the same. That’s all good and well but the fact of the matter is still that the ad dollars (aka the life blood of a publication) are much less online than they are in print. So while the publication would save money with printing and distribution by going online-only, they still stand to lose much more when their revenue shrinks in ad dough. Not surprisingly then, Seattle P.I. will be much smaller online than it was in print.
The other shrugging argument is that with Blender and other publications disappearing, the action will just go on elsewhere online as it has been going on anyway. The problem with that is that it’s a half-truth. By design, music nuts will have to look elsewhere for music news, recommendations and such, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that what’s online will take up all of the slack from the publications that disappear. Pitchfork doesn’t and can’t and neither can zines like mine—we each fill our own niches and though that sometimes intersects with the work of other magazines, it doesn’t take up the slack all the time either.
We can hope and dream that the patchwork of sites, blogs, zines and such will be enough to cover the bases in the music world (or we can even try to make it happen ourselves) but the fact of the matter is that it doesn’t always and it can’t. Other publications will eventually pop up in their place but they’ll face the same problems of how to stay alive in a Net age. And as you might have heard, there’s no reliable model for that yet so there’s no guarantees for any of the up and coming pubs to survive either. That’s what’s kind of unsettling to me and if you’re a real music fan, it might just creep you out too.
Comments
As a “real music fan”, all that matters here is that enough talented critics and bloggers are able to continue writing. Is there any evidence that people are reading less about music? I doubt it - far more likely that people are just choosing to read online now, which is great for the democratisation of music criticism - a few thousand less people taking Christgau’s writing to heart in preference for a handful of bloggers. Obviously a lot of bloggers aren’t very good, but the best generally do gather the biggest audiences. So while I see the obvious problem that many very good critics will now be struggling to find their next pay cheque, I don’t think we’re in a substantially worse-off position than we were 10 years ago, say, before we had music blogs at all. We’re at the end of a boom period - in music writing as in everything else - but the very best writers will still get paid, and the well of talented bloggers who never even expected to be paid for writing about music isn’t going to run dry anytime soon.
Comment by Ally from Edinburgh — March 30, 2009 @ 7:34 am
Ally, some of what you say is true, about the wealth of info online but many freelancers I know are struggling more and more to find work (I can attest to that myself also). The assumption that the best people are always going to find enough work isn’t a given anymore, esp. in this economy and with so many paying outlets (publications) drying up quickly.
Until publications new and old figure out a sustainable online model, this is unfortunately going to continue.
Comment by Jason Gross — March 30, 2009 @ 8:03 am
@ Jason
It’s not so much publications that need to figure out a new online model as it is users needing to be willing to pay for quality journalism as they have in print.
Most online subscription models have failed and most Internet users expect the Internet to always be free. Until that changes, online sites will continue to struggle with revenue, especially as online ad rates continue to drop drastically.
Comment by Steve from New York — March 30, 2009 @ 8:21 am
Hi Steve,
Thanks for the comment.
I definitely agree that the users’ attitude about how they support these services have to change but in the end, the burden for making that change has to still happen with publications/editors/writers ushering that along. If we leave it to the readers and hope that they’ll just change on their own, I don’t think that it’ll happen organically. There has to be a push within the industry for change and how they shape the perception of their readers.
Comment by Jason Gross — March 30, 2009 @ 8:52 am
Blender was a joke from the beginning. They were launched when Maxim was making truckloads of cash , Blender never made any money, they thought they needed to drive up their rate bast to 1,000,000 and that cost them lots of money. Blender editorially treated the artists/musicians as a punch line, always looking for a laugh instead of digging deeper into what made the musicians tick. when they had Brittney/Christina & Jessica Simpson all in a row the clock started ticking loudly.
Comment by chip couzzo from NJ — March 30, 2009 @ 9:40 am
Very good piece, Jason. I don’t know what the answer is - or if there even is an answer. As we spend more time online, we continue the process of fragmentation that began a generation ago. I personally won’t miss Blender - to me, much of their writing lacked depth and insight into the music itself.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and man, do we need to invent!
Comment by Ben Lazar from Brooklyn, NY — March 30, 2009 @ 11:54 am
Well yeah, of course I sympathise with the job losses and difficulties that freelancers and formerly contracted writers are now having. Job cuts are an issue in every industry right now, but there’s a triple whammy here - the decline in music mag sales, the decline in print sales generally, AND the worldwide recession. It’s sad, but in these difficult times for millions of people, it’s not “bad for society” if less people are paid to write about music. (In the same way that it IS bad for society that newly trained teachers can’t find jobs, and so on). Lots and lots of people never ever read or care about music criticism. Lots and lots of unpaid music writers—who are often patronised with the title “bloggers” as opposed to “critics” purely because their writing isn’t published with ink, regardless of its quality—can attest to the view that getting paid to write about music is some kind of fantasy dream job.
So yeah, it’s far from ideal that so many dreamers are being rudely awoken, and that bills will have to be paid in other ways for lots of people. And I know it’s easy for me to be pragmatic because I don’t expect to be paid for commenting about music anyway. But as a music fan, I’m not worried, because I think online zines and blogs can provide a plurality of informed opinion that is already far beyond what I could ever hope to have the time to read.
PS. online advertising is so much more efficient than print advertising—adverts can be targetted better, views and clicks and purchases can be measured exactly—why oh why are they not bringing in the same cash as print adverts?
Comment by Ally from Edinburgh — March 30, 2009 @ 12:06 pm
@ Ally
“online advertising is so much more efficient than print advertising—adverts can be targetted better, views and clicks and purchases can be measured exactly—why oh why are they not bringing in the same cash as print adverts? “
How we wish that were true. Not only are online ads a tiny fraction of what prints ads are money-wise, but rates are dropping during the recession.
Co-publisher of No Depression, Kyla Fairchild, had a very illuminating blog post about that last month. (http://nodepression.com/articles.aspx?id=5381)
Comment by SysAdmin — March 30, 2009 @ 3:20 pm
As a former Blender hack - they stopped using me when I found I couldn’t write sentences short enough for their imagined readership to understand - I’m probably writing through a veil of disgrunt.
However, I think i understood it’s place in the market and they were probably right to ditch the likes of me. Whether they were right to put pretty girls on the covers in an age when men looking for pictures of pretty girls can find more than they’ll ever need for free on the net, is debateable.
I feel for the writers (hell, even for subs and editors) who’ve lost income through this collapse but isn’t it indicative of something much wider that’s wrong with our society?
For maybe thirty years we’ve been living on the illusion of success, living on big talk, living on interest, living on credit, living with our heads in the sand.
The greed-based ethics of Thatcherism/Reganism had to crash eventually and that’s what I’d say a mag like Blender was ultimately based on. The basic assumption was that their potential readers were people with short attention spans, and that they could only be made to read by an editorial policy based on the short-term manipulation of envy, greed, avarice and the desire to live life as a spectator sport with drugged out rock stars doing the stupid stuff by proxy that we’re too scared/too smart to do ourselves.
Why else would a magazine run a feature about Old Dirty Bastard’s dumb exploits? Why do mags now run articles about Pete Doherty or Amy Winehouse? We’ve lost sight of anything resembling core values in our lives and, in the music biz, our core value should be music.
There’s no shortage of great music around. Why are magazines afraid to write about it? Admittedly, the audience for literate mags is smaller than it is for the ones with lowest common denominator editorial policies, but the idea of basing a magazine on appealing to people who don’t actually much like reading is surely, to say the least, short-sighted?
Mojo is still here. Word and Uncut are still here. I rest my (rather long-winded) case.
Comment by Johnny Black from Wiltshire, UK — March 31, 2009 @ 3:52 am
SysAdmin - thanks for the link. What I was exclaiming bafflement about was why online eyeballs are worth so much less than inked eyeballs when, in theory, there’s so much more you can do with online adverts. The disparity in price seems to be of magnitudes between 30 and 100-times, and that’s explained only in vague terms about how advertisers are all Luddites. That’s got to change sometime, so while there may not be a business model to support online publications that pay today, there probably will be tomorrow. C’mon, surely!
Johnny - The reason these people are written about is because they lead dramatic lifestyles and people want to read about dramatic events, not humdrum. I don’t think it’s anything to do with us losing “core values”. All the most popular publications in Britain are sensationalist - tabloid newspapers, ‘Real Life Stories!’ women’s mags, the NME. Then of course the NME gets criticised for its screeching hype, but level-headed analysis does not sell and does not influence. Unfortunately in music writing, as in music itself, there’s always a balance to be struck between appealing to a mass audience and staying true to principles of content.
Comment by Ally from Edinburgh — March 31, 2009 @ 6:21 am
I find it surprising that the music industry still seems to be taking their sweet time in joining the online world. After all, aren’t more people buying mp3s, iTunes and everything else online? As a result, music/record stores are closing their doors.
With a plethora of music blogs out there (with strong followings), PR people are already taking advantage of them and putting them high on their list of contacts next to Rolling Stone and Spin. And as more and more newspapers shut their doors and music blogs start to appear, hopefully the music pubs will finally start to aggressively move forward in their online strategy. Otherwise, you’re right, they’ll become the next Blender.
I plan to cancel my subscription to Rolling Stone soon since I can read the same if not more stories online, for free.
Comment by Liz Laneri from Boston — March 31, 2009 @ 9:50 am
Thanks, Jason, for the analysis, and to Johnny, who, if you’ll pardon the borrowing, has forgotten more about the music press than I’ll ever know.
The picture here in the UK is similarly grim - as Johnny notes, Mojo and others are still standing, and Q has taken the heartening (to those of us who prefer to read something substantial) decision to increase pagination and publish more words. But looking at Q’s and Mojo’s editions at the turn of the year was sobering, in terms of how few pages of ads they carried.
Ally - you ask some good questions in your most recent comment, but the answers are kind of depressing too. Everyone seems to agree that asking web users to pay for online writing isn’t going to work, because people are used now to getting this stuff for free. So, by the same rationale, why will advertisers, now used for years to paying fractions of pennies for access to online eyeballs, suddenly agree to exponential increases in those rates? Ads online are far more sophisticated now in their targeting and in the information they reveal than they were a decade ago, yet they cost fractions as much. There will inevitably be huge advances in what ads do and how they connect with viewers - but as they become more sophisticated their relationship with the “content” will, I feel, become more tangential. One of the most-praised (and apparently successful) ad campaigns of recent months in the UK has been the one for the price comparison site CompareTheMarket.com, but the attention has focused on how innovative and immersive they’ve made their CompareTheMeerkat.com site - in effect they have a TV ad to attract people to a site which is the real ad. That’s where the big bucks will get spent - in creating self-sustaining ad campaigns that fuel themselves and exist outside of other media - and I don’t see how this will benefit print media at all, let alone niche areas such as music writing. I’m not one for being blindly Luddite, but nor am I convinced that “someone’s got to work it out at some point, surely?” is an entirely sensible worldview for anyone involved in music writing to adopt, either.
I’m not sure NME can any more be described as one of the “most popular publications in Britain”. Its most recent ABC was 48,549 - down almost 25 per cent year-on-year and lower than Metal Hammer for the first time since the latter began publishing. That figure will mask some issues selling significantly less, as well as a few with free gifts that do a great deal better. I read an interview recently with someone who I think was a senior staffer there - though maybe they were staff of another music title - arguing that music magazines have to forget about six-figure sales and get used to being another special interest area, operating in a publishing niche: similar to magazines for model railway enthusiasts or Cage & Aviary Bird. This isn’t anything anyone I know in the music magazine world thinks is great news: even NME’s rivals have tended to depend on it (and the late Melody Maker, Sounds, Record Mirror, Smash Hits, et al) to bring new generations of readers into the habit and custom of reading about music. If those titles are either dead or on life support, that means there is no next generation of readers getting the reading-about-music bug (sorry: that should be the paying-to-read-about-music,-and-also-paying-for-music bug).
I definitely believe there’s a way of writing about music and musicians that is somewhere between dull and sensationalist, and I also believe there’s a market for it if it’s done well. What I am no longer sure about is who might be willing to pay to produce it, never mind who might pay to read it. It’s obviously not just music journalism that is in this state, but the situation is magnified by the collapse of music’s monetary value and the lower bar to entry (reviewing an album is something anyone could have a crack at and reasonably expect to be able to do as well as anyone else without anyone to pick up the tab; nobody is going to be able to report from the front lines of Afghanistan without a publisher to cover the costs).
Then again, this is all just so many angels on the head of a pin; the bigger question is who will finance the making of music in the future, once its value has finally settled at zero and all musicians have to fit in their music-making and gig-playing around whatever else they do to earn a living.
Cheers,
AB
Comment by Angus Batey from UK — March 31, 2009 @ 10:33 am
Great article. This hits home, as I run a company that does online marketing in the music biz. We are always expanding our reach of sites that cater to varying music audiences, but what we tend to find is that the sites that mirror a major tastemaker magazine are few and far between compared to sites that focus on a smaller niche. The result of this is more work to get the message out to a mass audience, but far more valuable coverage taking the content right to the most likely and appreciative fans. I mourn the loss of many good print mags, but since I spend all day finding the equivalent promotion avenues online, I do feel there are many interesting, engaging, interactive ways to achieve the same result. Unfortunately, as you and many comments point out, the financial equation is much different, and that will certainly have implications in quality and breadth of content. We have to find ways to adapt, as do almost all other industries lately…
Comment by Jason Feinberg from Hollywood, CA — March 31, 2009 @ 11:53 am
I’m with Chip, I always thought Blender was a little on the light side.
Comment by Kevin Ricche from USA — April 5, 2009 @ 10:36 pm
I’m an avid music fan who has subscribed to Blender for years. I first became impressed in the days when people like Johnny Black wrote for it. (Didn’t Christgau moonlight there, too?) The features and wit seemed very British and reminded me of Q especially. The witty pisstake photo captions in Q seemed a nice counter to the fact the writers really cared about the music they were writing about, and the fans they were writing for. This was evident in the writing. When you know something well, and respect it, you can take the piss out of it.
As Blender progressed through editors, though, it seemed to lose its identity. The more it preened for the teenybopper/short attention span crowd, the more out of place a piece on Vince Clarke’s place in cultural history seemed. This same transparent attempt to “skew younger/hipper” eventually spoiled my interest in Q, too.
Blender shrank physically…the reviews sections and the reviews became comically brief and bereft.
Well, there’s still Uncut. I’ll take predictable Neil Young’s 87 Best Songs features over predictable Kelly Clarkson’s life is crazy! features any day.
Thanks, Jason—
Comment by John Bergstrom from Madison, WI — April 23, 2009 @ 7:07 pm
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