Writing as a Music Critic

Is it all about the music as some musicians will put it in their interviews; or is it something else? In the world we live in today, we have hundreds of new ways to discover music and assess whether we like it or not and even more opportunities to hear or read about what other people think. For example, take a band or musician that you like and type their name into Pandora.com, now you have the ability to listen to music based around one band at the touch of a button. If that’s not enough for you, people who want to see more physical evidence in connecting bands or musicians, try mapping your favorite artists with the help of music-map.com by conducting a search of that same artist. Either way you look at it there are many different ways to discover new music other than word of mouth or reading the latest issue of Rolling Stone. With the endless options of discovering new music, there is the need for people to review music as an art since exists since so much music exists that one can listen to and discover but we still have need for unwanted music and genre classifications.

Without reviews, programs like Pandora or music-map would only be able to base their programs off of the genre classifications and not be able to branch out, giving the reader or listener a large array of music. Even more so, you would be able to quickly pick out a band to see on Friday night when you are looking through the endless list of bands playing in your weekly print.  The music industry has been growing continually, especially with the don of the digital era, but still has a need for music reviews even though they are not based around classical music as they were up to the 1960’s. Today, becoming a music reviewer can be something that anyone can do, but would not be something to bank on to make the big bucks since many review columns are written by freelance writers and print publications have limited spots for full time positions.

            Simply getting your foot into the door to become a music reviewer is not that hard especially if you are coming at it as a freelance writer. As an experiment for this piece, I started a blog on concert reviews (concertrevieworegon.blogspot.com) and within a week I had lined up one show to review and another venue that would allow me to attend any show that I would like. The royalties from this field experience have been attending one show for free and getting admittance to another venue whenever I would like while being completely ignored by several other venues. Acting as a freelance writer in this experience has not paid off anything that would make me quit my day job or drop out of school and pursue this full time, but has allowed me to see the struggles that one has in this field of work. For starters, I had to get my name out there and this task was simple setting up a blog and beginning to write. After producing a few posts from previous concerts I had attended, I was able to begin throwing my name out to venues to get invites to shows or just get my name on a press list. That was the start but there will be a lot to build if I ever hope to get paid for my works. The idea was to start this and have no advertising and see how big I could make this blog through word of mouth. I added a link on my facebook and my stumbleupon account (a Firefox add-on where users are brought to random websites that are introduced by other users) and so far, I have one follower and another author, but on the bright side I am public for people to find me so that one day I could get paid like: Emily Mackay (reviewer for NME), Steve Smith (reviewer for nightafterlice.com and the New York Times), Will Hermes (reviewer for NY Times, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly and more), and Jon Dolan (reviewer for SPIN)  and write for one of a big name music review print like these journalist have.

Where to go from here though, I have my blog and I have emailed some people about what I am doing and the money isn’t rolling in nor are the job offers from these big name publishers. Simply doing this as a freelance writer is going to take a lot more work than staring a blog, and I will need to get my name out there even more than writing to local venues. The Rolling Stone does not have a link to jobs that they offer nor does the search for “job” pull up anything successful, so on to Pitchfork. At this time Pitchfork says that, “there are no positions at this time” but looking at the staff list they have 21 contributing writers that are associated with Pitchfork (having personal email addresses linked through the site) and 18 others that are not. Of those 21, 6 of them are musicians and professional writers while the other 15 are freelance writers who have their own blogs, twitter accounts or personalized websites along with many publications and reviews throughout the web. There is still hope even though there are no jobs available at Pitchfork but I am back to the beginning just trying to get my name out as a recognizable reviewer or critic. Potentially more insight into the field will show me the hoops that I will have to jump through to make it big.

            Reviewing music is a form of journalism where many people start writing for their local newspaper or weekly print. In Bernard Shaw’s essay “How to Become a Music Critic,” he began writing as lead writer and proposed to turn his attention to music criticism. As the first music critic for this paper, Shaw struggled for seven years getting the attention of readers with his small column and getting the attention of the general reader which was slowly worked out with his editors when he produced The World, a page given entirely to music criticism. Shaw was lucky as a writer to be allowed to continue to write a column for so long without it getting a large response from readers on top of being able to produce an entire page of music criticism after having many years of little response. Beyond his success in getting more space to review and critique music, Shaw still struggled as a writer since it was not the highest paying job and he ended his article saying, “I have already brought myself face-to-face with an economic difficulty in my own path. ... Newspaper proprietors offer men from a pound a week to five pounds a week for music criticism, the latter figure being very exceptional, and involving the delivery of a couple of thousand words of extra brilliant copy every week,” showing that the riches from this job were not great in the early 1900’s and even today not much has changed. The market is full of writers from young music enthusiasts to freelance writers looking for anything that is willing to pay them to the few professional critics working for well known publishers. The BBC mentions the fact that, “Many major magazines and newspapers rely on freelance writers for a substantial part of their material” meaning that fewer and fewer print sources and web reviewing sites are relying on staffed writers meaning that there are more opportunities for freelance writers in the music journalism field. This is good for those trying to get into this line of work but also means that the market is a lot more competitive.

Looking back at Pitchfork’s staff list, there were 39 writers and 18 of them had no full association with Pitchfork and 15 of them were freelance writers who had continual work through the site while 6 are professional writers and musicians that have added content. The majority of this websites work comes from freelance writers showing that there are opportunities to get paid as a music journalist/reviewer but maybe not by the means of a full time job that pays a salary. Nate Dorward supports this as a music reviewer in his blog when by saying, “With many print and online journals, you won’t get paid except in review copies, and if you get paid, it won’t be much. So if money is important to you, stop right now.” As a profession this will not be the greatest paying career nor since the likelihood of making it as a staffed reviewer is slim, but the payoff in being able to listen to lots of music and see many shows may still be worth it to many. 

            Though this will not be the greatest paying job, there is a lot of opportunity to become successful as a reviewer since the number of music based web sites is endless; simply typing in “listen to music” on Google will give you 48,300,000 results. A career in music reviewing will not be the easiest job since it is a competitive field with large numbers of freelance writers. In the BBC’s article, they interviewed Noel Gardner, the editor for Buzz magazine, who, in her interview, suggested that reviewers should, “Be incredibly keen, and be prepared to write about stuff you're not actually that interested in.” This advice will go to show that all reviews are not done by fans of the band and the reviewers who are not just following their favorite genre of music. Noel supports her statement by explaining that, “fewer bands” are, “getting big features” and this is because of advertisement taking up publishing space. Following Noel’s advice for being very open to the bands that you review, you will have a better chance of getting published or recognized on the web if you can review things that are not being heavily reviewed in print, such as the smaller names or the abstract genres. Similar to Noel’s advice, Joe Goodden discusses the many possibilities of getting published through the web or even submitting work to magazines. Upon writing the reviews or critique of an album in his blog, Nate Dorward explains his successes as a reviewer and explains the basics of writing successful reviews. Some of his advice is as obvious as carefully editing while he also explains that for an album review, “Don’t always start with track one, or you’ll get fuzzy on the later stages of the album. (Shuffle play is handy,)” since playing an album from track one through often sets the tone for the entire album. With even more advice discussing the characteristics and descriptions of what a reviewer should be looking for and should avoid doing, Nate is explains that getting published is not the hardest part of this job since there are so many opportunities to get published online or in smaller print publications.

            As for me, it looks like the big check will not be rolling in after all, but the possibility to listen to great music is still there. Beyond the blog and getting into shows for reviews, my publications will have to be sought out through submissions to the larger music review publishers. Music reviewing is not necessarily a field or career that you will be given a desk to go to everyday from 9-5 since the majority of music reviewers are freelance writers. There are still a lot of well known reviewers who carry a lot of prestige but there is still the ladder that one has to climb to reach that point and be well respected in the field. The music reviewing industry is quite large with its number of publishers online and in print allowing many opportunities for writers. I have a long ways to go if I ever want to be really successful but the possibilities of this career making me rich is not a reality. The blog is just a start in getting my feet into the field, the next step would be to submit work to publishers and start getting paid, and with that said I will go listen to another album and write another review. 

By: Ian McCreary

Works Cited

"Become a Music Journalist." Become a Music Journalist (2009). BBC. BBC Whales, 5 Feb.         2009. Web. Apr.-May 2010.   to/pages/journalist.shtml>.

Bernard Shaw. How to Become a Music Critic. University of Calgary, 1912. Web. Apr.-May        2010. .

Dorward, Nate. "Music Reviewing: Rules of Thumb." Web log post. Don't Explain. Wordpress,    23 June 2005. Web. Apr.-May 2010. .

Pitchfork. 2010. Web. Apr.-May 2010. .

Rolling Stone. 2010. Web. Apr.-May 2010. .