For about three years, from 2011-2014, I was a freelance music writer. Well, “freelance” might be too strong of a word. “Volunteer” is more apt; “Aspiring” if we’re being generous. I wrote, conservatively, tens of thousands of words in reviews and news posts and lists for the likes of Under the Gun Review and Late Night Sing-Alongs with the goal of getting some free albums and maybe one day having a byline in Alternative Press.
I’ve been thinking about that time in light of the news this week that Alternative Press and Brooklyn Vegan, among others, were completely gutted by their parent companies, Live Nation and Veeps. (There’s a sick irony to the fact that the co-founders and CEOs of Veeps are Benji and Joel Madden of Good Charlotte, and so much of my relationship with music goes back to a pre-teen obsession with that band). These were institutions that spanned multiple decades and tracked the rise and fall of so many scenes and trends. They were what everyone I worked with in the music blog world wanted to be: The place you would go to find your new favorite band. I know we can’t make it 2013 again through science and magic, but it still hurts to see hardworking people who believe in independent music lose their jobs so that these publications can get recycled into merch stores and AI slop factories.
I got out of that game after college because I wanted to focus on my bands and other stuff in my life, but I stayed in touch with a lot of the friends I made, and I have so much respect for the people who have found a way to make it a career. It just sucks that it’s such an unstable one.
There’s plenty to criticize about the peak music blog era in terms of exploitative labor practices (I was paid, by and large, in MP3s) and a consensus of taste and coverage that overwhelmingly favored a certain type of artist, but the ecosystem was so big and vibrant that you could find a blog or a writer whose taste and perspective overlapped with yours and led you to something special and new. That’s really what I wanted to be: The person who shows you something cool. (And not because it makes me any cooler for knowing about a band first. It’s about seeing someone connect with art regardless of the source). It’s what I was doing by making mix CDs for friends in high school, and what I still try to do now by talking about music on a podcast every week.
Music discovery has been broken for a while (citation: every page of Liz Pelly’s excellent book Mood Machine), and that’s tied to the plummeting ad revenue, and making the browsing experience worse, and throwing AI at everything, and Meta and Google doing everything they can to keep people inside their platform silos, flicking to the next short video, and so on and so forth. But I remain inspired that there is still music out there to discover. I love finding new bands on the Chorus forums, and in group chats with friends, and in the small names at the bottom of the festival lineups, and I still love sharing them.
I’d like to think that my championing of bands like The Hotelier was important in some way. It probably didn’t materially affect their careers, but maybe someone read my review of Home Like NoPlace Is There and listened and got inspired and started a band. Maybe they’re playing a coffee shop in your town tonight. Maybe they put out a record this year. I can only hope.
Troy Sennett 