The High Cost Of Music/Culture Reporting
In the decade plus that I’ve been doing this work I’ve heard the following about this biz:
It is dying
It’s dead
Oh shit, it’s alive again
It’s all about the gatekeepers
The gatekeepers are dead. YOU HAVE THE POWER
Poptimism ruined everything
And…at some point probably all of those have been true/none of those have been true. It’s a wild space. But one thing that is consistently true is that it’s a lot of work. And it takes a lot of time.
Consider This
For argument's sake let’s say that the average listener listens to around 100 unique, NEW-to-them albums in any given year.
A typical music journalist/blogger may listen to 10-20 times that. Sometimes more. And it’s not just casual listening. It’s listening for context. What work influenced this new music? Does it push culture forward, or is it just pastiche? What kind of impact does it have on the culture? These are all important questions when considering music, and that’s just the start of it.
Then there is the question of where you share your thoughts about the music you hear? Do you start a blog? A newsletter? Do you try to get hired by a large publication or are you happy just creating and sharing your analysis on your terms? Do you, and…stop me if you’ve heard this one before, start weekly hang in your basement to discuss all of this, record the sessions and put it out as a podcast? That seems crazy, but stranger things…
At any rate, all of this takes the aforementioned time and energy, but it also takes money.
That’s right…the ever present specter of capitalism.
Which is what we’re here to talk about. Not so much to convince YOU to give US money, but just to provide a little perspective on what it’s like out there for journalists and bloggers big and small.
What’s The Cost?
So, here’s a list of our expenses, which have steadily increased over the years but have generally stayed within reason. All are just the services that we use but, the prices are pretty relative across the board. Also, I’m including time as labor. And the rate for us is exactly $0 per hour.
Site Hosting: $33 a month [Squarespace]
Remote interview platform: $10 a month [Riverside.fm]
Audio editing/design software: $42 a month [Creative Cloud]
Time (broken down by activity)
Listening: averages out to a minimum of 40 hours a month. One additional, unpaid work week a month.
Recording and editing show: 5 hours each episode (including research)/10 hours a month
Site design: For our redesign we spent a combined 200+ hours of work.
Site upkeep: We built the site to be easy to use, so in general it only takes about 10 minutes per post max, with about 10 posts published on a good week.
624 hours a year
That’s about 26 days
Every. Year.
To be honest, putting it out there like that is a bit astonishing to even me. And I’ve been living it the past 12 years. It takes nearly a month of our lives every year to do what we do, and we’re not even what you would call “overachievers.”
What’s The Point?
(Spoiler: There are TWO)
First: We need your support.
Actually, that’s not quite right.
We would LIKE your support.
Both Eduardo and I are fine in the “making a living” department. So, we don’t “technically” need it. In fact, if you know of some young, scrappy kid starting a music blog right now, give THEM your money. Give THEM the access. It could change their lives.
But if you’ve done that and you still want to support us, we’ve made it “relatively” easy. You can now…
Support Us With A One Time/Recurring Contribution
Every little bit helps. And every little bit is appreciated.
Second: If you’re a publicist wondering if you should spend actual time pitching to a lot of smaller sites instead of just Pitchfork/big publications, the answer should be undeniably “yes.”
More to the point, get those people access to your artists. A narrative can be great, but the only thing you’re communicating is that you’ve decided on a best way to market something to consumers. Narratives are devoid of and separate from humanity by definition. They are static. People/artists are fluid. There are a million stories that can be told about a single song. Enable the people that want to tell those stories to do so.
Thanks for making it to the end of this post. It means a lot.
Now back to listening to music…
- Kevin
