BBC Radio 4 has a 30-minute programme on the history of the UK music press from the 1970s and '80s through to the present day. The last ten minutes looks at the future prospects for press and the critics in the age of MySpace.
Journalist Tom Artrocker wants to put MySpace in its place, arguing that it has its use as on-demand resource for checking out new music instantly, but does not itself lead to anyone discovering anything. He argues that professional media played a more critical role in breaking the Arctic Monkeys than MySpace (see my comments on this last year, and I broadly back the specifics of that account in my book). But he goes on: "without people to do the filtering, it's a mess, it's chaos, it's anarchy — I do maintain that no new band of any value at all has been discovered through MySpace." Well, there's nothing actually stopping a new band being discovered through MySpace or other social networks. Even if it hasn't happened yet, it will. And what's wrong with a bit of anarchy?
Paul Morley is good value as usual, highlighting the determination among music critics, professional and amateur, to get there first to the new bands, and thereby stake their claim to being in the vanguard of taste. He blames this for some of the over-hyping in the press and in blogs.
The essential motivation for all rock writing is to discover things before everyone else, and then of course to be disappointed when everyone else discovers them. At the moment what slightly saddens me from the rock writer point of view is that there's no value given to you finding it… [the new bands] are set up to be so extraordinary that there must be a constant sense of disappointment; and I think that slight sense of everything being celebrated to such an extent must ultimately start to crumble a little bit. People will start to realise that they're being over-egged and over-excited, on the basis, ultimately, that they're going to spend some money.
Listen to the full show until at least 21 July. Tom Artrocker section starts about 20'15" in; the above Paul Morley extract begins at around 23'30", and he's also on at 12'05".
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