other ephemera

Punk Planet, No Depression, Harp and now Resonance.

Another print music magazine has left the building, the victim of declining label advertising, rising postal costs, ever-present distribution issues and a shift in the music discussion from magazines to blogs. While we would never consider ourselves technophobes, we can’t help but thinking something is being lost here.

Blogs are very good at spreading bands quickly, at helping them be heard, at creating a brush fire. They are terrible at sustaining that fire. This is where print comes in.

Mojo can give you a context around a record’s genesis that a 100 word post about a pre-sale for the Mercury Lounge simply can’t. The Big Takeover can give you a paradigm of the past six months’ albums that runs from late 70s punk icons to modern day baroque pop, while most blogs focus entirely on one narrow niche or the personal obsessions of their author.

They are incredibly valuable, but nowhere near as interesting as learning what Fred Mills, someone who has worked as a professional journalist for decades, is listening to these days. Music blogs allow new voices to appear, grant much-needed exposure to young bands and spread news and information quickly, but few of them engage in real music criticism, let alone insightful interviews or in-depth reporting, and few of them will ever have the revenues needed to support that kind of writing.

Magazines offer the benefit of time, of context, of serendipitous discovery. The fact that Magnet runs a cover story on, say, My Morning Jacket, sends a signal about their importance to this moment in music in a way that hundreds of blog posts simply can’t. When David Fricke gives Accelerate four stars, it means more than when hundreds of bloggers argue about whether it’s a return to form or more boring “Dad rock.”

Perhaps most important, print magazines create community: think of the passionate readership of Punk Planet, read by thousands of punk kids who were exposed to political ideas and a remarkably broad definition of “punk” meant. You can read a print magazine and know that others are reading too, that it’s a shared experience, that there is a worldview you share, or abhor, or at least engage with. Where’s the community in an RSS feed?

Here’s hoping Magnet, The Big Takeover and the other remaining few find a way to survive at least a little longer. The music world would be a much poorer place without them.