Do Music Blogs Still Matter?
The other day I was perusing former MetalSucks writer Finn Mckenty’s excellent YouTube channel The Punk Rock MBA when I stumbled upon a video with a curious title: “Music Blogs Don’t Matter.” Naturally, I watched.
Contrary to what you might expect me to say, I agree: as always, Finn is right!
Oh, sure, blogs still matter plenty in the general sense. Sites like this one that cover news, and editorialize that news in what might be called a bloggy fashion, are doing just fine.
But when it comes to marketing and attempting to spread the word about new music and bands, which is what Finn is talking about here, music blogs are a much smaller part of the equation than at any point over the past decade. Blogs are no longer where music fans turn to discover new bands; they’re where fans go to get information about recently announced tours their favorite bands are going on, new music by those same well established acts, gossip (tons of gossip) and anything else that might fall under the umbrella of “news.”
But new music discovery pieces, track premieres, reviews of and interview with anyone but the top artists in the genre? They land with a thud. And it’s not just us: other metal site editors I speak to say they hardly see any attention on these types of content anymore either, and more and more publicists are telling me they don’t bother trying to line up premieres at all. I’m surprised publicists still even bother coming to us with premiere offers; it only happens with up-and-coming bands that little to no one has heard of, and I suppose they’re seeking a guaranteed post and a few eyeballs where there otherwise wouldn’t be any. Fair enough. I can tell you definitively, though, that reviews, interviews and premieres are the least popular types of content we post.
It didn’t used to be this way. In the early days of MetalSucks, when we got behind a band and wrote about all of their singles glowingly leading into an album release, it made a difference. They felt the heat, their label felt it, we felt it. A few bands I can point to as examples are Protest the Hero, Periphery, Animals as Leaders, The Ocean, Revocation… we were very early with all of those (I had to beg Prosthetic to let me premiere an Animals as Leaders track despite their strict “no free mp3s” policy at the time, for example) and if you asked them, I think they’d all say MS played some role in their rise.
But fans aren’t paying attention to premieres, new music hype pieces, reviews or interviews anymore. Not just here, but everywhere (see Finn’s video). And why would they? They don’t need “gatekeepers” like us telling them what to listen to when the recommendation engines and algorithmic playlists on Spotify and YouTube are just as good or better, and the magic of the internet makes it easier than ever before to discover new music that’s right up your alley. “Word of mouth” is stronger than it’s ever been, that phrase in quotes because it just happens on social networks now. People share what they like. Their friends react. In a way, it’s very old-school.
In closing, Finn is dead-on when he says the flow of new band popularity is the opposite of what it was even five or six years ago. Whereas it used to be that fans would take notice once bloggers wrote about you, now bloggers (and YouTubers, “influencers,” etc.) take notice once the fans start to create noise about a band. Recent examples of this kind of upstream trajectory are Gatecreeper, Tomb Mold, Rivers of Nihil, Turnstile and other bands that seemingly took a huge step up “out of nowhere.” It happened organically, on the ground level, then the so-called “tastemakers” got on board.
So, watch Finn’s video below and see what you think. It’s only four minutes long, perfect for modern-day internet attention spans like mine and yours ;)
