Page 24 - Weiss, Jernej, ur./ed. 2024. Glasbena kritika – nekoč in danes ▪︎ Music Criticism – Yesterday and Today. Koper/Ljubljana: Založba Univerze na Primorskem in Festival Ljubljana. Studia musicologica Labacensia, 7
P. 24
glasbena kritika – nekoč in danes | music criticism – yesterday and today
reason to believe that matters will soon improve. The problem goes deep,
and it has nothing to do with how this or that zone of the arts is faring. It
has to do with the very survival of journalism as a business. Some time ago,
people stopped thinking of news as something for which they should have
to pay. “Information wants to be free,” the slogan went. The drastic decline
in revenue that has resulted from the falling off of subscriptions and news-
stand purchases has caused cutbacks across the board. The wound was to
a great extent self-inflected. When the Internet came along, many newspa-
pers and magazines placed their “content” online free of charge, assuming
that mobs of new readers would swoon over their offerings and subscribe. A
battle was already lost when that word “content” entered circulation. In oth-
er words, the media voluntarily brought on itself the crisis that had invol-
untarily befallen the music business, when recordings were pirated through
file-sharing. Print media pirated itself.
The shift to digital publication has also introduced a tremendous-
ly damaging factor known throughout the business as “clicks.” One could
now measure, with alarming exactness, exactly how many people have read
or look at a given story. The result, at many publications, is an overvalua-
tion of those stories that get the most short-term attention. And once you
accept the equation of popularity and value, the game is over for the per-
forming arts. There is no longer any justification for giving space to clas-
sical music, jazz, dance, architecture, gallery shows, and any other artistic
activity that fails to ignite mass enthusiasm. In a cultural-Darwinist world
where only the buzziest survive, the arts section would consist solely of su-
perhero-movie reviews, TV-show recaps, and instant-reaction think-pieces
about pop superstars. Never mind that such entities hardly need coverage
in established papers, having achieved market domination through social
media. It’s the intellectual equivalent of a tax cut for the super-rich.
In recent years, in my country, a certain consciousness has dawned of
the dangers of clickbait journalism. The election of an incompetent, cor-
rupt, and dangerous president in 2016 owed much to the catastrophic feed-
back loop of fake news and clickbait. Afterward, subscriptions to the New
York Times, the Washington Post, and other so-called “legacy” publications
surged. Do these chastened content-consumers really want breezy chitchat
on trending topics? Or do they trust that storied institutions will decide for
themselves what merits attention? One lesson to be learned from the rise
of Donald Trump is that the media should not bind itself blindly to what-
24
reason to believe that matters will soon improve. The problem goes deep,
and it has nothing to do with how this or that zone of the arts is faring. It
has to do with the very survival of journalism as a business. Some time ago,
people stopped thinking of news as something for which they should have
to pay. “Information wants to be free,” the slogan went. The drastic decline
in revenue that has resulted from the falling off of subscriptions and news-
stand purchases has caused cutbacks across the board. The wound was to
a great extent self-inflected. When the Internet came along, many newspa-
pers and magazines placed their “content” online free of charge, assuming
that mobs of new readers would swoon over their offerings and subscribe. A
battle was already lost when that word “content” entered circulation. In oth-
er words, the media voluntarily brought on itself the crisis that had invol-
untarily befallen the music business, when recordings were pirated through
file-sharing. Print media pirated itself.
The shift to digital publication has also introduced a tremendous-
ly damaging factor known throughout the business as “clicks.” One could
now measure, with alarming exactness, exactly how many people have read
or look at a given story. The result, at many publications, is an overvalua-
tion of those stories that get the most short-term attention. And once you
accept the equation of popularity and value, the game is over for the per-
forming arts. There is no longer any justification for giving space to clas-
sical music, jazz, dance, architecture, gallery shows, and any other artistic
activity that fails to ignite mass enthusiasm. In a cultural-Darwinist world
where only the buzziest survive, the arts section would consist solely of su-
perhero-movie reviews, TV-show recaps, and instant-reaction think-pieces
about pop superstars. Never mind that such entities hardly need coverage
in established papers, having achieved market domination through social
media. It’s the intellectual equivalent of a tax cut for the super-rich.
In recent years, in my country, a certain consciousness has dawned of
the dangers of clickbait journalism. The election of an incompetent, cor-
rupt, and dangerous president in 2016 owed much to the catastrophic feed-
back loop of fake news and clickbait. Afterward, subscriptions to the New
York Times, the Washington Post, and other so-called “legacy” publications
surged. Do these chastened content-consumers really want breezy chitchat
on trending topics? Or do they trust that storied institutions will decide for
themselves what merits attention? One lesson to be learned from the rise
of Donald Trump is that the media should not bind itself blindly to what-
24
