Has music journalism lost its way?

Has music journalism lost its way? Earlier this week, the debate bubbled up on music Twitter after a user named @cllnsmith posted a viral joke about Pitchfork that (understandably) made a lot of people in the music journo community pretty mad. The timing, for our own opportunistic purposes, was perfect, because we happened to be putting the finishing touches on an episode with veteran music journalist and NPR music critic Ann Powers, inspired by a Facebook post she published that offered a refreshingly nuanced take on the forces beleaguering the field. 

"Here's something I think music writers might want to think/talk about," she wrote. "The rise of the quick react/hot take colliding with the unmanageable proliferation of accessible music releases and streaming platforms'  algorithmic favoritism of the very few have combined to enforce media focus on pop's 1 per cent to the extreme."

Noting the extent to which underground and mid-level artists appear to have been crowded out of the conversation, she raises a thought-provoking question: "Is this a correlation to the rise of the one per cent in other aspects of the culture?”

Lucky for us, Ann was kind enough to join us to talk about how we got here. And as someone who has been chronicling American pop music and youth culture on the ground for nearly four decades, from the scrappy alt weekly scene of 1980s of San Francisco to the august halls of the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, she seemed like the perfect person to help us make sense of the shifting role of the music journalist, along with the economic, technological, and wider cultural forces that have shaped it. What is the point of music journalism and criticism? Why did we need it in the first place? What remains—even in the era of streaming and social media—that makes it still important to have now? Join Emilie and Andrea as we go long on these questions with Ann and compare notes on our respective journeys through the field. 

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