You used to check music publications to find out about good new music or read about music news. Nowadays there are better replacements and you don't need it.

News

Almost every news piece reaches Twitter or Instagram before any music publication. Some articles are completely based off tweets whether reliable or not. A lot of articles are just based off other music publications so you never know if it's fake news, which happens often. Every artist publishes new music on social media so they don't need music publications to post about it you can just follow these artists!

Thinkpieces

You don't need to read an article to read a thinkpiece you can just go on social media, actually a lot of the thinkpieces aren't original and are copied from social media (like KTT!) Why would you pay people to write articles over hot takes on KTT? Also a lot of these thinkpieces are either biased, because the label paid or because of politics, or straight up negative and hold nothing of value. Or just uninteresting and you know this "journalist" was grasping for straws.

Reviews

We used to read reviews to know if we should buy the album. Now you can play every album in the click of a button so you can judge for yourself. I don't know any music publication that posts interesting reviews, even Pitchfork which used to be a nice place to find good music is now heavily biased and kisses Twitter's ass, just like every other publication. Why not just go on Twitter? Why pay journalists when we can just go on RYM? Say what you say about RYM but I think even with the mob mentality, they play it less safe than music publications.

Click Bait

Pretty much every publication has to do click bait to attract readers, and write many articles about all sorts of stupid things, just to get their paycheck and get more money off ads. It's so ridicilous to click on an article and see it's not really about the title, or it's just two paragraphs about a tweet. Or you can link it directly to a thread on KTT, so lazy and so useless today.

Finding new music

Again social media, I find more good music there, also Spotify and Apple Music, I know artists pay them but they pay magazines too so what's the difference?

I made this thread because of the other thread about the article "A Boogie is trash", like why do we need this article? Why do we need to pay someone to write that s***? Contribute to society my kings.

Anyway what do you think?

Music forums are worse...

There is no good music

?

agreed, this s*** is obsolete

I forgot to talk about The Needle Drop, i think he's a good example of why this industry belongs to the independant individuals

Think what you think about him, but he's entertaining and people care about his opinion

Yeah music journalism's trash for the most part

Op making some valid points

I'll be real with you Ron James, I care about your opinion on R&B music more than any one of these magazines

another thing that bothers me is that it's primarily white writers who think they're experts on "urban music"

Didn’t Frank Zappa say somethin like writing about music is like dancing about architecture

gatekeepers are necessary

Music publications let me know kehlani released a new video today where she’s basically doing a cam show on an iPhone 7 camera so I wouldn’t say they’re completely useless

Who’s paying Brandon to write two paragraphs about “I hate A Boogie” go b**** on Twitter

You could’ve read that on KTT MSCT they h**** as f***

Pitchfork is really good for album news/single releases tbh

Lmfao true

P4K is only one i sometimes look at because they quite good a spotting talent

They basically gave Arcade fire a platform with the Funeral review

I don't visit any music publications, but I can see the value.

When I visit a site like The Ringer, I'm not doing it out of necessity, I'm doing it for entertainment. I'm bored and I want to see if they have a piece that interests me. I imagine people use sites like Complex or Pitchfork in the same way.

I know you can get hot takes from twitter, but sometimes i'm in the mood to read a long form, well written article, not 120 characters.

Most of the stuff sucks, but every now and then you'll get something interesting.