I’m on your side if you no longer read music reviews in magazines and online publications. We can find comfortable reasons such as growing old and becoming less enthusiastic about new releases or new angles on old releases, or not finding enough time to delve deeper into an album or artist. Yet these may not be the core reasons why the craft has lost its charm.
Throughout the last ten years, I have gone up in the amount of books and articles I read. But music reviews have gradually made for a smaller proportion of them. This is when discovering new shape-shifting artists was once done by reading about a favorite journalist’s view about them. That is no longer the case.
Apart from music journalists who write about music as their day jobs, the same argument can be had about blogs that were once known as taste-makers. There are almost no traces of them left. The ubiquitousness of streaming services, AI-driven playlist recommendations, and similar artists have replaced them.
But we did not always find great music through “similar” artists, because great journalists and taste-maker blogs opened our ears to new realms. Indie lovers found beauty in hip-hop. Hip-hop connoisseurs inevitably had to reach the shores of jazz, blues, doo-wop, and rock ‘n roll. The catalyst was the blog or writer who had listened obsessively to…
