This won't work the way you think it will.
Some rambling thoughts about the potential pitfalls of a music newsletter collective, as I see them.
Hello and welcome to REPLY ALT, the first and only email newsletter about music. That’s a fun little joke I like to kick these posts off with because—and this may astonish you—REPLY ALT is actually not the only email newsletter out there. [hold for astonished gasps and champagne flutes shattering on the ground] I know, I know, it is hard to even fathom. It seems outright ABSURD that anyone would want to receive an email from someone other than me, America's Only Music Writer™, but believe it or not there are a number of other newsletters floating around, apparently.
As traditional print publications and online media continue their slow death march, and as writers and bloggers get laid off and/or realize it’s an unsustainable career path, newsletters have gained in popularity over the last year. I don’t have the hard data to back this up, but I imagine the graph looks like this:
Newsletters have gotten so popular among freelance writers, in fact, that a few of them have banded together to form newsletter collectives. The idea is: a handful of similarly minded writers and bloggers corral their efforts in an attempt to churn out more content and thus bring in more subscription revenue, breaking the shackles of the corporate machine and its insatiable reliance on clicks and ads from Dollar Shave Club or some hip new startup company that makes period panties for cats.
The two newsletter collectives that I enjoy following are the news/politics-focused Discourse (which is largely made of ex-Splinter people) and the news/sports-focused Defector (which is largely made up of ex-Deadspin people). And they both seem to be doing well. The latter is doing so well, actually, that it has already raked in enough money off subscriptions to abandon the newsletter model and morph into a full-on blog, which to me is like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon and spreading its beautiful wings, only to say, “Actually I think I wanna go back to being a disgusting lil caterpillar.” But hey, to each their own.
Naturally, some music writers have kicked around the idea of launching a similar media collective for music journalism. Here’s a tweet that got some people talking:
(Full disclosure: I have worked with Emilie in the past, so none of my dreadful forthcoming opinions are in any way a reflection on her or her work!)
I’ll cut to the chase: Idealistically, I want it to work, but practically I’m doubtful it would. At least not the way people think it will, and not in the long run.
Before I get branded as some sort of anti-collectivist ogre, I will clarify and say that I support the effort to launch it and am rooting for it to succeed! I would love nothing more than to cut the head off the media machine and take the power back into the hands of the creators. No gods, no masters, etc. Cautious idealism aside, though, I foresee a few potential pitfalls.
For starters, from what I’ve seen from my years working for Youth-Oriented Media Companies, it seems that they are staffed, in large part, by a bunch of fucking children. I don’t even mean that in a strictly negative way. I am a fucking child. My brain functions in such a way that I can rapidfire off 50-plus jokes about Father John Misty, yet every April 14 I have to drop a CVS bag brimming with various paper slips and receipts onto an accountant’s desk and say pweeaase help me pay my wittle taxes pweeease. These are the types people who make for good creators. They are imperative to a prolific media outlet. Yet, an entire staff of them is a recipe for disaster. Too many personalities, too many problems. If a venture like this were to function properly, there would need to be assigned roles—managing editors, EICs, etc.—but power and rank can poison the spirit of collectivism.
In my mind, the closest thing to a collectively run music initiative that could be considered both a creative achievement and a longterm success is Maximum Rocknroll, along with its live-music extension, 924 Gilman St. The longrunning punk zine and the Berkeley club were both started largely through the efforts of the late Tim Yohannan, an organizer who was already in his 40s when Gilman, a club attended primarily by teenagers, opened its doors.
Not that long after its opening, Yohannan walked away from Gilman and, left without an adult in the room, the club’s volunteer-run operations were in jeopardy. In the extremely thorough Bay Area oral history Gimme Something Better, there’s a great quote from Larry Livermore, co-founder of Lookout Records (another successful indie institution that cratered after its adult-in-charge quit), where he speaks about how Gilman was able to endure after losing its chief operator only by sticking someone in charge:
It was on the verge of closing. One thing I learned from Gilman, no matter how socialistic or cooperative the venture is, somebody always has to take ultimate responsibility. Gilman succeeded, with all of its faults, because Tim was able to step into that role.
I helped encourage this one young but very smart kid to be the new head coordinator. Basically I said to him, “Look, all this cooperative, collective stuff is great, but there has to be somebody that's willing to tell people to fuck off and to say this is what has to be done. And I think you can do it.”
His punk name was Mike Stand, but it's Mike Lymon. He later went on to found a very successful internet company in Berkeley. He might have been less than 18 when he took over Gilman, and completely saved it from bankruptcy. He was an unsung hero.
In that spirit, I’ve been noticing that some of the individuals who run more profitable personal newsletters—specifically Luke O’Neil’s funny/depressing Hell World and Todd Burns’ helpful Music Journalism Insider—have been paying outside contributors for one-off posts. Perhaps that is the way forward: Starting small and building out. But of course, that puts a few potential problems on the owners of those newsletters—namely that I foresee writers handing in subpar work, submitting it late, and being stubborn about taking notes or edits, because hey it’s just a guy’s newsletter and not Rolling Stone, right?
“But surely, the success of Defector and Discourse prove a group effort can work, right?” Well, no. I don’t think it’s necessarily a one-to-one comparison. For starters, Defector and Discourse had huge head starts in that their staffs had been previously hired and shaped elsewhere, by companies with health insurance plans and HR teams and offices, etc. They already knew their roles and their dynamics and applied them to a new but similar venture. Unless Pitchfork’s staff wants to cut the Conde Nast cord and go private, assembling a newsletter collective for the music would require putting together a patchwork of writers and editors from scratch.
Also, while the voices of Discourse are all unique in their own way, they’re largely approaching coverage from the same general lefty perspective. Same thing with sports writers, who differ in team allegiances or sport beats but are united in their larger efforts to provide smarter coverage than the Barstool bottomfeeders. Music journalism is different. It’s a free for all of opinions, tastes, and bad takes.
Music writers are the kinds of people whose existences are predicated on the smallest of music hills they’re willing to die on. They’re born arguers who are socially awkward and annoying. And that, I think, makes them good at what they do. But at the same time, they’re difficult to wrangle into a unified direction.
“I don’t understand, Dan. Give me a hypothetical example and stick a lot of unfunny jokes and clunky metaphors in there if possible.” OK fine. Say a big, divisive artist like Taylor Swift releases a new album. Maybe someone on staff will want to write a big Taylor Takedown. Say, oh I don’t know, they want to point out that an artist of her stature has no business submitting her album into the Alternative Albums category and is actively hurting smaller artists for whom that chart is the only place they stand a chance on Billboard among the corporate giants and the move is akin to LeBron James dunking on nine-year-olds in a youth basketball game. But maybe someone else on staff will want to play nice with Taylor. Maybe they are working with Taylor’s people to land a Big Interview with her and a hit piece would jeopardize their chances.
Or maybe it won’t be about how to cover powerful artists. Maybe the disagreement will be about censorship or editorial policies or word policing or OH GOD IMAGINE THE ‘BEST OF THE YEAR’ LIST ORGANIZING. These conversations will devolve into ongoing passive aggressive fights about Who Is Right and What We Stand For and Who Our Audience Is. These are conflicts that arise in traditional editorial meetings, of course, but it’s hard to see peaceful resolution without an established adult in the room.
And yes, I fully realize that the phrase “Adult In The Room” which I am espousing has become shorthand for the capitalist ratfucks who run media ventures into the ground with their demands for unattainable traffic numbers and complete lack of understanding of the websites they own. I don’t mean the vampire money men. By “adult,” I mean someone on staff with whom the buck stops when problems arise and when work needs to be delegated. They need to be willing to perform the thousand and one unpleasant and thankless tasks that come with running a business (and it is a business). And this person needs to be responsible for figuring out the money flow because, as anyone who’s ever played at a punk squat can tell you, even splits never work out evenly.
Speaking of money, let’s address the matter of funding. When I step away from this very insidery viewpoint and look at the idea of a music newsletter collective from a consumer perspective, I have a hard time imagining that a general readership would be willing to pay for such a thing, especially when compared to politics or sports. Political coverage is extremely popular and lucrative right now among newsletter writers. Whenever I pop over to Substack’s top posts of the day, the large majority of them are titled shit like “Let’s Talk About The Historic Significance of Flies on Mike Pence’s Head” or “Can Trump Really Say THAT?” And sports are a monolithic form of extremely profitable entertainment. Millions of people are watching the same games and athletes, and follow sports writers who… uh, I don’t know what sports writers cover, actually. Write about how far last night’s home runs travelled and what footballs are made of? I dunno / not my business!
But music is harder to pin down. It’s a fractured artform that has been further compartmentalized by the internet. I am lucky that REPLY ALT has a few thousand subscribers who seem to enjoy or at least tolerate my coverage of all things in the punk/hardcore/emo/indie rock world (subscribe plz!), but would anyone care if I were paired up with other writers from disparate genres? Would that add any value? Probly not. Readers like to stick to their own little worlds about their own little genres. There are niche blogs and websites and newsletters dedicated to various genres and it seems like a losing battle to run a general interest music site these days. When was the last time you were drawn to a music website through a link on social media and then clicked around to see what else they had? I will be honest and say that the answer is a big ol’ never for me!
This is all my longwinded way of saying that a music newsletter collective sounds very exciting but stands a good chance of imploding on the launchpad if not structured properly and carefully. And even then, the power dynamic would be very delicate. I think you’re going to end up with more people willing to write for it than pay for it. Asking writers and editors to commit their time to a project that’s going to take a while to become financially solvent, if it ever does, is a big ask.
Then again, maybe a new music publication shouldn’t be built to last at all. After all, every countercultural venture that starts out with good intentions eventually either dies or lives long enough to become a boring, institutionalized ghost of its former self. MTV, Rolling Stone, SPIN. They’re all but flickering embers of the mighty blazes they once were. (Unless any of these publications want to pay me to write about music in which case their specific inclusion was a typo.)
So I say: Start the collective, because it sure as hell beats the alternative. Just make sure there’s someone there to tell people to fuck off and to say this is what has to be done.
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