What Happened To Music Writing This Year?

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The question “what do readers want?” has hovered over any media business worth its advertising revenue for years, but in 2012, it took on more urgency. Any item worth its pixels this year was built for sharing, for posting on Twitter or in friends’ Facebook newsfeeds and multiplexing from there. Sometimes these shareable pieces would dig deeply into a topic with a new perspective; more often they would play off already-existing biases, asserting them or proudly acting the contrarian.

Music writing — the mishmash of news, reviews, lists, self-promotional social media updates, reports on those updates — was not immune to the ever-stronger pressure on media companies to goad readers into acting as their own town criers; if anything, the pressures of social media brought the ways in which people learn about music home. Genre-spanning lists that include familiar names, nostalgia grabs or bold declarations (or, ideally, all three) can bring in eyeballs from all over the taste spectrum, from angry enthusiasts to chuckling casual fans; scandal-free news bites on new artists, on the other hand, might only bring in fans of that band, or the occasional relative. Some sites, buoyed by their name recognition and traffic from coverage of other topics, only dipped into the realm of photo galleries and lists when they absolutely had to; others went whole-hog with the pandering, spreading their conventional wisdom over 40-page photo galleries containing a Katy Perry cleavage shot or two. Most outlets — their brands playing second fiddle in readers’ browsing habits to Facebook and Twitter — unsteadily meandered in between the poles, hoping to hold on to their critical credibility while indulging in a gallery here or tweet reportage there.

In the old days of arts journalism within the general-interest sphere, some newspapers and magazines responded to the sheer number of albums (and books) released every year by going as broad as possible, allowing staff writers to follow their noses while also requiring them to cover The Big Names. But now that musicians can have a bigger readership than the publications covering them, the idea of the generalist outlet with a point of view has fallen by the wayside; in its place are legions of sites that dive down cultist rabbit-holes and other sites that attempt to predict what the masses will want to read and share on social media like Twitter and Facebook. (Buttons advertising Facebook “likes” or Pinterest “pins” are atop pieces of individual content, which reveals maybe too much about the importance of winning each hour’s popularity contest.) The online model, with its robust tools for analyzing readership and its constantly content-craving maw, lays the broad-brush motivations of Googlers bare; “new songs that are good” is rarely high on the “popular search term” list — and how would a search engine define a “good” song, anyway?

The idea of giving readers what they want brings up a couple of somewhat unpleasant questions. The first: Who reads music writing? There’s obviously a core of readers invested in what reviews and think pieces have to say — they debate on Twitter and in specialist havens like I Love Music, on their Facebook feeds and even sometimes in the comment sections. The economics of the web, which are both more directly tied to traffic numbers and lower-margin than those of print, make that audience too small to make any economic sense as a core demographic; readers outside the Best Music Writing-obsessed have to be reached as well.

And this is where the larger quandary comes in. If the idea is to “serve the reader,” does that mean exposing them to new things they haven’t heard and ideas that might not have been aired yet, or does it mean pivoting off the conventional wisdom in some way? The most crucial difference between print and online media consumption boils down to the click. When reading a print publication with multiple stories, your eye could flick over a headline or catchy paragraph and be drawn in; the process of choosing to read something is fluid. Compare leafing through a paper to scanning a stack of headlines, deciding which ones compel you from their brief description, clicking, reading, then clicking back and going through the whole rigmarole again. (There’s also a question of scale; the cascade of headlines coming from, say, Twitter or Facebook is magnitudes bigger than that in a typical daily.) “Most Popular” lists on some publications’ sidebars allow for a quick way to dive into content, but they often become self-reinforcing, or reward topics that have a predictable payoff.

In 2012, attempts to stay ahead of readers’ innate desires resulted in a collective throwing up of hands. Think pieces and reviews still existed, but they were accompanied by other attempts to lure readers: Trifles like album titles and track listings treated as news items worthy of their own “stories” (to maximize the possibility of people tripping over their fingers and into a unique view); artists out of the public spotlight for more than six months unearthed as if they were creatures from another dimension; Tweets and other public statements by artists taken out of context and drained of their tone so as to stoke “WTF” headlines; superlative-laden lists not even aimed at expressing an opinion in count-downable form; posts with factual errors seen as hits to institutional credibility and opportunities to wring double the traffic out of one story.

The keenest metaphor for music journalism in 2012 turned out to be the around-the-world jet jaunt known as the #rihannaplane. The Barbadian pop star proved to be a lightning rod throughout the year, releasing provocative singles while taking to social media to post photos and profane tweets that burnish her sex-drugs-and-club-beats image — a perfect storm of content available for mining, complete with controversial and complicated, Oprah-interview-worthy relationship with her almost-as-famous ex Chris Brown that even mutated into a couple of much-discussed songs. She’s the dream subject for any media outlet worth its analytics, and when her team invited a small army of journalists to accompany her on a seven-day, seven-show tour, the potential for content was so strong that some outlets waived their no-junket policies.

It proved to be a bust, at least for the journalists. Ri came out on Day One and showered the assembled with champagne and cognac, and all seemed well. But as time wore on, not only did the promise of getting any more facetime with her — not “up close and personal” so much as “not mediated by Instagram filters” — dissipate, so did the guests’ treatment. There were delays. There was blatant product placement. There were not a lot of opportunities to sleep. At one point tensions bubbled over so severely that a passenger tore off his clothes and streaked the plane. The excuses given incorporated the standard PR claims of “exhaustion,” but the paparazzi photos showing Rihanna shopping for lingerie and partying with Diddy punched holes in that particular alibi. A few of the stories eventually published were almost startling in their candor (Julianne Escobedo Shepherd of Spin and Jeff Rosenthal of Rolling Stone offered particularly gimlet-eyed takes) in large part because they laid bare the transactional nature of “music journalism” in 2012; every piece of “news” an artist offered could be bled dry by media outlets, but there were so many of them that big stars had to go absurd or disastrous, or a combination of both, and satisfy nobody. (It should probably be noted that Unapologetic, the album Rihanna was promoting with this tour, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 — her first chart-topping album, although that position was probably the result of her team holding back the album from streaming-music services than any mutineering reporters.)

Where writing about music goes from this point is anybody’s guess. Marquee outlets will still score exclusive interviews with big names and execute them well, but the hustle for angles and stories — and, most crucially, readers — might only become more Darwinistic. The appetite for the longer-form pieces fetishistically known as #longreads seems to be growing, but are massive amounts of text a boutique interest for outlets that can afford to let their writers do deep dives (like those that have one person working traffic-whoring duty so other writers can dig deep into a topic)? Is the rise of social media, which has for many artists replaced pairing up with publications for the purposes of advertising new material, going to push writing even further to the sidelines? And what of the artists? “Maybe somebody with more lawyers can take them to task, but i’ll just use the Internet and Twitter instead,” Jack White said — er, typed — after a misquote where he was apparently insulting Lady Gaga spread around blogs like wildfire. (Although surely any editor would love to have his byline on their site, since it would be a traffic boon.)

Perhaps most important, though, is the fate of readers — who are also listeners. Is all of this chatter about music’s superficial aspects, whether angry or anodyne, really helping people hear music, or is the endless thicket of lists and updates on who’s tweeting who a sign that “discovery” has been ceded to algorithmic solutions and recommendations from friends? In the pre-streaming era, music writing had a function for the listener, providing context about a record’s sounds (which Robert Christgau cheekily condensed as “Consumer Guide”) as well as the artistic vision behind it. As we go into 2013, there’s almost too much context — from streaming albums to artist tweets to comments in the iTunes Store and beyond — and music writers become just another voice, shouting above the fray to be heard. Turning that chaos into a conversation that spans fans of all genres and artists, and that connects people in surprising ways, should be a goal among writers and editors in 2013 — even if doing so means to first have a radical rethinking about the ways of building an audience and a media business.

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Bollywood 2012: Small budgets fight it out among 100cr club

While the 100 crore club became a fad in Bollywood this year with star-driven films raking in the moolah at the box office, small budget movies too made their presence felt among the bigwigs with strong content and entertainment factor.

Superstars – Salman, Shah Rukh and Aamir – ruled the box office with the success of Ek Tha Tiger, Jab Tak Hai Jaan and Talaash, on the other hand the innovative subjects of movies like Gangs of Wasseypur, Kahaani, Vicky Donor and Paan Singh Tomar connected with the audience.

“It was a better year this time. A lot of big and small budget films have done well. New kind of films with innovative subjects were being made and audience liked them. There were only a few disappointments this year. Overall it seems the year was good for the Hindi film industry,” trade analyst Vinod Mirani told PTI.

Kahaani, directed by Sujoy Ghosh and starring Vidya Balan, became a huge hit as a suspense thriller. The film was everything but a typical Bollywood project- pregnant female protagonist, small scale set-up in Kolkata and almost half the dialogues in Bengali.

Another path-breaker was Shoojit Sircar’s Vicky Donor, with the male protagonist playing the role of a sperm donor, a profession still considered a taboo. The film’s music and Delhi-setting was loved by the audience.

Anurag Kashyap’s two-part epic Gangs of Wasseypur was a resounding success. With a rural crime setting, lot of violence and not so famous faces, the film impressed both the critics and the audience. The film was even screened at the prestigious Cannes film festival.

Irrfan Khan-starrer Paan Singh Tomar, story of an athlete-turned-rebel, and Akshay Kumar’s Oh My God, a satire on certain religious beliefs, found resonance both among the critics and audience.

Another film which won hearts was Anurag Basu’s Barfi!. The film had two mainstream actors Ranbir Kapoor and Priyanka Chopra completely demolish their starry images to emerge as a deaf-mute boy and an autistic girl in love. The film is India’s official entry to the Oscars this year.

Simple yet touching, Sridevi made a successful comeback with English Vinglish playing a housewife who endeavours to learn English.

While offbeat films found their space in mainstream cinema, it was a good year for the masala entertainers too.

Hrithik Roshan-Sanjay Dutt starrer remake of Agneepath became the first movie of the year to reportedly earn Rs 123 crore at the domestic box office. It was followed by Sajid Khan’s multi-starrer comedy Housefull 2.

Films like Prabhu Deva’s Rowdy Rathore, which saw Akshay return to action movies and Rohit Shetty’s comedy Bol Bachchan, also joined the 100 crore club,.

“2012 was one of the best years for us – a year when our strategy of focusing on entertaining and differentiated content across all genres came together in a big way. We had two of the biggest hits of the year Rowdy Rathore and Barfi!,” Siddharth Roy Kapur, Managing Director – Studios, Disney UTV told PTI.

Salman Khan’s major release Ek Tha Tiger, which grossed Rs 186 crore, was his first with Yash Raj Films. Directed by Kabir Khan, the film was a love story of two spies from either side of the border.

His other major release is the sequel to Dabangg, due to hit theatres this Friday. Also starring Sonakshi Sinha and Prakash Raj, the film is expected to be as big a money spinner.

Diwali had the two King of Romances – Yash Chopra and Shah Rukh Khan – unite for the last time to deliver the superhit Jab Tak Hai Jaan.Starring Katrina Kaif and Anushka Sharma in the female leads, the film also crossed the 100 crore mark, besides going down in history as the swan song of Chopra.

JTHJ clashed at the box office with Ajay Devgn’s Son of Sardaar but did not hamper its success.Aamir Khan dabbled in the genre of suspense drama with Talaash. Directed by Reema Kagti Talaash went on to earn big money in the domestic and overseas market. The film saw Aamir playing the role of a cop, Rani Mukerji his wife and Kareena Kapoor a prostitute.

Saif Ali Khan returned to romantic-comedy with Cocktail, a genre which has been lucky for him. Directed by Homi Adajania, Cocktail also starred Deepika Padukone and Diana Penty. The film reportedly made on a budget of Rs 35 crore earned Rs 75 crore.

Saif’s other film Agent Vinod co-starring his now wife Kareena Kapoor dabbled with the spy thriller genre. This film had a modest fate at the box office.Among actresses it was Katrina Kaif who had two major releases Ek Tha Tiger and Jab Tak Hai Jaan.

Kareena Kapoor had four releases – Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu, Agent Vinod, Heroine and Talaash out of which Agent Vinod and Heroine despite their hype failed to create magic at the box office.

For Priyanka Chopra Agneepath was a huge hit and her Barfi! performance impressed one and all. Teri Meri Kahani with Shaid Kapoor was disappointing.

Sonakshi Sinha had a good year with Rowdy Rathore and Son of Sardaar becoming superhits but Joker was a flop.

Other films that disappointed this year include Abbas-Mustan’s action thriller Players, south director Gautham Menon’s Ekk Deewana Tha, R Madhavan-Bipasha Basu’s Jodi Breakers, Priyadarshan’s Tezz, Karisma Kapoor’s comeback vehicle Dangerous Ishq, Rani Mukherjee’s Aiyyaa, Ram Gopal Varma’s Bhoot Returns and Prakash Jha’s Chakrayuh.

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