Tag: Music reviewing

Christopher Nosnibor’s Guide to Being a Music Reviewer – Part Seven: Negative Equity for Working? No Thanks!

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I’ve written previously on the economics of the music industry and some of my experiences working as a music reviewer. And yes, I do mean working: just because I enjoy it, doesn’t mean there isn’t a considerable amount of time and effort involved. There are deadlines and word counts and chaser emails from editors and PR people. And there are standards to maintain.

I recall the Musicians’ Union campaigning against venues with ‘pay to play’ policies back in the 90s, and this practice does now appear to be rather less prevalent. There’s also currently a substantial movement campaigning on behalf of workers – writers and artists in particular – with a view to prevent exploitation, and to stop people being pushed into working for free. While zero-hours contracts – and I’d like to think it goes without saying I’m fundamentally opposed to them – have been a hot topic of late, the vast swathes of people working for free, ‘for the exposure’ or to ‘build their portfolio’ as they’re so often told, have been largely overlooked.

I write music reviews. It’s not my day-job, because writing music reviews at the level I operate doesn’t pay. I’m ok with that. I used to spend a lot of money buying albums and going to watch bands play. Now I don’t. But I am still very active in supporting, and, effectively promoting music. I spend long hours typing up reviews. I’ve spent a decade straight doing this now. I’ve seen some incredible shows, conducted some hero-worship interviews and heard more amazing albums than I could have ever imagined. But churning out up to 1,000 words a night and working past midnight seven nights a week on top of a challenging day-job and parenting means it is very much for the love rather than the money. But I view it rather like bartering: I receive an album or entry to show in exchange for writing which may further the artist’s career. I feel no guilt over this, especially if an artist has hired a PR company: their job is to attract media coverage by sending representatives of said media copies of the album or inviting them to shows in the hope that they’ll provide coverage which is positive. A positive review is, ultimately, marketing and promotion. If a PR fails to attract significant media attention, then they’ve arguably failed in their job. But they still get paid. It’s not necessarily their fault if the press don’t bite. But of course, if they do, then the PR has done a good job, justified the expense, and probably helped shift some units.

So why would an artist or label undermine this? I recently experienced an unusual and frustrating situation, where a local (sort of) band I like launched their new album, at a venue I like, promoted by a national PR I’ve been in contact with for quite some time. The gig came to me via the editor of a site, and it was he who arranged it with the PR. On arrival at the venue, I was informed that I was on the list, but that it was a ‘cheap rates’ list, rather than an actual guest list.

I accept that things sometimes go wrong, that communication chains break from time to time: the guest list doesn’t get passed to the guy on the door, or your name hasn’t been added to it, or you’re not marked as having a +1. It can be embarrassing. But there’s no point making life hard for the guy on the door: he’s just doing his job (even if often they’re not interested in being shown the email confirming that you’re on the list with a +1, because, well, you could be anyone and besides, there’s a queue of people with actual tickets to deal with).

Music reviewers are often accused of freeloading, of being liggers – an accusation I’ve faced myself. But as a writer, I’m not getting something for nothing: my side of the deal is to actually produce copy in exchange for my free pass. Do other journalists face the same criticism? Can you imagine a news journalist being told ‘you like news, you should write news articles for free’? Or, to offer a slightly different perspective, imagine a producer pitching to Jamie Oliver, ‘well, you enjoy cooking, so why should I pay you for your time to do it on TV? It’s just a hobby, right?’

Let’s look at this in terms of the broader picture. People usually work for an hourly rate, or otherwise on a by-job basis. The minimum wage in England is £7.50 for over 25s. I’m way over 25. So, if I arrive at a gig having been informed by a PR firm hired by a band or label that I’m on the guest list for a show, with a +1, I should be able to reasonably expect that I will be allowed entry to the event as a non-paying guest, with the expectation that I will provide coverage and therefore media exposure for said artist. Because, after all, my review is work.

If it’s only a £6 gig, and it lasts 4 hours and takes me 2 hours to write my review, then I’m working for well below minimum wage. But I accept that, it’s the nature of an industry in which there is no money once you’re below the top 5%. But to arrive at a show to be told that no, I’m on the ‘discount ticket’ list and that I have to pay £4 to get in… well, that’s different. It may sound petty to piss and moan about paying £4 to get into a £6 gig up the road from your house, but it’s not actually about £4. It’s about the fact I’m expected to pay to provide a band or event with exposure.

You wouldn’t hire a web developer and ask them to pay to build you a website, would you? Or tell your builder that you’re going to charge him to build an extension? How many would walk into a restaurant and tell the chef he’s got to pay you to cook a meal? So why would it be different for a music reviewer?

I accept the depressing reality that we live in a culture where everyone wants something for nothing, thanks in no small part to free music streaming sites, YouTube, and crappy internships. But as of now, I’m done paying to work.

Christopher Nosnibor’s Guide to Being a Music Reviewer – Part Six

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It’s been just over a year since I posted the last of the five previous ‘Guide to Being a Music Reviewer’ posts. I’ve been busy, launching my own site – Aural Aggravation – while drowning in emails with downloads and streams, offering interviews and live shows, and wading through endless CD. To be clear, I’m certainly not complaining about any of this. But equally, I’m not getting rich off any of this: my reviews for other sites are unpaid, and Aural Aggravation is ad-free as a matter of principle.

Generally, I keep the CD I get sent if they’re any good, the bulk of the remainder I donate to charity shops. However, occasionally, I will find I’m running out of space and stick a handful up on eBay (though I’m always mindful never to list anything prior to release date, or even until a fair while after so as not to take potential sales from the artist). I tend to start all of my sales with a .99p starting bid, because ultimately, it’s more about getting rid of stuff than profiteering.

Now, it’s not often I’ll gripe about specific personal matters, but on this occasion, it feels appropriate, given that it ties in with the broader issue of the economics of music reviewing, the music industry and beyond.

Earlier this week I sold an album with a sole bid at .99p. Three days after the auction closed, the buyer paid through PayPal with the message ‘second class post is fine.’ So the following day, in my lunch break, I went to the post office and sent it by second class post (and obtained proof of posting, of course).

Two days later, I received the following message:

so pleased with cd but was about to register my dissatisfaction with postage and system refers me back to you.,,,,i find 1 pound 50p excessive for a 72p stamp and a recycled jiffy….over 100% mark up on postage

I was rather miffed by this. 100% markup on the postage itself, maybe – at least on the face of it – but in context, the complaint seemed, well, just a bit twatty. But of course, the customer is always right, supposedly, and so I elected for diplomacy and replied as follows:

I’m sorry you’re unhappy with the cost of P&P.

I charge a flat rate p&p for CDs, although actual costs do vary. For example, ones in jewel cases etc. tend to come in heavier, and I usually use first class, which is (on average) around £1.25-1.65. I always recycle jiffies, not simply for economy to me, but to keep packaging costs down for buyers, and for the good of the environment.

However, you did advise in your delivery instructions that second class was fine. I therefore used second class as requested, hence the lower cost of the stamp.

I would add that eBay take 15p in fees off the 99p sale price of the CD, and another 10p in fees for my p&p costs postage. PayPal in turn deduct 28p on a transaction of £2.49, meaning I make on average 71p per CD (ignoring the cost of tape, etc, and the time it takes to pack and post it), although granted, on this occasion, I’ll have made £1.41.

That said, I’m willing to refund you 70p if you so wish.

I genuinely believed he would be shamed into making a deal of 70p, given that he’d purchased a fairly recent album, in mint conditions and with a press release thrown in, for £2.49, within 48 hours of making payment.

Instead, he accepted the offer, saying “that would be appreciated”.

It’s more than I can say for his custom. If you want to get rich, don’t become a music reviewer.

ebay-reveals-new-company-logo-7cfa25d9f9

eBay: where tossers shop for bargains and complain that their bargain wasn’t quite bargain enough

Not in it for the Money: Getting Aggro

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I was faced with a dilemma. Back in 2008, having written a couple of largely unread music reviews on my MySpace Blog, I started writing as a reviewer for Whisperin’ and Hollerin’. It came naturally: I’d written music reviews for a few local and regional papers and so on in the past. And so before long, I was cranking out a review a day on average, and sometimes more. Landing more reviewing slots for other websites alongside, I independently built up a substantial PR network over the next few years. While continuing to receive streams and CDs and all other gubbins for review from editors and various PRs, and moving up to an average of two reviews a day, I couldn’t help but feel I was holding back on occasion. That isn’t to say I wasn’t loving my work, and the various sites are all outstanding in their ways, commanding respect and a decent readership.

But the reviews I was holding back on were more journalistic, essay-like pieces which felt appropriate for some of the releases I was receiving, but posting the 450+ word pieces I wanted to write didn’t feel entirely right even on the sites I had free reign on.

For a long period of time, I deliberated running my own site, and laid claim to Aural Aggravation in 2013 with a view to launching my own site devoted to covering the niche bands I liked but felt warranted a more specialist review space over sites that covered everything. I had a sense of how the site should look, feel and navigate. I suppose you might say I’m a control freak: I’d argue against that, but sometimes feel the need to impose my creative ideas on the world – albeit usually only a very small corner of it.

It was listening to the new Philip Jeck album while simultaneously reading Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life that spurred me to write a very different kind of review. More contemplative, academic, even. And much longer – somewhere between a longform review and an essay, you might say. I immediately realised that this was the kind of review I wanted to write. Not always, but sometimes.

And so Aural Aggravation was born and the site went live – public – with a couple of album reviews, a single review courtesy of James Wells, and a couple of audio / video streams. Boom.

I’m not ditching W&H or S4M any stretch, and I’m most certainly continuing to work in my various fiction projects and build The Rage Monologues (more of which very soon). But I am branching out in the reviewing world.

Aural Aggravation won’t be for everyone. And I’m happy with that. It will never reach a huge audience, either. The aim isn’t to be a mainstream site, either in the music if covers or in the way it covers it. Both aspects of the site are purposefully niche, and the fact that reviewing difficult music in reviews that will take more than a minute and a half to read, and don’t even use any kind of rating system runs completely contra to everything that’s going on in the media right now, from the ‘net to the debased print version of the NME. And that is precisely why I’m doing it. There’s a gap in the market, so to speak. Small and specialist it may be, but it’s one that I’m looking to step into in some way – for the love, not the money.

Aural Aggravation Website: http://auralaggravation.com/

Aural Aggravation on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AuralAggravation?fref=ts

Aural Aggravation on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AAAAggravation

Christopher Nosnibor’s Guide to Being a Music Reviewer – Part Four

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Knowledge is power, or so it’s said. In the music industry, there’s a sort of consensus that it’s now what you know but who you know, and while knowing the right people for bagging the best gigs and high profile interviews can help, gaining the respect of readers is more about what you know. People who read reviews – and a lot of music fans dismiss reviews as pointless, and consider reviewers to be pond-life – expect reviewers to be knowledgeable about music. It’s not such an unreasonable expectation.

After all, you’d expect anyone in any other profession to be suitably qualified and / or experienced. Granted, music reviewing isn’t on a par with being a medic or lab technician, but if someone’s job – paid or otherwise – is to impart critical judgement, you want to believe they have a background that means they understand context. While there are plenty of bozos down the pub spouting shit about football who haven’t got the first clue, anyone who writes a sports column or appears on TV or radio as a pundit has to have more than a pretty face or good speaking voice.

Of course, what ‘qualifies’ someone to be a music critic is pretty vague, but ultimately it’s about the hours put in listening to music and learning about bands and styles – including the ones you have no interest in, including the ones you hate. I make no bones that I’m no fan of The Beatles, but have a rudimentary knowledge of their career path, and know what they sound like and so on.

If anything, I think my own personal knowledge is more extensive than most. I’m a cultural sponge, and still keep half an ear to the chart shit that flops out of the R1 playlist and another on the half-arsed emo cack Kerrang! pass off as rock so much of the time. Because I’m curious. Because I consider it my duty to stay informed. I can’t criticise something I’ve never heard. Which means I’ve tortured myself with Katy Perry and Miley fucking Cyrus in the name of music journalism.

But people have unreasonable expectations. They expect you, as a music writer, to have heard every album, ever. And to remember every song, by title. And in sequence, on every album. They’ll whinge that their favourite album of the year isn’t on your list. It might be great, but you haven’t heard it. The fact you’ve listened to and reviewed over 500 albums in the last 12 months counts for nothing if you haven’t heard and raved about X, Y or Z, which 6 Music and the NME loved. Meanwhile, people in the office who love generic mass-market indie bands and who think The Cribs are off the beaten track and worship Paul Weller, and scenesters who go out to be seen at all the local shows while they talk through every act will be amazed you haven’t heard of their favourite new local band who have only played three shows but are amazing and are already getting quite a buzz around them. That, or the fact Tom Robinson played them and I haven’t a clue who they are… They were on the front of the NME! Kerrang! Featured them last week! They played the local pub last month…. The fact I don’t know who they are, and certainly don’t know their every song makes me the most pointless asinine excuse for a music journalist on the planet. I don’t deserve all these CD and downloads or free gig passes. I should just give up and get back to watching Never Mind the Buzzcocks right now.

 

Indie

Some generic indie kids, yesterday. Your opinion as a music reviewer isn’t worth shit if you’ve not heard – and raved about – their friend’s self-released cassette, limited to six copies.

Too Busy to Blog!

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For many writers – both accomplished and aspiring – a common obstacle to productivity is inspiration. Most people run dry at some point. It’s not a brag when I say that this isn’t a problem for me: no, my real problem is time. There simply isn’t enough, and there are only so many ways to stretch it.

Over the past few years, a fair few people have asked me how I manage to maintain my output, how I find the time. The answer has always been that I make time, and type quickly. But then, every now and again, it becomes insustainable, and when it does, something’s gotta give.

I didn’t set out to become a music writer: it was something I once dreamed off, made a few stabs at and did on a very part-time and voluntary basis for a couple of local and regional papers back in the early 90s before giving it up. My applications to music papers for paid work had been unsuccessful, to the extent that none of them had even bothered to reject me, and I decided it was simply too competitive for me, a person who’s not particularly competitive by nature. Moreover, not given to being all that outgoing, and steadfastly refusing to suck up or otherwise ingratiate myself, I decided music journalism wasn’t the career for me. I was 25, working full time and studying at the same time, and in my spare time, attempting to carve out a novel. I was going to be a proper writer!

It took another five years to get my first book, Bad Houses out into the world, and the novel I had been working on, Exiled in Domestic Life, along with its sequel, Rusty Bullet Wounds, remains languishing, unpublished. Still, a lot’s happened since then, and while I have received some help and support – not to mention invaluable exposure – from people who I’ve encountered along the way, my weekly blog on MySpace did contribute considerably to whatever readership I achieved.

People are always going on about the importance of maintaining a blog as a means of building and maintaining one’s profile, and at the time, it seemed that they were right, but when the MySpace community dissolved before my eyes, so the hits to my blog plummeted. Rebuilding a readership from scratch just felt like too much effort for questionable reward, and by this time I had begun reviewing for Whisperin’ and Hollerin’, something I had fallen into quite by accident, but it felt good to be reviewing again. It had been noticeable that the reviews I had posted on my blog had been the least successful by miles, receiving half the hits of my rants. Having a proper outlet for the reviews was an extremely positive thing, and besides, it meant that even if I wasn’t being paid, I was getting free CDs and entry to gigs – plus being able to say that I was a writer for a recognised site meant I was able to approach PR companies directly and have them add me to their mailing lists. This meant even more freeness.

At present, I’m managing to review approximately half of the stuff I get sent, and given that I’m kicking out an average of one to two reviews per day, you can get an idea of just how much the reviewing gig’s grown in the last couple of years. But I don’t want to be known simply as a music writer: I do still write fiction, after all, and have some pretty hefty projects in the works, with the story ‘Corrupted from Memory’ which appears in the new Paraphilia anthology A Dream of Stone being the first of a new wave of fairly dense pieces penned recently.

Then there are the interviews. I’d be daft to turn down the chances I’ve had to meet up with various bands, or to conduct email interviews with Malcolm McNeill and JG Thirlwell. They’re once in a lifetime opportunities. None of them came about because of my blogging, though, and finding the bile to spew out a weekly rant in a blog just wasn’t something I had in me.

The discipline of maintaining a regular blog is healthy for a writer, primarily because it’s so easy to procrastinate, defer and postpone: a commitment to produce a piece each day or week can be a great motivator and can provide the impetus to knuckle down to writing and attempt something new. By the same token, it can all too easily become an obstacle to producing anything else, with the main work becoming sidelined by the thing that’s supposedly a mode of liberation and promotion. Moreover, in churning out pieces on not only a regular but a frequent basis, it’s easy for the quality of output to suffer and to find yourself saying the same thing. If it gets boring to write, it’s going to be equally boring to read: if and when that moment arrives, it’s time to quit.

I had other reasons to quit, or at least cut back though: well, something had to give. I’m no longer studying, but am still working full-time and then some. I can’t not: there are bills to pay, and very few writers actually get to make a living from it. Besides, getting to teach English Literature to undergraduates, albeit on a part-time basis, is often rewarding, but make no mistake, it’s hard work, especially in conjunction with holding down another job at the same time. So how do I find the time to write? Make time, and type fast, of course. But without blogging, at least as often. Has it damaged my readership? No, I don’t think so, and while I receive more hits to my site via searches for ‘Christopher Nonsibor reviewer’ and Christopher Nosnibor Whisperin and Hollerin’, I still get the same number who arrive at my site having searched for ‘Christopher Nosnibor writer’ or for one of my books (more often than not THE PLAGIARST).

But then, I’ve recently found myself wondering if maintaining a blog is as important as it used to be – not just for me, but in general. I still read voraciously, but the number of blogs I read has diminished, and I instead prefer to read a small number irregularly, rather than a large number regularly, partly because many of the blogs I follow tailed off around the same time I allowed my blogging activity to become less of a feature of my writing output. Is the golden age of blogging over? Does it really matter? A world in which everyone has a blog is a cluttered one, but shouldn’t be mistaken for a well-informed one. Knowledge may well equal power to an extent, but with no shortage of blogs brimming with ill-informed opinions and even outright hateful propaganda receiving ample traffic, it would equally appear that misinformation is power, and besides, who cares about what you’re saying as long as you’re popular. The interest in celebrity blogs and Tweets remains unabated. Ok, so bloggers like myself (i.e. the authors of the blogs I like to read) are never going to be in competition with these ‘celebrity’ retards, and never were, but there comes a time when pissing in the wind stops being fun and simply becomes a thankless slog.

For me, the blog always served a dual function: to vent or to comment on the things I had no other outlet for doing so, and, if I’m honest as an indirect means of promotion. Now, I have other channels for both promotion and venting, and besides, I’ve come to the conclusion that the world only needs so many producers of culture and of comment, given that there are only so many consumers. Personally, I try to do both, but it’s hard to consume while producing. It’s simply impossible to read an article and write one at the same time. So, while I continue to work on the job of perfecting a clone or two to enable me to multitask more effectively, the blogs will remain on the back burner while I crack on with the real work…

And of you’re loving my work, there’s more of the same (only different) at Christophernosnibor.co.uk

A Dream of Stone (and Other Ghost Stories), edited by D M Mitchell and Dire Mccain is out now in the US through Paraphilia Books.