Every March, like clockwork, I hit a wall with music writing. A bloated album release calendar combined with publicists cramming to launch even newer album cycles ahead of a zombiefied SXSW becomes a thing of overwhelming, especially if you’re a tiny site written by one person. There’s too much noise which sends most of the freshly written (and the accompanying new music for that matter) straight into a black hole. Not helping is that these publicists who bomb your inbox with three e-mails over the same track announcement within a span of 24 hours can’t even be bothered to get your first name right when addressing you. Cut to me going down a bleak, existential rabbit hole while taking another pulse check on where the current state of music writing lies.

It’s easy to look at the same ol’ familiar culprits which have led to such doom and gloom in the past. The cultural shift in the way people listen to and “discover” new music through talking head videos and playlists finally serving the death knell to music discovery in the written word seems all too easy and obvious at this stage, though. I’d argue that there’s more words being written about music now than ever. The problem is that most of it is being served up as flattened garbage buffet with a playlist appetizer.

Paying closer attention lately to what artists, labels, publicity groups, and even listeners themselves are sharing (if they even bother sharing anything out, that is. I’ll get to that in a minute…,) it just amounts to a hollow echo chamber of content farming. Each week, I stumble upon some site I’ve yet to hear of that’s only been around for a couple of years. They all appear to have a common denominator in design in bearing a sleek logo with a sharp, minimalistic, aesthetically-pleasing layout. I’ll find myself surprised to see how many posts they’re populating in a given day considering there’s hardly a team of full-time writers behind them. For that matter, the posts themselves are rarely anything of substance — copied press releases slightly tweaked, give or take a new sentence with complete emotional anonymity in their breath indicating there’s actually a human being who thought to put in the work. Could all of that content be the product of AI? I wouldn’t be surprised, but it’s more likely that the bar for effort is in Hell.

At the same time, this is all that artists, labels, publicists, and even readers expect from music sites nowadays. As long as there are a few words on a song or album squeeze from a press release’s concentrate with a pull quote slapped over it, the job is done. Loosely controlling the narrative of an album cycle by having everyone more or less regurgitate the same story behind it is the ideal scenario for any invested stakeholder attached to the music itself. That’s a mistake we let happen when an entire generation during the mid-2010s convinced everyone that reviews and criticism of new music with grades or numbers attached to them no longer mattered. All of this was an over-corrective reaction to, of all things, blaming Pitchfork scores for burying an artist whose music a more general public enjoyed, thus marking it dead on arrival through a lukewarm or negative review when the reality was that the art just didn’t doing a great job at being art-ing.

Where we stand right now because of it is that the substance behind words no longer matter — or, more ironically — the words no longer matter, unless they are published on a much larger and reputable website. Like Pitchfork or Stereogum or BrooklynVegan. Because the problem was never that a Pitchfork score or a fairly deconstructed Stereogum Premature Evaluation was killing the buzz. That’s looking more and more like the excuse that was merely given. The problem was that a sea of posts on smaller music sites might also write their own takes on the matter, which could then interrupt the goal of streamlining the narrative, potentially causing listeners to reconsider what all of the other sites are collectively saying about it. At the end of the day, of course an artist or a label is still going to want and need those big music publications to exist so that whenever those reviews pop on the timeline — which they hope will at the very least be fair and politely in their opines even if they don’t amount to a high score — so they can be parlayed into good publicity to further blast your release for promotional purposes across your socials.

Not a blanket statement, because there are artists who do enjoy seeing some original thought placed behind what they create, but I’d wager that fewer new artists care what smaller music sites have to say about them when they’re paying a well-connected publicist who can get their music supersaturated across all of the bigger-reaching sites more easily. For this reason, there’s no longer a need to acknowledge anyone on your socials who isn’t a name brand, even if they’ve written an even more impressive breakdown of a listen in much more succinct words, that are all of theirs for that matter. The audience has already spoken: coverage and reviews aren’t relevant (unless they’re published on a brand name site.)

Even so, the volatility of social media over the past year hasn’t helped. A year ago, I’d have estimated that posting a write-up of a new track or an album review might get it seen by 25% of the people who follow me. Nowadays, it’s definitively 0% thanks to a severely broken algorithm across most platforms. Small music sites are 100% dependent on artists, labels, and anyone who follows them to share out their posts in order find some engagement. Not helping lessen frustrations is that there’s also a very clear answer as to what everyone should be doing right now when it comes to migrating over to platforms where the algorithm is healthier, more productive discourse is happening, and it makes posting visibility so much easier. After a few brief exoduses, it ultimately doesn’t seem the majority of the independent music scene is interested in leaving a platform whose primary business model is to spread misinformation and flame bigotry because *checks notes* they’re afraid of having to rebuild their followers elsewhere. That right there alone should turn anyone into a nihilist about music writing.

Breaks have helped in the past and you could have convinced me that doing this as a passion project with no expectations was enough to make it matter, but at least then, you knew someone out there was always reading. You don’t really get that feeling anymore. Sure, you could be one of those smaller sites that focuses solely on spotlighting DIY releases by bands barely anyone has heard of and will never hear of again, because there’s always going to be a niche market for giving your time to the underdogs who are just happy to get any kind of coverage at all, but if you’re goal is to write about music that actually resonates with you and the greater culture — not for the influencer glory or the tiny paycheck, but for the connection to a community that may not physically exist immediately within your surroundings — I’m inclined to believe that the body has been gutted and legs cut out from underneath anyone who exists somewhere in the middle of it all. To try to make it matter would be a fool’s errand because your written words don’t matter to anyone anymore.