Capitalism killed the music blogging star
Hello. Rolf here from Terror Management with a new issue. Hopefully you won’t notice, but just in case you do: I’ve moved away from Substack as a publishing platform because it has no problems hosting nazis and it turns out I have problems with them not having problems with that.
I’ve moved over my archive and all your subscriber data and service should resume as per usual. Thank you for your continued support.
Now over to your regularly scheduled programming.
Pitchfork is dead. Well, at least as seen on the grand scale of industry. The publication has been staring death in the face since 2015 when it was bought by Condé Nast and now that it’s being folded into GQ, it’s pretty much on life support.
Witness: palliative care in the media industry.
A music blog, no matter how popular, does not often a profitable business make and is certainly not compatible with the modern day capitalist goal of continuous exponential growth.
(Not that anything ever is able to grow forever, but that’s a revolutionary missive for another time.)
So now we’re merely waiting for the masters of numbers at Condé Nast to see just the slightest hint of justification in the practice of overhead reduction, and Pitchfork shall be no more. Perhaps the brand shall remain for a while, as it does in these situations, a washed out shadow of what once was.
On corporate buyouts
Do not misunderstand me: I shall shed no tear for Pitchfork’s demise. In all its history, the site has never grasped the essence of punk rock at its core, stuck as it was in the glamorous swamp of pop music and indie rock. Never mind that its writers seemed (seem?) to think that writing means typing long strings of important looking words in a semi-random order. It mostly remains unreadable to me. "The primal, brooding guitar attack of "Optimistic" stomps like mating Tyrannosaurs," one sentence of that infernal Kid A review reads.
What the fuck does that even mean?
Anyway. Not here to to spit on a grave, never mind while it’s still being dug.
What I do shed a tear about, is how capitalism has once again destroyed an independent voice, no matter my opinion on said voice. Music curation should not be left to artificial intelligence. Either it exposes how machine-like humans are that we can be so simply emotionally manipulated by computers, or (and this is where I put my belief in) all we get out of it is a cheap facsimile of music recommendations that never come close to that tape you got from a friend in high school.
Takeovers never end well. Oh, we've all heard the chorus of "there will be no immediate changes" when a company gets subsumed by a larger fish. It is, without a single exception, always a lie.
Even if current bosses leave the new darling alone, those bosses will not be there forever to protect them. The new bosses at some point will look to make their mark, and what better way than to 'correct' the previous ownership's 'mistakes'? Just look at the acquisition and subsequent sale of Bandcamp to Epic for another example. Thankfully, Bandcamp is still with us, but as with Pitchfork, its hourglass has turned.
On money and artistic fulfilment
Let’s turn inwards for a moment.
Terror Management is a minuscule publication. It has a few dozen subscribers (and I love you all very, very much) and while I am certainly not immune to the dopamine internet affirmation can provide, I try my hardest to be fine with how small this newsletter is – and mostly succeed. How could it not be? It’s about punk music, as seen through a very specific lens, so it would only reach so many people to begin with. Never mind that I send out new missives very irregularly and the topics are all over the map.
And yet, I see what I do here as being the very purest form of self expression. I have raged before about capitalism and how it poisons artistic work, directly or indirectly, so I shall not relitigate this case.
This is born out of incredible luck and privilege, which I would like to acknowledge:
My day job pays me well enough that I can spend money on this endeavour and not have to worry about making a return on investment to keep myself alive. What I pour into this, I pour into satisfying my soul. The need to express myself. It allows me to sell my zines at what amounts to what it costs to make them. I do not charge for my labour on this project, because it is the labour that I love, that fulfils me. In a perfect society, I wouldn’t have to have a separate job to sustain this, but all the same, I would wish even this version of this situation for anyone.
And yet, even if I were trying to make this a financially solvent endeavour, it’s not something that can sustain endless exponential growth. I would not want it to grow. I would merely want to run this publication. Not interested in hiring anyone – at least not on the writing side.
(Perhaps a technical help would be handy, considering how painful an effort it was to migrate off of Substack, but that’s a different story.)
Please also know I do not judge anyone for trying to make a living doing what they love. As long as they know that if one goes down that road, the thing they love becomes a job. I don't want this to be work.
For most things, it’s perfectly fine to merely exist and sustain itself to remain where it is. Over a long enough timeline, everything in our universe ebbs and flows, expands and contracts.
And, of course, eventually, everything dies.
Which, to be clear, is also fine! Or rather, we’re forced to be fine with it, because it’s the one undeniable outcome of existing. I hope Pitchfork is alright with it. Terror Management is.
Not yet, though. There are more things to write about. More music to consider. As long as I can scrape a couple of bucks together to keep this financial misadventure going, I shall
