Pop, in Service of the Good

One nagging trend that has continued on in discussions of aspiring musicians is the notion of “career”, with much literature and marketing implicitly suggesting that “success” means having a “career” where having a “career” in turn means being financially self-sufficient on one’s music. The focus on financial self-sufficiency has, in turn, generated a variety of […]

I begin with the caveat that I am not literally giving an analysis of the birth of imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome has existed for as long as people have been doing art, and naturally arises from the tension between what an artist thinks they have accomplished, and what an artist has actually done. In this […]

Traditionally, independent musicians think of self-sufficiency as being a milestone on their way to greater recognition. But for musicians who are wanting to get artistic recognition for their work, self-sufficiency may actually be a bad gamble. In fact, you may actually be better off getting recognition as an artist by keeping your day job. Here […]

I was talking to a music journalist the other day who suggested that music reviews don’t matter, because nobody reads music reviews.  I wouldn’t be surprised if people don’t read reviews as much as they used to, but the claim implicitly appeals to a belief that the social function of reviews is to funnel listeners […]

What is Ten Songs of Worship and Praise for Our Tumultuous Times? I would say first and foremost, it’s a religious revisionist record, one which roughly tracks the Great American Religious Drift of the 21st Century. When I speak of the Great American Religious Drift, you probably already know what I’m talking about even without […]

The underground music world is buzzing from a recent mass casualties event in which many musicians have had songs delisted by Spotify because of an algorithm designed to remove songs that have been boosted by artificial plays via bots and fake plays. I won’t get into all the issues that one might have with a […]

Below is Metacritic’s list of outlets that it uses for Metacritic ratings circa 2019, which has been annotated to mark outlets that have either officially or unofficially become defunct (meaning they at best only produce a handful of reviews every year). I think its accepted that the original list was created to include mostly larger […]

I want to reconfigure public attitudes towards artists who write outside of the industry and proposed the term “pro bono musician” the other day but I think the concept deserves some more thought and I’m proposing that we have a genre term which I will call Public Service Musician. By Public Service Musician, I refer […]

Consequence of Sound has a useful Album Release calendar that they put together, which gives people a heads up as to what releases are coming up and when.  Their release calendar can be found HERE.  If you’re a music journalist, it’s useful, because it allows you to plan ahead in terms of knowing what releases to […]

I was talking with a friend about songwriting credits the other day, probably an outgrowth of the Lizzo trademark controversy, and have been thinking about the term “singer-songwriter” – a phrase that I in fact use for myself. It’s funny because I think in actual usage, the image that comes to mind is a person […]