This rings louder after the recently announced mass-layoffs at music publications Alternative Press, Revolver, Goldmine, BrooklynVegan. Live Nation is fucking evil and them swallowing up music publications, gutting them and thus controlling which bands get covered and what people say about bands and music is just fucked up. It's one step in the big plan to control the entire music industry ecosystem.
If real music journalism and the huge variety of music journalists' voices and interests gets replaced with one bland face of a huge corporation, pushing out ai-slop masquerading as journalism, produced for the sole benefit of safe advertising and reputation management for large music companies and the select few favourite golden geese of the company, they will kill off everything that gave rock its soul.
When the industry of cool deems anything out of the ordinary cringe or risky and therefore not worthy of being written about, we will miss out on a lot of amazing stuff made by weirdos for weirdos. It's no wonder that MCR fans love digging for clips about the band members' actual thoughts, weird quirks and old twitter shitposts or that they adore the crazy theatrics of it all (hello lltbp fetish opera). That's what makes the people behind the music feel more real, more like us. And that gives more power to the music they've made. And real music journalists are an important link in getting these human aspects of the artists out to the fans. Losing these journalists is a huge threat to the vibrant, strange and fascinating world of rock music and how we experience it in our homes or out in the concert halls.
Screencaps from the film "Almost Famous".
