It used to be so simple. From the 1960s to the early ‘90s, the consensus among those concerned with the artistic merit was, if a band or songwriter ad-licenced their song they were a sell out, worthy of all the scorn The Village Voice could muster. In the 2000s, that train of thought is all but extinct.

Licencing music has become an accepted practice, with even The Village Voice asking in 2010, “Is It Possible to Sell Out?” After all, when beacons of artistic integrity, from Bob Dylan to Kurt Vile, are ad-licencing their songs, it does appear that the concept of “selling out” is a cultural relic, a symbol of a past generations’ ill-advised attempts at rebelling – like the trendy Chairman Mao pin.

A similar argument was made by author Hua Hsu on Grantland.com in his article “M.I.A. and Impossibility of Selling Out.”

However, isn’t selling out always possible as long as artists have moral and ethical beliefs? Selling out shouldn’t be a black and white, yes/no, issue but in the new age of music and advertising, selling out is harder to identify than it used to be.

In 1971, the average American was exposed to a little more than 550 advertisements per day, according to author David Shenk. The best estimates indicate that the average American is currently exposed to anywhere from 1,500 to over 3,000 ads daily. In 1971, college radio and alternative rock stations in urban centres were the primary source of new music for anyone in the counter culture.

In the last two years, well established and long running alternative rock stations have changed formats – to talk, gospel, or top-40 – in Orlando, New York City, Chicago, and Philadelphia, and a number of college radio stations have also been sold off.

With this new reality, no one can blame artists for ad-licencing their music. It’s become an accepted fact that advertisements provide much needed money and exposure for indie bands who would otherwise have very little of either.

You can credit/blame Moby for discovering the formula. His 1999 album “Play” was the most licenced album of all time, with all 18 tracks being used in a TV show, movie, or commercial, and in some instances all three. As his manager Eric Härler explained, they simply needed exposure because radio stations refused to play Moby’s music.

Getting exposure through ads worked better than anyone could’ve imagined, as “Play” became the best-selling techno album of all time and transformed Moby from cult DJ to global star. At the time Moby took a lot of flak of from fans and the music press for being a sell out. One fan even went so far as to sell Moby’s soul on eBay (Moby’s “soul” was an empty jar but you get his point).

It’s an argument that seems antiquated 13 years later, when we barely notice Civic using a Vampire Weekend song to sell cars. Derek Miller, song writer and one half of the indie duo  Sleigh Bells, summed up it best while discussing his

own band’s decision to licence the song “Rhythm Riot” for use in Honda’s commercial for a hybrid SUV. “The ‘sell out’ discussion never even happened, we happily license our music for movies and advertisements on a case-by-case basis,” Miller told the Boston edition of Metro newspaper. “It’s almost pretentious to avoid the opportunity, especially in this climate.”

It’s the “case-by-case basis” part of Miller’s statement that best explains the modern dilemma over selling out. What if, for example, Moby, a committed vegan and vocal supporter of PETA, had licenced his music to KFC (I’d suggest using “Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad” to sell the Double Down)? Would that be selling out? The simple answer is yes.

That’s why when The Village Voices’ Zach Baron writes, “selling out has long since stopped existing as a meaningful concept,” he’s only partially right. He is right that selling out isn’t an all-encompassing fear for indie bands the way it used to be. But selling out is still possible and is still meaningful.

If a fervent anti-war band like Rage Against the Machine ad-licenced a song to war profiteer Halliburton, that would undoubtedly compromise their integrity. However, the same couldn’t be said for flag-waving, pro-war, country singer Toby Keith.

In essence, the debate over selling out should be less intellectually lazy than has often been the case. In the 2000s, saying “yes” to every company that comes knocking makes no more sense than saying “no” did in the 1990s.

Just because a bands’ views over right and wrong have changed – from the ‘60s-style “all capitalism is bad” to a more 2000s viewpoint of “I love me some Heinz ketchup but Hummer is a gas-sucking parasite” – doesn’t mean ethics don’t exist. And as long as they do exist, it is still possible to sell out.

Photo of Moby by Katy Baugh

The post The changing nature of selling out appeared first on Quip Magazine.

Question: “Do you think there’s any justification for being a rock critic? What makes your opinion better than the average guy out there on Sixth Avenue?”
Answer: “Nothing. Let him do it!”

• Music critic Lester Bangs. April, 1982. His last interview.

Like many members of the proletariat masses, I read movie reviews or check IMDB ratings before heading to the theatre to drop $12 on a movie and another $15 for a bag of stale popcorn and a pop. However, I have never scanned Rolling Stone’s review section or Googled the Pitchfork rating of an album before heading to the record store. Why is this? It’s because the old fashioned music review, which still dominates the back pages of most music magazines and a substantial part of most music websites, is obsolete.

Like pagers, TV Guide, and the curtained-off porn section at the movie rental store – or the movie rental store itself – increasingly easy access to more and better information has made the music reviews unnecessary.

Despite a multitude of problems that have always existed with music reviews, they still served a practical purpose for decades. Before the Internet age, reviews acted as a consumer guide, a way for music fans to gauge what was worth their money. Only music critics had easy access to all  albums before they were released and were able to listen to everything, the classics and the crap, in order to find the gems.

Their wordy and convoluted analysis would grace the pages of Rolling Stone, Cream, The Village Voice, and Spin. Even if normal people had no idea what the hell critics were talking about or why it’s brilliant that Patti Smith’s Horses wasn’t “synthesized neo-British progressivism” – as Rolling Stone’s John Rockwell put it in 1976 – the reader could understand enough to know if the album was any good in the critic’s opinion and, thus, was worth buying.

Pre-Internet, reviews could make or break a new band, especially if they weren’t one of the lucky few bands their label decided to push on radio and with well-funded promotion. But that time is gone. Today, everyone is a critic because everyone has access.
Unlike movies, books, and theatre, all music is easily accessible to anyone with a computer, often before it has been officially released.

The one great advantage that critics once had over their readers has vanished.

Critics are often listening to an album at the same time as their readers because as soon as a promotional copy of the new Fleet Foxes album is sent out, it appears on Thepiratebay.org and every other torrent site. Within hours it is streaming on YouTube and by the next day it’s old news on the blogs.

The new universality of music hurts music criticism in two major ways. The first and most widely acknowledged consequence essentially boils down to, why the hell should I care what the critics think if I’ve already heard the album and developed my own opinion? Reading a review simply becomes a way to confirm this opinion. It’s no longer about learning what’s new and good, reading a review is about confirming your already established notions of what’s new and good.

It’s similar to current political thought. Do you think President Obama is a Kenyan socialist hell-bent on establishing Sharia law in Arkansas? Then you probably watch Fox News. Do you think Obama is the miraculous love child of Abraham Lincoln and Rosa Parks? Then you probably watch MSNBC. When you’ve already developed an opinion, challenging it can be a pain in the ass.

This point was proven by a study, entitled Does Chatter Matter? The Impact of User-Generated Content on Music Sales, by New York University professor Vasant Dhar. Dhar found that blog chatter, not by critics but by other fans, has a greater effect on an album’s sales than whether or not the album received favourable reviews. According to the study albums covered by over 200 blogs significantly increase in sales.

Dhar told the Toronto Star, “We expected that the views of the traditional media would count more. But in some cases, blogs were more important than media ratings. Basically, what that suggested is that when it comes to music, people tend to trust people with views similar to them more than [they do] the experts. People who are looking at the world in the same way as you [do] are becoming increasingly important.”

Luckily one magazine is acknowledging the new reality. Spin announced last month that it is phasing out its music review section and is instead starting a Twitter feed called @SpinReviews, meant to be more a conversation starter among music fans rather than an old fashion review.

The magazine explained in an announcement on Spin.com that “the standard music review, once presented as an imperious edict, has increasingly frayed into a redundant, gratuitous novelty in an era of fewer and fewer actual music consumers. Tight security on major-label albums (and practically no security on indie-label albums) often means you’re downloading a leaked album the same day as your favorite magazine or website. The value of the average rock critic’s opinion has plummeted now that a working knowledge of Google can get you high-quality audio of practically any record, so you can listen and decide for yourself whether it’s worth a damn.”

Secondly, in the race to hear everything the moment it comes out and be the first to review it, reviews themselves have become less reliable and thoughtful. Full appreciation of music requires multiple listens and some time to digest.

As a music fan, many albums I loved on first listen got old quickly and many of my favorite albums took time to grow on me. The new age of music criticism doesn’t allow for digestion. Bloggers are blogging and tweeters are tweeting the second they push play on iTunes. Reviews no longer have to be thought-out or well written, they simply have to exist, now, because that album will be old news by next week.

As Los Angeles Times music critic Ann Powers says, journalism and the music industry are “two fields hit extra hard by the web’s flattening effect on information flow. There’s also precious little authority of the old kind. Expert pronouncements and writerly pirouetting no longer pay any kind of rent.”

This isn’t to say that great reviews don’t exist anymore, I’ll occasionally come across a long-form review which really does make me give an album a second chance or listen to it in a new way. However, more and more reviews tell me nothing knew, flat-out irritate me, or fail to grab my attention at all.

Music criticism is obsolete. Music reviews no longer exist to educate, they exist for the sake of existing.

The post Has Music Criticism Become Obsolete? appeared first on Quip Magazine.