How the Internet Changed Music Part 2: Blogging

Of course, you know that description couldn‘t be further from the truth. No Ripcord is basically a labour of love, dependent on the time, hunger and talent of its writers. We receive no money for our work; we do it because of our enthusiasm for the music we like and the enjoyment we get telling people about it. In the pre-Internet age, a collection of people coming together in the way the No Ripcord team has would have been impossible, but it’s now a common story. Anyone, from the most learned academic to the most reactionary imbecile has a worldwide platform from which to share their thoughts.

 

The fact anyone can start their own site and contact anyone they want is a fantastic thing, according to Guardian journalist Jude Rogers: “If I was 18 now and wanted to be a journalist, I’d start a blog, just to be able to write something and try and connect to an audience. There are 18 year olds who track me down and email me and I think it’s wonderful, I wish I’d been able to do that when I was that age.” It’s hard to disagree with that; it’s a fantastic form of democracy in action. Theoretically, the cream should rise to the top, but is that always the case? Jude Rogers continues: “I think the best thing to do when you’re writing a blog and want to be a writer is just to work really hard at it, read writers that you like, keep in touch with your subject, start speaking to editors but do it in a way that they’ll understand. Editors always want people who have great, new ideas. You’ve got to be prepared to work, you’ve got to be prepared to get rejections.”

 

Of course, give everyone a voice and there’s a danger of it becoming a case of who can shout the loudest. Go to any YouTube video with a decent number of hits, read the comments below and you’ll find that your faith in human nature has likely evaporated. This is a trend that reaches far wider than videos of kittens; the comment sections of broadsheet newspaper sites and the BBC are overflowing with bile. “There’s a whole ream of people whose automatic start position is ‘whatever somebody has said, I fundamentally disagree with it and I will shout them down‘,” believes Music Week journalist Eamonn Forde. “It’s just unleashed people who’ve got no opinions but think they’re Charlie Brooker. It’s opened up the floodgates for people to jump up and say, ‘you’re a cunt‘, repeatedly at somebody.”

 

As extreme as that may seem, it’s easy to see why journalists might feel aggrieved by this sort of behaviour. Imagine someone comes into your place of work and begins to openly criticise everything you’re doing. You’d be annoyed, but what if you then discovered that this person has no knowledge or experience of the field in which you work? Moreover, it then turns out there are a group of upstarts trying to unseat you by doing exactly the same job as you, but in their spare time and for no wage.

 

Journalist Andrew Marr provoked outrage in 2010 at the Cheltenham Literary Festival with his comments on bloggers. “A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed young men sitting in their mother’s basements and ranting”, he opined. “So-called citizen journalism is the spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night.” Leaving aside the fact that Mr. Marr is employed by the BBC whose own website has many blogs and seems to constantly ask the public for its opinion on news matters, it smacked of someone horribly out of touch. “Andrew Marr is talking rubbish”, says Word Magazine founder David Hepworth, “And you and I are paying for the pulpit from which he says it. He should know better.” Eamonn Forde has a different view: “I think Andrew Marr has confused the comments sections on websites with blogs. That sounded like a man floundering in the 21st Century to understand communication, which is kind of bitterly ironic for somebody who’s a journalist and opinion-giver to, in broad brushstrokes, dismiss a whole generation of new writers and that whole way of communicating.”

 

It would appear that everyone - with the possible exception of Andrew Marr - would agree that blogging is very much a good thing. In fact, it seems that even established writers, keen to escape the constraints of editorial staff and deadlines, have got the blogging bug too. “Why do I blog? Because, in the words of Bob Dylan, ‘I've got a headful of ideas that are driving me insane’,” says David Hepworth, “And because in my blog I don't have to compromise with anyone but myself.” Towards the end of 2009, Jude Rogers began work on a blog with a twist, entitled 50 Songs, 10 Years. The premise was simple: as the decade drew to a close, she chose fifty songs that had shaped the previous ten years of her life, and wrote a short daily entry on her experience and why that song mattered to her. It was a huge success: “So many people responded to it. I get emails about things that I write for the Guardian, but I got such a response for this it was really exciting. Since then, a couple of writers have come up to me and asked if I want to do a book about it. I had a meeting with my editor at the Guardian after finishing my column, and she said it was the best writing I’d ever done, and I think it was because it wasn’t for a commissioning editor, but for myself, and I still think that’s the writing I enjoy the most.”

 

So, maybe the best journalism will come from people writing for themselves. Free from the pressures of an in-house style and appealing to the broadest market, bloggers are able to write exactly what they want, how they want. In fact, that’s where this article has come from; I wasn’t told to write it, I had the idea, I pitched it and now here we are.

 

One downside of the Internet’s unstoppable growth is the demise of the much-loved paper fanzine. The convenience of websites is impossible to beat, and they can be updated on a daily basis, but it’s hard not to miss the physical product: the cut, pasted and photocopied paper available at your local record shop (also probably not there any more - thanks, Internet). Jude Rogers started Smoke: A London Peculiar as a love letter to the city she adored. Despite this only being in 2003, it already sounds like a bygone age: “We saved up around £600, it took about a year. We printed a thousand up and we literally went round all the shops in London with copies in our rucksacks. It seemed like the right thing to do, we thought we’d give it a go. Luckily, some bookshops took it, it sold out quite quickly and it went from there”.

 

Maybe it’s quixotic to mourn the loss of the fanzine, but that story seems to have a romanticism and a determination to it that the setting up of a website could never possess. It seems that in 2011, it’s about making the Internet work for you. It’s too late to halt the march of the bloggers and the citizen journalists, so use it to your advantage. It’s never been easier to set up your own site, but at the same time it’s never been more difficult to stand out from the crowd. If you want to be a music journalist, just start writing! After all, as well as changing the way we write about music, the Internet is constantly changing the way we consume music too.