2023-10-08 15:58:38
A cry of alarm (and help) is running through the networks these days: that of the press managers of artists and record labels, who complain that we journalists pay less and less attention to them and that we no longer even respond to their emails. . They are right, and the answer begins by invoking the thickness of those hundreds of emails (and quite a few ‘whatsapps’) about releases that we receive every day, some of them with the claim of ‘urgent’. To anyone who may have offended with my silence, my sincere apologies.
The world has changed, both music and media. Never have so many songs and albums been recorded as now. It is not the ‘voracious industry’, it is the average citizen, anyone, who can record an album at home with an excellent finish and hang it on a platform. And, at the same time, newsrooms generally have fewer hands than before, not to mention the precariousness that usually accompanies specialized digital media. Diabolical conjunction.
A year ago, Sir Lucian Grainge, CEO of Universal Music Group, said at a conference that every day about 100,000 are published in the world songs through streaming services. Last May, there were already 120,000, reported market monitor Luminate. It is true that a part (not specified) of this increase corresponds to those files, now in vogue, of ‘white noise’ (waves, rain, bonfires), and the rampant themes created with AI (this is another story).
But the avalanche of news is formidable, and at all levels, from the ‘macro’ to the ‘micro’: the ‘Music Yearbook 2023’ tells us that, in 2000, 152 albums were published in Catalan, and in 2022, there were 1,178. Almost eight times more. And the communications offices (often poorly paid and pressured freelancers) now claim that we publish reviews and interviews not only for each album they release, but for each song.
To help shed light on this jungle there must be the press, which for some time has practiced a reflection that does not coincide with industrial interests: it intimately suspects that in the times of wine and roses it allowed the link with the reader, the origin and the reason for everything. Friends of the sector, It cannot be that each release is ‘urgent’, that with each album and each song the world ends. Try to refine and look for new frames thinking about your journalistic potential. The meeting point exists, but perhaps it would help if they stopped seeing the press article as the pure and simple equivalent of an advertising insert.
#Buried #news #songs #day