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[Rez]

I'm starting this thread under the assumption that some of the people on here have some experience of writing about music, whether it be for personal blogs, or whatever. I'm considering some kind of music journalism as a career, and want to start writing reviews etc to see if I'll be any good at it.  So, before I make time to start doing this, is there any advice that any of you could give me? Any pitfalls that you yourselves have fallen in to that I'd do best to avoid? Any advice at all would be greatly appreciated.

[Dazed]

Avoid being a pretentious twat. And don't use "(band)-esque" too much.

[Rez]

Done. The "esque" thing is already a pet peeve in mine. As is "(something)-goodness".

[Scandanavian War Machine]

avoid over-wrought, verbose descriptions about minute things unless it's really really necessary and you have the literary chops to back it up and not sound like a jackass.


"the cymbal crash two minutes fourteen seconds into track three resonates off into the distant, rocky alps of your mind while your ear shoots ejaculate all over the Dhali Lama as he pounds a drum made of unicorn hide. also, Loud Reed is there and he tells you about the time he rode on the back of giant bald eagle to the bottom of the sea, because obviously he can breathe underwater."


^don't do that, basically.

[Catacombs]

Avoid being a pretentious twat.

Pretty much this alone will get you far.

[Harun]

pitchfork reviews


also, song-by-song reviews. It's okay to point out specific songs and it's characteristics in a review, but don't focus entirely on this.

[Rez]

Thanks very much! I had forgotten how helpful the internet can be when you find the right forum with the right people.

[Inlander]

Remember that a music review is not an excuse to show everyone how well-educated you are, or how many big words you know, or how creative you are with the way you choose to approach reviewing music. You are writing a music review because you want to tell somebody about the music; your reader is reading your music review because they want and expect to be told about the music. By all means colour your writing with occasional personal anecdotes, unobtrusive jokes, etc. if they have a point or if they make the review more enjoyable to read (because an enjoyable read is an easy read, and above all else critical writing needs to be easy to read and to comprehend), but always remember that your review is always about the music, NOT about you and how clever you are.

Oh, and if you don't know anything about the history of the music in question, or how it relates to other music in the same scene, or anything about the private lives of the musicians - that doesn't matter! Ultimately all that matters is that you can tell someone whether the music is good or not.

[Rez]

I'm doing an English degree at Oxford, so it'll be fucking fantastic to escape from the intellectual wankery I have to encounter on a day to day basis. Would anybody recmmend trying to keep to a specific word limit when I'm writing? Is this a good discipline to stop me going into "write everything I know" mode, or should I start doing this when I've got a taste for it?

[Nodaisho]

song-by-song reviews. It's okay to point out specific songs and it's characteristics in a review, but don't focus entirely on this.

But I like song by song reviews... I think I'm probably the only one. It would probably also depend on the kind of music. If it is an album full of 20-25 songs just a bit more than 2 minutes long, it might be better not to, but if it is made of a few 10 minute songs, there is probably plenty in each one to talk about. You know, unless the musician doesn't understand that to make the song longer, you have to add more substance to it.

[Rez]

Good point. It'd be near impossible to not do a track by track, on say, Lindstrom's last one.

[Catacombs]

For your length question, I'd say stay away from the five sentence reviews, similar to what's in the back of Rolling Stone or Spin.  That doesn't help the listener at all.  But I also HATE the reviews that are like reading a paper or something.  I always thought allmusic.com does a good job of reviewing albums.  It's long enough to give the reader a little taste of the album, and at the some time intrigue others to check it out. 

Basically short, sweet, and to the point.

[Dazed]

Don't be like Rolling Stone. Rolling stone said Jack White was the 17th greatest guitarist ever. DO NOT BE LIKE ROLLING STONE.

[Thrillho]

1. Do you live in Britain?
2. If so, do you want to just get real-world experience writing for a website?

I started out on www.rockmidgets.com, I wrote there for three and a half years before coming to university. It taught me almost everything I know about writing about music. Also, write reviews on amazon, just to stay in trip.

[Sox]

I wouldn't advise a career writing about music if you really, really love music. I've been there and it was a soul draining experience because on occasion I was forced into a position whereby I had the option of writing about bands I hated or not being able to eat/make rent/exist in general. In order to earn good money doing it, you basically have to become part of the loathsome 'Music Industry'. You're basically paid to turn art into a financial commodity by some very dubious people and corporations. It's essentially impossible to earn a realistic income writing about genuinely good music because it isn't popular enough. Also, printed and paid music journalism is on its way out. Maybe not tomorrow but it's certainly on the cards.

Start a website or a blog if you feel a burning desire to write about music. Just my two cents.

This post is on the ball, except for that part about printed/paid journalism being on the way out. Not in the near future. That's not realistic. There's always going to be a demand for physical magazines and there's always going to be a demand for high profile journalist, even ones writing about the music industry. Yes, the music industry is taking hits thanks to the sheer amount of free material on the internet, but don't get too comfortable with the belief that the entire thing is going to collapse and go away. There are enough people that genuinely enjoy mainstream music and don't give a shit about independents to ensure they'll be around for a very long time. Billion dollar industries don't go away overnight. They adapt. The NME is about as likely to go away as major record labels.

I suggest you start a blog. But I also suggest you don't write specifically about music you like. Tommy mentioned it's unrealstic expecting to be able to do that professionally. Choose an area of music, specialise in writing about it, including good and bad. Everybody can talk forever about things they like. It's harder to be professional and critical about something that you don't like. Get out there, learn about your local music scene. Get involved. Get to know the bands and their relationships with eachother. Give yourself a set time to update it, write about shows that are occuring, gig reviews, review recorded material, inform people when somebody is getting into a studio or touring. I think an important part of journalism is discipline. This means writing about things you don't neccessarily agree with while keeping up appearances of being a non-biased source of information.

Few things to remember;
*Update regularly and routinely, on time.
*Stay non-biased and cover a variety of materials, good and bad.
*Don't just write reviews. Music reviews are a very small part of music journalism.
*Try to seem passionate for what you're writing about.
*When in doubt, shop local. A lot of blogs suck, coincidentally those blogs pull random high profile releases from across the globe, or only write about post-rock.

[Zingoleb]

song-by-song reviews. It's okay to point out specific songs and it's characteristics in a review, but don't focus entirely on this.

But I like song by song reviews... I think I'm probably the only one.

No, there's two of us.

Don't be like Rolling Stone. Rolling stone said Jack White was the 17th greatest guitarist ever. DO NOT BE LIKE ROLLING STONE.

Wait, what the fuck? They did?

Christ. I like Jack White, but...not enough to call him that.

[Be My Head]

Here's a tip, your reviews will be more interesting and captivating if you have some kind of story or anecdote to frame them around.

[Sox]

Anecdotes are for bar talk, not music reviews.
Don't pay attention to any advice we offer in this thread, just write what you think. Write from your heart, but keep a sharp tongue on a short leash if you come across something you don't like.

[rynne]

Familiarize yourself with actual musical terminology, so you can avoid using "[band]-esque" and overly-verbose descriptions in your reviews.  For that matter, try not to make "[band X] is like [band Y] plus [band Z]" comparisons.


I'd suggest not attempting this style of review, either, unless you're Mark Prindle.

[sean]

http://zen-face-punch.blogspot.com/

This guy can write about music. You might be able to learn something from this style.

[IronOxide]

Fuck, two hours ago I went into this thread with the exact opposite intent: Do what Mark Prindle does.

In retrospect I am glad I didn't do it after all because it's a terrible idea for anyone that isn't Mark Prindle.

After wading through that insufferable shit, I would not recommend that style for anyone, Mark Prindle or otherwise.

[Fishboy]

I'm doing an English degree at Oxford, so it'll be fucking fantastic to escape from the intellectual wankery I have to encounter on a day to day basis. Would anybody recmmend trying to keep to a specific word limit when I'm writing? Is this a good discipline to stop me going into "write everything I know" mode, or should I start doing this when I've got a taste for it?

A wee bit off topic, but have you ever tried screenwriting? I am not sure about the community where you are but the whole attitude of screenwriters here in Australia (S.A. specifically) is so much less pretentious than most others types of writers (in my experience), they are also a lot more supportive of each other than novelists and the like. For television writing at least there are many opportunities for young screenwriters, provided you go to a producer rather than a network with your screenplay. But yeah, try writing a short screenplay to see if you can abide the style required, there are a lot of very intelligent, surprisingly humble, magnificent bastards in that industry.

[Johnny C]

mark prindle's style is good for anyone comfortable with the knowledge that they don't get a lot of things and will be wrong all the time

[Johnny C]

Practice 300-word reviews. When you get good at those, start relaxing your word counts. Get longer as you get better at it.

The most important thing in a review is saying what you want to say about the album. Begin by learning how to do that well and move on from there.

[Thrillho]

Actually Johnny, I'd suggest going the opposite direction. Most publications and websites seem to have mostly 100-odd word reviews. I'd say learn to write 300 and work backwards.

[Caspian]

A few simple rules:

No song by song reviews.
Avoid pretentiousness (has been mentioned, needs to be repeated).
"Elitist", "Open Minded" <-- words of that ilk automatically make a review horrible.
Keep your articles/reviews between, say, 200 and 1200 words. No one likes stuff that's short unless if it's really clever, no one likes stuff that's long unless if you're really good. If you've only just started writing chances are you're neither.. so, keep it relatively brief.
If you find that you're decent at writing, whore yourself out to a few lower level webzines. You'll get free promos and a tiny bit of e-fame. Cheap, easy, and sometimes fun.
If you're an indie kid, please don't write about metal. Please.

[Johnny C]

Actually Johnny, I'd suggest going the opposite direction. Most publications and websites seem to have mostly 100-odd word reviews. I'd say learn to write 300 and work backwards.

What online publication has a word limit?

[Thrillho]

The ones I've written for, and most websites have a kind of non-official limit of 800 words max, but a lot of other places have shorter limits. Most I've written for have been 300-500 depending on what you're writing about who.

[Caspian]

The ones I write for have no word count, at all. I've never heard of one with one, actually.

[Thrillho]

A lot of websites could use one. Or a shorter one.

[Johnny C]

The 100-word review isn't long for this world, though.

[David_Dovey]

you just don't understand

He's so whacky

[Thrillho]

The 100-word review isn't long for this world, though.

I can only hope so, I prefer 300-500 or else I feel like it's NOTHING.

[rynne]

I like Prindle because, regardless of his style, he’s the single reviewer that comes closest to my personal tastes.  I'd put more stock in a positive review from him than from almost any other single review site.

And yeah, his style is very amusing.  But the world certainly doesn't need someone else writing like that.

[Krina]

I used to write about music! My brother and his friend had a zine on Hardcore music: decayzine - music for freaks. It's still there if anyone wants to google. I wrote for their website, I did Interviews with bands, partly via e-mail and partly irl, I translated stuff and we wrote reviews of CDs / records and shows. It was all pretty obscure, which might have been why it was such good fun. To this day, we still get CDs sent to our house, even though we haven't updated the page in over 3 years. That was a really good time in my life. - Since it was our own webpage, we could do whatever the hell we wanted, so I have no idea about wordcounts whatsoever. I was the one who had to proof-read everything though, because everybody else was pretty crappy at spelling.

I also used to write about music for my highschool newspaper. Sadly, not many other people shared my passion for Bob Dylan etc. so I was pretty soon let go of.

Edit: I missed the advice part. I dunno, somebody said that it's hard to make a living from writing about music, which I guess is true, at least if you don't want to become a kind of whore-ish. I guess if you're into obscure music, that's good, because that way you'll get a reputation fairly soon. Yes, I have been a little semi-"famous" in the hardcore scene, it was kinda cool.