A Reviewer's Dystopia

It's probably an act of perfect timing on my part, observing the slow and arduous decay of the print medias, the proliferation of digital downloading (legal and otherwise), the advent of Spotify and Last.fm; and then deciding that my new favourite past-time would be reviewing some of the most readily available, free music there is.

It used to be the case that reviewers were arbiters of taste, in more fields than just music the person with the biggest medium to project their own views on to was, often enough, the one who got to dole out the success. Not exactly democratic or open as far as cultural hierarchies goes, but it happened and it happened not all that long ago. Even I at a relatively young 24/25 can remember the days when buying a magazine like NME was an actual cultural choice because, cynical though I may have been, what was contained within those pages still made up the scenery upon which my musical tastes were built. I could and did detest half of what they promoted but those bands I did settle on were still ready sealed with the stamp of approval from one journo or another. Although you could of course point out that record company PR departments had as much (if not more) to do with defining that musical world as the writers did but even beyond the realms of 'popular' music the art of reviewing has usually meant something. Genre specific fanzines, local rags, even random people who just liked the sound of their own voice and the look of their own tastes; they created a whole system for propagating music, corrupt and discriminatory as that system may have been.