"Crowdsourcing killed indie rock...because people have awful taste."

I watched about 30 seconds but when he started complaining that he isn't going to get paid by offering up his stupid opinions...

EXACTLY!!! FUCK YOU people for trying to decide what you like for yourselves!! Pay me to tell you what to like! Stop discovering good bands faster than I can, and then pay me to make them trendy for you!

Nice hat hipster. You really didn't deserve the job you had.

What an idiot, and who gives a fuck?

Interesting take, although his comment about 19 year old kids who blog for concert tickets and a pat on the head was a little rough! Also, since demographics are constantly changing, in five years will this guy's voice be important anymore? :-p. The young people are the ones dictating what's good, but I don't necessarily see the problem in that. Also, maybe I'm idealistic, but I'd like to think great writing will always have a place somewhere.

Music critics are even more useless than movie critics. He has some good points but this is what we go through every revolution in the music industry. People having a hard time adjusting to the new. Nothing is dead, he just is in an profession that is becoming out dated. He might have to actually work for a living and that is terrifying I suppose. Poor little man.

First off, making a living off of writing about music is idealistic you should have listened to your mom and been a male-nurse. Secondly, why do u big shot music critics always have such an arrogance towards the rest of humanity when it comes to music trend? Yes the masses are very general, and sometimes bland, but i blame the musicians for not having more integrity toward writing in the first place. Finally if you hate the median on twitter then why do post on there? your not unique enough to boycott things you don't like? i would have checked it out but i don't tweet.

@nightafternight on twitter says "Missing in world w/o critics: the "because." Christopher R. Weingarten rails on Twitter & music: RT @activecultures"

I run a site called NxEW.ca - it is a volunteer run Canadian music site, not out of prejudice but because by focusing on home grown music we hope to do a better job of covering it. We currently have 116 contributors in 35 Canadian cities and a few in the US and UK (still writing about touring Canadian bands.) So far, though we have a few ads, it doesn't pay for itself but it soon will and we hope to eventually have sponsors and a small staff - someday.

I feel bad for this guy in a way, he's young to be a dinosaur but a dinosaur he is. First of all his point that "Crowd Sourcing killed indie rock - people have awful taste" is truly a sign of what went wrong in the first place. If people agreed with critics, if critics had amazing taste and were a reliable source of information and if they actually did a good job of covering everything - people wouldn't have felt compelled to start all of these sites. This guy is saying though that he still knows best, that everyone having an opinion is bad for music and that we should just leave it to him and stop finding music for ourselves. In other words he's asking us to give up having our own ideas so he can keep his job.

He also claimed that "nothing adventurous ever gets out" with the internet as it is. I'd say it's just the opposite. There was a time, not so long ago, when there were a handful of labels putting out a few hundred albums a year. By the late 80s - though the number of albums was up the big labels (Warner, Universal, etc) also owned the radio stations, television stations, newspapers and music magazines. What's happened since then?

According to the Toronto Star there were more than 750,000 albums produced worldwide in 2007 compared to 38,000 in 2002.

http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/article/288598

There is more music, and a greater variety of music available now than there ever was before. Not all of that music is good, but I would say that there is far more good music out there now than there was when he started in 1999. The big labels are now on their knees but there are hundreds of small labels popping up all the time.

Technology has made it less expensive to create recorded music and the internet has made it easier to promote and distribute your music. The internet hasn't killed music, the internet has resurrected music.

It's true that reporting on music has trended away from reviews and away from the why but that's because it's music. I don't remember who said "writing about music is like dancing about architecture" but it's true. With music you either like it or you don't and a critics opinion (the 'why' he's so fond of) isn't likely to change whether you like something or not.

At NxEW.ca the basic editorial policy is anarchy. Each of our volunteers is 'self assigning' they can write anything they want about anything they want. No one tells them what to cover or what to think about it. There are some album reviews and some live show reviews but most of it tends to just be information. So, in short, we say - here is information about bands we like and what they are up to now, here is what you can expect from the new album, here is where you can see them on tour and sometimes 'here is a band you may not know and here are a few songs you can test the water with.'

We don't try to tell people what they should and shouldn't like, we just tell them about what we (each, individually) like and hope that there are those who share our taste and are interested in the information we have. Screw the 'why'.

The music industry is not dying, it's evolving and expanding and some of the older 'music industry' types are failing to evolve with it. I would suggest that this guy is one of those people.