12 Thoughts on the Latest Round of Music Writing Layoffs

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it.

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1. Yesterday, word made it around the internet that a cluster of long-running music publications—specifically, BrooklynVegan, Alternative Press, Revolver, and Goldmine—were reportedly hit with massive layoffs that basically left all of the publications without a staff to run them. I say "reportedly" because, at the time of writing this (4:08 pm EST on August 5, if you're a stickler for timestamps), nothing has been confirmed by any official sources—but, for all intents and purposes, the news seems to be true.
2. An interesting wrinkle in the entire situation is that the parent company that enacted said layoffs, the livestream platform Veeps, is owned by none other than Benji and Joel Madden of noted terrible-music-making band Good Charlotte. As many bemoaned the layoffs on social media, this fact began worming its way into the discourse for two notable reasons: Firstly, we are and have definitively been in an era where the notion of celebrity-as-business mogul has resulted in said celebrities enacting the type of mass cruelty experiments that layoffs resemble in the name of good business. This phenomenon—which, granted, isn't terribly frequent but does occasionally take other hilariously insidious forms—is yet another dent in the armor of the "celebrities are our friends and we're living for it" era that 2010s millennial culture so desperately thrived upon, and by extension another candle snuffed in the collective millennial fever dream that once burned far too bright.
3. Despite the snuffing of said dream, celebrities also continue to function as shorthand explanation for the inner and outer workings of the world at large; beyond the tone of positivity in the sentiments themselves, there's not a ton of daylight between "the Good Charlotte guys killed BrooklynVegan" and "we have Dolly Parton to thank for the COVID-19 vaccines". Even the most grizzled and cynicism-drenched poster fell victim to embracing the former oversimplification yesterday, some very fantastically suggesting that the layoffs themselves ran opposite to the "punk ethos" that Good Charlotte supposedly strained to embody—all reactions of which function as strong evidence that few, if any, are truly immune to the celebrity industrial complex affecting their overall worldview.
4. Of course, it doesn't really matter whether the "Little Things" guys actually smashed the Staples "That was easy" button to decimate the music writing landscape yet again; the bottom line is that more coverage space is gone, more jobs are lost and never to return, and the ever-growing pool of people looking for stable work in media (which I am also currently swimming in, el-oh-el) just got a little more crowded. It sucks to lose your job, and it also seems like everyone I know is losing their job in some capacity these days, in all industries, beyond the ever-beleaguered realm of digital media. What else is there to say beyond the fact that it remains an increasingly tough time to exist in this world?
5. Allow me to give a little bit of a eulogy for BrooklynVegan specifically: As several colleagues have pointed out online, the site was an indispensable resource for anyone who was looking to get the full breadth of coverage when it came to new emo, punk, metal, and more generally rock releases. In recent years, it's been one of the only websites that I visit regularly, largely because their coverage of new releases across the musical spectrum has been truly comprehensive and an absolute boon to "I must listen to everything" freaks like me. The last time my fastidiousness took an L like this was when Resident Advisor drastically cut their singles and albums reviews; I haven't been back in years, but that was by choice. (For what it's worth, Shawn Reynaldo's First Floor and Philip Sherburne's Futurism Restated newsletters have proven essential resources in the wake of RA's general cutbacks.)
6. In the case of BrooklynVegan, I've lost another resource for compiling the materials that drive my obsessive listening habits, and I definitely appreciated their fastidious and no-nonsense work in providing that resource. Whether someone will pop up and provide a similar service for the realms of rock and heavy music is anyone's guess; I'm personally not holding my breath for the time being and, if anything, am increasingly resigned to (longest sigh of all time) scouring RYM and AOTY, if I can stomach it.
7. I truthfully have not read Alternative Press or Revolver in years; I honestly don't know if I ever read Revolver, and in the case of AP I don't have any real memories of visiting the website, although I'm sure I checked out the occasional profile—but I did read the magazine quite a bit as a teenager and have fond memories of being urged to purchase, say, Blur's The Best of Blur or Richard and Linda Thompson's Shoot Out the Lights in the back pages. As for Goldmine, I honestly didn't even know it existed until I read a description in the aforementioned Pitchfork news piece about what the publication was and what it did.
8. I'm not saying any of this to suggest that my not knowing about or regularly frequenting these publications is in any way an indictment of their prior existence—far from it. If anything, I'm putting these facts forth to emphasize that we are all generally talking about these publications and the work they do/did the most when they are disappearing or being subjected to death by a thousand cuts. The active investment in their vitality seemingly always arrives right when they're on their way out; even as I know several people who have contributed to AP in the past, I don't think I've ever seen people talk about the publication as much as I have in the last 24 hours, and the same goes for BrooklynVegan and the rest.
9. Lest you think I'm doing a Billy Eichner-on-Britney Spears thing to suggest that we're all culpable for the continued decline of well-staffed, decently-moneyed culture publications: The decade-long death rattle of digital media at large is many-factored and much-bemoaned, and it has as much to do with expectations set forth by the perils of constant economic scaling as it does the fact that reading about popular culture—reading about music, specifically—remains a relatively niche concern compared to, say, sports or politics writing. Feel free to insert a "late-stage capitalism much?!?" millennial sentiment here, if you wish.
10. But in recent years, I've also been faintly bemused at the bemoanings regarding The State of Things becoming its own industry of posting from music writers—a replacement for actual writing, perhaps, or at the very least an acknowledgement that banging the "Democracy Dies in Darkness" drum for the cause of music writing can get more attention than writing about music itself. Feel free to group me in this phenomenon for a second, since I am quite literally writing in this vein as we speak—but if this gets eyes the way I expect it to, it's just more proof that beating one's chest about the future of music writing also functions as a more effective audience honeypot than, again, writing about music itself.
11. The reality is that—and I recognize the irony that this is coming from someone whose very first newsletter post six years ago was titled "Is Music Writing About to Die?"—people are not actually mourning the death of music writing, but the slow erosion of an economic structure that actually started to vanish when I was telling advice-seeking college students "I know things seem bad but I think they're going to turn around soon" around 2017 or so. People are also mourning the dream of writing for publications that have a level of cachet or name recognition—which, to be clear, is a totally reasonable dream to have had at any point in the past. But "the dream of writing for publications you know and love" is very different from the actual vitality of music writing itself.
12. The good news is, it's easier than ever to write about popular culture—music, specifically!—without relying on throwing your hat in the freelance pool of pitching-and-getting-rejected-and-writing-and-invoicing, which I know everyone in this industry has a varying level of resistance to engaging with. I've been doing this newsletter independently for years, and although it is by no means a way to fully financially support myself (you can help me out by subscribing, though!), I take a great amount of pleasure in doing this for myself and continuing to engage with whoever chooses to read what I've written. I do this because I want to, and for years now, "because I want to" has pretty much been the only reason to do this period. If you're doing it for any other reason, I won't go as far to question the nature of your commitment—but it's worth asking yourself whether you're searching for echoes of a past sensation instead of truly living in the reality of the moment.