Are Music Blogs The Great Hope For Rock Journalism?

From The Rock and Roll Report: : "Apparently it's a bad time to be a rock journalist. The decline of the music industry and the paucity of good magazines has left many a budding Lester Bangs to pound out their stuff on a lowly blog."

For more on the state of music criticism see Guardian Unlimited "Like falling off a blog":

"What they add up to is a fertile breeding ground for a new style of music writing - just when the trade needs it most. The ludic quality of music criticism merges with a serious approach to the subject rarely found in a mainstream that treats music as entertainment rather than art. Add encyclopaedic knowledge, genre-crossing frames of reference and a disregard for celebrity, and you have the key traits of the music blog.

Above all, music blogs are free from the business plans and targeted readerships that determine the content of commercial publications. It may be, as one blogger recently admitted, a 'hermetically sealed and potentially borderline-autistic pursuit', but this unregulated zone contains fantastic, stimulating and piercingly acute writing. Savour the moment before its protagonists have to find proper jobs. "

Note: I had to look up "ludic" - it means parody.

And over on blissblog - a Prog Blog - replies to The Guardian's proposition of blogging as 'borderline-autistic pursuit' :

"Must disagree with Mr Young on one point though, where he quotes in apparent agreement someone's remark to the effect that blogging's a 'hermetically sealed and potentially borderline-autistic pursuit'... sure this is the land of 'spotters and savants and data-hoarding obsessives, but no actually for me one of its major appeals is the sociality (or do I mean sociability?). The way conversations occur in near-real time; people take the baton of argument and run with it, then pass it on. That's why it reminds me a bit of the old music weekly press when writers would engage with each other, have debates across the pages and weeks--usually within one magazine, sometimes across the whole inkie-weekly terrain. "

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