For Orchestra

I love this video. Chris Weingarten, music writer for Village Voice and Rolling Stone, brings up a fantastic point about the future of music in this age of digital journalism during his presentation at 140 Conference. To check out his awesome speech at last year’s 140 conf click here.

He stresses that its an SEO game, where journalists give way to actual music coverage, and rather simply ‘blanket’ the music news so they gain views. Case in point AOL’s SXSW coverage. This video below plays automatically. If you hate that feature let me know, I’ll take out the video and simply link to it.

UPDATE: The automatic playable video is so annoying, based on the emails I decided to take it out. To see it click here.

He goes on to bash The Hype Machine, too. I agree with his points, but I like the technology behind Hype M, but can totally see his point. I think it does do some cool aggregation and new musical tastes and stuff – but as with anything, true aggregation is in people’s desire to continualy seek out new sounds, ideas, and references. Depending on any one blog isn’t authentic, but neither is simply depending on a single newspaper for news, or TV station, or music magazine.

And this doesn’t just apply to music, this applies to everything. I met Chris at SXSW, and think he really knows what he’s talking about. And he’s passionate.

I think what he is referring to is that in order to win the game – any game – you have to be well rounded, and stop playing into the game.

The pleasure of discovery is in the hard work, and the process of digging for something new. The cream eventually rises to the top, but not always the top of the search engines.

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