I took a pass on blogging Ivanka Trump, but I enjoyed her talk. She was real and unscripted in conversation, and clearly is using social media in a first-person way. The high-level message from her talk was mostly transparency and consistency across brands.
Super excited for Chris Weingarten!
Twitter & The Death of Rock Criticism II: Music is Math – Chris Weingarten (@1000timesyes)
Chris comes out swinging and cursing. The internet is killing his profession! He got into music for music, not for math, but now the math of aggregated opinions is replacing the role of the rock critic – “we got into writing because we fucking suck at math.”
Again, the theme of citizen journalists vs. journalism as a profession, such as it is: Now everyone just wants to be first, “insight no longer the end goal, just an afterthought.”
“The dickheads from some inconsequential band is on stage with the dickhead from some other band!” The blogs are all trying to cover each indie band first so they can “ride the long tail” when one amongst those bands breaks big.
This is an awesome, profane chat that’s impossible to capture accurately – absolute evisceration of indie music coverage on the web. I think it’s a little outside of the sphere of some of the crowd, but I am loving it.
“Good writing dies at the hands of search engine optimization.” “We’re losing a large part of engaging in music.” How can we find the unknown if we’re just clicking on things we find in our “StumbleCulture.” “It’s not how you best illustrate a keyword, it’s how many times you can use the keyword in a day.”
Online music coverage is “playing mad-libs with music trends. I can name the best music writers right now, and they’re all writing about AmericanIdol.” “It’s not enough for a musician to be an artist, they have to be an internet hustler. They have to be keyboard cat.”
The constant stream of new art, new videos, new songs is devaluing the actual act of making quality art. All art declines as a result, creating more sound and noise within the blog hype machine about less and less actual quality content. “No one posts negative commentary because no one Googles the bands they don’t like.”
That was awesome. Meeting him is my #1 conference priority at this moment.
(My seatmate has proclaimed me the loudest clapper in the room.)