Al Horner: How Radiohead's 'The King of Limbs' is killing off music journalism

alhorner:

These are the publications - scratch that, institutions - that popular music fans would once turn to for advance word on what awaited me on a new release, leering longingly at the privilege being a music journalist once held. No longer though. There were no advance copies of The King of Limbs.

As a result, you could practically hear the stampede of critics racing to blurt out their initial thoughts online, desperate to remain fresh and relevant. The advent of live-blogging and Twitter has clearly brought with it an urgency to what the press would typically report on - music journalism included. It prompted founder of the popular Drowned In Sound web-zine Sean Adams to speak out on Twitter: It’s an interesting and arguably legitimate comment on a day which saw the ancient art of the music-review reduced to a sort of knee jerk, first-time-round decision making. Thumbing through my record collection, I notice that the albums I continually return to years after their release - Radiohead’s own Kid A included - I had difficulty warming to on initial listens.

Guess I wasn’t just doing “professional trolling”, after all.

Gonna give it at least 3months before I listen to King of Limbs. I’ve got about 200 other albums in my play queue and enough people are listening to it that I don’t really have to.

Still can’t decide what was worse: friday’s live-blogged death of music journalism (“I am downloading the tracks… I am listening now!”), wherein I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by firsties, gorging on search engine optimisation OR the fact I had more retweets and gained more new Twitter followers in day for being vaguely disinterested in gut reactions to the new Radiohead album, than I usually get in a week for bigging up any music I love. (how do I check how many followers I lost in the process?)