SPIN Cycle
Earlier this month SPIN Magazine announced that it had plans to revolutionize the world of music criticism. Read up a bit before we dive too deep so we are all on the same page.
To summarize: SPIN wants to remove the 80-word mini reviews from the publication and convert those all to Tweets, and using a staff of 12 writers they hope to plow through 1500 albums this year; ambitious. What is the reasoning for the shift in medium? The new editor, Christopher Weingarten, seems to think that no one reads these mini reviews and they are better served to post micro reviews to start arguments among fans; please change “ambitious” to “lazy”.
For the visual, what I did above is show you the difference between a 140-character Tweet and an 80-word paragraph. Staggering just how big the difference is when it is presented right in front of you. Also keep in mind, Avid Reader, the Tweet is going to contain artist and album title information along with those two or three words to describe the piece of music itself. Is there no bigger, or smaller in this case, slap in the face to a musician that spent quality time on an album than to see that someone ripped it apart on Twitter? At least with the old format the author was given a chance to sign their name to the piece. For the Tweets there will be the generic @SPINReviews so you don’t even know who to address your nasty hate mail to.
The magazine is also going from a monthly publication to a bimonthly as well as going back to original larger size magazine, which I can dig. This will give them a chance to “focus on the photography and larger album reviews” — in other words: more pictures of kids wearing sideways hats and reviews of bands called We Bite the Heads off Chipmunks then Dance in the Night. The Twitter appeal is to give the lesser quality albums almost no press time from a major publication. True, a majority of the new generation have no idea what a magazine is or what an album review is, but those of us that still do, not to mention the people making the records, like to read what some folks have to say. I don’t think many writers went to an expensive school to study how to craft the best Tweet. No, many of us went to school to improve on our long hand and use words, not gibberish. Even NPR doesn’t like it, not that you were shocked by this knowledge.
I’ve been asked to review music by some small time folks that may not see the inside of those magazines and they all appreciate the words when they are written and posted on the Internet. Pretty soon you won’t tell people you’re on the cover of a Rolling Stone but you did get Tweeted, which does not make for a good song.
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I read those little reviews and they’ve actually gotten me to check out some bands before. Twitter is garbage!