ABSTRACT
The music press plays a major part in the process of selling music as an economic commodity, while at the same time investing it with cultural significance. In one of the first extended critical discussions of the music press, Simon Frith correctly argued for its central role in ‘making meaning’: ‘the importance of the professional rock fans – the rock writers’, and the music papers, whose readers ‘act as the opinion leaders, the rock interpreters, the ideological gatekeepers for everyone else’ (Frith, 1983: 165). Currently, the ‘traditional’ music press remains significant, but has been modified by the advent of online music magazines and blogs producing a democratization of music journalism. My discussion begins with a general consideration of just what constitutes ‘the
music press’, which I view as a diverse range of publications. Music journalism is a literary genre in which any distinction between ‘rock journalism’ and academic writing on popular music is frequently blurred. Music magazines include industry reference tools, musicians’ magazines, record collector magazines, fanzines, ‘teen glossies’, ‘the inkies’, style bibles and the new tabloids. Although these publications have many features in common, each serves a particular place in a segmented market, in which journalism becomes collapsed into, and often indistinguishable from, music industry publicity. Despite this symbiosis, popular music critics continue to function as gatekeepers and arbiters of taste, a role examined in the concluding section of the discussion here. The music press includes a wide range of print publications, with many now
also online, along with web-based publications. General interest magazines and newspapers will also cover popular music, with regular review columns. More specifically, however, the music press refers to specialized publications: lifestyle magazines with major music coverage, music trade papers and weekly and monthly consumer magazines devoted to popular music or particular genres within it. In addition to these are privately published fanzines, usually peripheral to the market economy of commercial publishing but significant nonetheless. Although categories frequently overlap, various categories of publication can be distinguished. They include popular (auto)biographies, histories and genre studies; various forms of consumer guide, including encyclopedias and dictionaries, discographies and chart listings and compilations; and discographies, usually organized by artist, genre or historical period. The last represent an important aspect
of popular music history, which they constitute as well as record, and are important texts for fans and aficionados. There are also more esoteric publications, such as rock quiz books, genealogical tables plotting the origin and shifting membership of groups and ‘almanacs’ dealing with the trivia and microscopic detail of stars’ private lives. In one of the first bibliographies of popular music, Paul Taylor observed: ‘The variety of these publications is matched by the variation in the quality of their writing, accuracy and scholarship, which means one must approach them with a degree of discrimination and care’ (Taylor, 1985: 1). Almost 30 years on, this judgment still stands.
