Listen Up: Stumble Culture, Hype Machines and How Paste Rolls

Maybe you know Christopher R. Weingarten from that speech he gave about Twitter and rock writing last year. Maybe you know him as the @1000TimesYes dude, or the Hipster Puppies guy. Maybe you know him as what he probably most wants to be known as: a music critic who writes for Spin, Rolling Stone, Village Voice, Revolver and others. Maybe you don't know him at all. But the man has some thoughts on the state of criticism and the internet and how everything sucks and who's to blame, and he delivered them last week in another speech at this year's 140 Characters Conference in New York City. The short video (which plays automatically, as you probably already learned) is below and is worth watching, even if/especially if you have a feeling you might disagree with him.

Weingarten's main point? "When clicks are your lifeblood, it doesn't matter if the writing is any good, and that fucking blows.” He's a very quotable guy, and when you consider only the choice quips (you've probably seen some flying around online already) he's essentially spot on. But between the quotes, it's a little rickety. To begin with, there's the matter of Hype Machine, which gets the brunt of his ire. If you're not familiar, the website aggregates posts from some of the web's top music blogs; it's meant as a catalog of artists' and songs' popularity, not necessarily of quality, but Weingarten rants about its overuse in determining what bands get covered online. "The sad thing is," he says, "the people who read it the closest are magazines who cover all the same bands two months later and music festivals who book all their bands for their practically identical lineups."

If you're mostly removed from the inner-world of music writing, that statement might seem pretty sound. But because I know first-hand and for certain Paste doesn't rely on Hype Machine in any capacity, I'm a bit suspicious of how fast and loose Weingarten might be playing here. And anyway, if everyone was actually using Hype Machine in precisely the way he says we all are, would the website itself really be to blame? I don't think its creators ever actually intended the site to be the internet's grand overlord taste-bot; it seems more than a little unfair to dump the blood of music writing on its hands.

But that's not the only factor to blame, and that's not the only thing he gets a little bit wrong. Early in the speech, Weingarten cites Paste as one of two examples of music outlets running non-music stories that grab page-views and devalue actual music writing, calling out the 25 Best American Breweries of the Decade list we published online last fall. I get that he doesn't mean this as a dig, and while it's certainly more apt than his other example (MTV not covering music? Say it ain't so!), it still doesn't quite work. Not to get all prissy about it, but we've never been a straight-up music magazine; our tagline has been "signs of life in music and culture" from the get-go, and "signs of life in music, film and culture" since 2004. Music might be the main thing we cover and what most people know us for, but we've never acted like it's all we do, so it's weird when other people hold us to that standard. We even used to have a food and drink section before page-counts took a dive a few years back; we cut it so we could have more space to write about—guess what?—music. But hell, we really like beer—I mean, we really, really like beer—and there's plenty of space online, so we still write about it when we want.

I bring this all up because what Weingarten seems to think we're suddenly doing (desperately casting a shamefully-wide net for page-views) is actually just us doing what we've always done (writing about what we're passionate about), which is something he clearly wishes more publications would do. He calls the page-grabbing "playing Mad-Libs with Google trends," which may very well prove true on whatever lucky day in the far future when an obscure beer-monger becomes hot enough to nudge out any given natural disaster, athletic event and/or teen pop star du jour from Google's top searches. But, eh, don't hold your breath.

Anyway, this is actually how most of our editorial decisions go: We like it, so we write about it. It's pretty simple, and it sounds kind of corny when it's written out like that, but there's strangely little transparency when it comes to magazines and blogs talking about their editorial process, so there's a shiny nugget of insight for you. If you believe Weingarten's laments, though, there's nobody doing this today; all editorial decisions are driven by analytics and page-views and Hype Machine stats. "At least when we had a rigid hierarchy of editors, some of their random favorite shit would pop into magazines instead of having everything vetted through the bland, middling tastes of the internet hive-mind," he says.

I chuckled when I heard this because, first of all, it seems like unfair generalizations and weak supporting facts are more of a threat to good writing than any online MP3 aggregator. Dude says “all” and “every” and “no one” in the speech almost more than he says “fucking,” which is a whole fucking lot. But also, wow, wouldn't my job be easier if this was actually how things worked?!

See, I assign all of the emerging artist profiles that appear on Paste's website and in the magazine. A huge chunk of my time at work is spent scouring for and vetting bands and musicians I've never heard of; my inbox is sagging with emails from publicists and writers about new artists, and then there's the internet and the whole wide real world teeming with unknowns. If I did literally nothing else with my time, I still wouldn't be able to listen to it all. On a good day, it's a fun challenge and I feel lucky to do it; on a bad day, it kind of makes me hate music.

But oh! To be able to visit one webpage and see a fully-populated list of bands that someone else has already decided are good and that are all essentially guaranteed to lure tons and tons of cool-hungry visitors to the Paste site! How perfect! How easy! Perhaps with all my new free time I'll go browse some stories about Lady Gaga maybe having a penis, or click through a thirty-page gallery of photos from some party in Brooklyn that I wouldn't have been invited to even if I lived in New York! Hell, maybe I'll just ditch work for the afternoon, go find a dog, dress it in an old Body Glove shirt and some shutter-shades and see if I can get somebody to put it in a book. All this while the page-views just roll on in to Ye Olde PasteMagazine.com!

But that's not quite how it works.

How does it work? How does Paste pick new bands to cover? It's probably closer to Weingarten's presumably-ideal vision of music writing and discovery than he'd guess. Every artist we slap our “Best of What's Next” approval on is an artist we like, plain and simple; some come to us by way of staff and intern recommendations, some from writer pitches, some from publicists. Everyone in the office listens to a lot of music, but we also listen to our friends and to TV and movies and the radio. We go to shows early for opening bands; some of us have even been known to browse record stores when the right mood strikes. We keep up with other music and culture magazines and websites, but as far as I can tell, it doesn't matter all that much which bands anyone else is covering. Weingarten says “stumble culture” is dead, but that hardly feels true down here in Atlanta.

To be completely honest, I hadn't visited Hype Machine in years until his speech nudged me to revisit and figure out what all the fuss is about. I used to go just to hear specific songs I couldn't find on MySpace; after Imeem (R.I.P.) and Lala came along and better served the same purpose, it mostly fell out of my routine. So it surprised me to hear Weingarten talk about it like it's the driving force behind what bands do and don't get covered online. The folks behind the Hype Machine are clearly doing a good job at what they do, and I see how the site could be incredibly useful for some fans. But damn, if actual professional editors and writers actually use it as some kind of editorial dowsing rod—if that really honestly is something that people whose tastes other people are lead to believe are worth trusting actually do—then yeah, I'm standing with Weingarten.

But do they? Is it? I ask genuinely and with a touch of disbelief, not because I'm morally opposed to letting an aggregator exclusively determine who and what a magazine or website covers (it's not wrong, just lazy and hackish!) but because I'm kinda skeptical of Weingarten's far-flung proclamation here—and also because it all just sounds so incredibly not fun. What's the point of writing about music if you can't write about music that you actually care about? You're not gonna get rich from it, that's for sure—but are you really going to do any better by populating your blog or your magazine with Hype Machine-gathered bands and MP3s? How long can you really ride that wave, and who wins in the end?

And if that's what you have to do to survive, how come Paste is still here? Because, uh, we aren't playing that game. When we think something's good, we write about it; we want you to know, too, or at the very least we want you to have the pleasure of telling us we're wrong. We write about stuff we think is bad, too, despite another fantastically broad generalization from Weingarten: “No one is left to say shit sucks.” Really? Because we do it all the time. And so do most other magazines—music-focused or otherwise—worth their salt and/or pageviews. Record labels might get pissed and not give you exclusive MP3s, like Weingarten says, but also like Weingarten says, those are pretty much pointless now anyway. (Confidential to CRW: We don't actually care for the new Broken Social Scene either, but the review is just now coming out the April/May issue—sorry to make you wait for it, but you know, damn the firsties and all that.)

To be sure, Paste sometimes overlaps with the most-hyped of the Hype Machine, and we sometimes cover subjects that might have a broader appeal than some readers prefer. But the internet and its click economy isn't to blame for this; we were balancing that load years before we had any kind of notable web presence, and you'd be hard-pressed to find any publication (online or off) that doesn't struggle with the same thing. It's an old problem, just in a new and more instantly-trackable form. There's no changing the fact that page-views are important, which is why we sometimes cover subjects we care about (or just find honestly compelling in some way beyond the obvious keywordiness) as lists (which—fact of life alert!—are almost always bound to get more hits than anything else) and why we paginate web stories and why there are are links covering nearly every inch of our site; we need clicks so we can sell ads so we can stay in business so we can keep doing what we love.

And that's the really important part, the "doing what we love" thing. If we're not doing that, it really doesn't matter what kind of page-views we get. And we do not love the idea of following the dictates of some strange ouroboros of a web machine—or, barring that, of some nebulous mob of blogs. That's not fun and it doesn't serve anyone. That's not worth our time and effort, and it's not worth yours—or your precious clicks.

Rachael Maddux is Paste’s associate editor. Her column appears at PasteMagazine.com every Monday.