A Dozen Quotable Moments as Reasons to Watch Christopher R. Weingarten Talk for 10 Minutes about Twitter, Bonnaroo and the Death of Music Criticism

I discovered this clip on Thursday afternoon (via Twitter, natch) on The Daily Swarm, and found it entertaining, thought-provoking and controversial. Christopher R. Weingarten has contributed to a number of substantial music publications over the last 10 years, and to say he's got a few things on his mind in regards to the state of the musical union is an understatement. Hilarious, furious, and argument-inducing, the above speech has more than a few quotable moments. As such, the dozen below are my way of coaxing you into burning 10 minutes of your life watching the video. It's Saturday, after all, and you should take a little time off anyway. Enjoy:

1. "I am a freelance writer for RollingStone.com, the Village Voice, Revolver magazine, Decibel magazine, Idolator and more. By this time next year, I'm going to need a new job."

2. "...labels plied [music critics] with cocaine and hookers and vacations. This was all before I got in the game."

3. "Magazines and websites don't discover bands; they just report on trends."

4. "You don't need a critic to tell you if something is good. You can listen to it... If you want a leaked record,  you don't have to wait for me to tell you if it's good. You can type the name of the album and '.rar' into a search engine and get pretty much any album you want. It's easy."

5. "Now it's not a game of hearing the right record, it's hearing the leak the fastest. Music websites report on leaks and they still don't cover them fast enough, because Twitter people cover the leaks."

6. "All that a music review does now is reinforce the opinion that somebody already has."

7. "Crowdsourcing killed punk rock. Hands down. Crowdsourcing kills art. Crowdsourcing killed indie rock. It's bullshit. You wanna know why? 'Cause crowds have terrible taste. People have awful taste."

8. "If you let the people decide, then nothing truly adventurous ever gets out, and that's a problem."

9. "The magazines [at Bonnaroo] weren't covering what they wanted to cover. They were pretending to care about Phish because Phish was a trending topic. These places you would go to to ignore bands like Phish now have to pretend they love Phish."

10. "No one [talking about Bonnaroo on Twitter] said why these bands were great. No one stopped to say, 'Everyone at #bonnaroo, you should see my favorite band because,' and that's what we're missing in a world without critics: the because."

11. "People think you need some long Internet rant to express appropriate enthusiasm; it's not true."

12. "Be a critic in whatever you do. Let people know the 'why,' let people know the 'how.' Just don't expect to get paid for it ever."