...and that means that they will completely ignore the description of their panel and talk about whatever the hell they want.
Before I even start this post, I just want to get something out on the table. The following content is written while I’m still a little bitter about the hour that I will never get back after sitting in on this panel. So to be fair to the panelists and to the folks that went to the panel who disagree with me, I’m giving you a ticket out now. This is not going to be a very pleasant review of the panel “Bloggers Are Now in Charge” from the South by Southwest music festival in Austin on Thursday, March 19, 2009.
Now that that’s out of the way, let me start by saying that I’m amazed that five individuals who were put up on a panel to discuss blogging at one of the world’s premier music festivals seem to be so out of touch with consumer generated media, and with the obligations they have to the audiences they serve and the industry they report on.
Panel Description: Amid the rubble of the music industry, a new breed of music enthusiasts has established instantaneous and direct links to like-minded fans. What exactly is their impact on the scene?
Moderator: Glenn Peoples , Coolfer.com
Robert Duffy, Founder, donewaiting.com
Justin Gage, Founder, Aquarium Drunkard
Bill Pearis, BrooklynVegan.com
Janet Timmons, Editor, OuttheOther.com
I expected to walk into this panel and be blown away by a couple, if not five emerging media/social media mavens who specialize in the music industry. Instead, the audience and I were treated to a full hour of four amateur journalists who thought it was more important to discuss the state of vinyl record stores in local markets and why they would not accept CDs from musical artists to review. Most galling of all, was the statement by panelist Duffy, and the unanimous agreement by the other ones, that all of them only write about artists that they like. Oblivious to the fact that they’ve now announce that they were lapdogs to the local music scene that they served, Robert Duffy of http://donewaiting.com continued by explaining that writing about artists that he didn’t like, or that he would be critical about, was not worth it because “it’s not worth the hate” that is generated by unhappy readers.
So after we established that all of the bloggers on the panel were self-described lapdogs to the local music scene, we were treated to half an hour of self-serving discussions about the minutia of their individual blogs and how they ran them. This was not my expectation for this panel. Considering that we're at South by Southwest, these panelists should have represented influencers and connectors in the music industry that have an impact on the industry as a whole. At a minimum they should have been experts in the field that were prepared to come and talk about how blogging and consumer generated media impacted the music industry overall. It would have been more accurate a description of the panel if the SXSW program had called it “Four Bloggers Talk About Themselves, Their Blogs, the Music Scene in Columbus, and Why Vinyl Is Superior To All Other Materials in the World for All Purposes.”
The Vinyl discussion needs to end. Kids, vinyl is dead. Vinyl scratches. Vinyl is fragile. Vinyl is a subject that only obscure music critics care about. Move on. We did over a decade ago.
My overall impression of the panel, which I think was the biggest disappointment to me, was that the bloggers were just mini, under-employed versions of traditional journalists or music critics...without the “critical” part. You might even say that they were worse, considering that they admitted that they would not write critical reviews of local music artists and/or wouldn’t cover artists that they didn’t “enjoy.” A more accurate description of these bloggers would be “fanboi’s.” Surely not a group of folk that are going to have any real impact on the music scene beyond picking up where the newly unemployed local music critics left off in the local dailies.
Another revelation was, again with the unanimous agreement of all the panelists, that unless artists sent them music in a predefined format that they preferred to receive content in, they would not even listen to the artists’ work. All the panelists prefer to receive links to MP3s via e-mail; none of them liked receiving CDs. This smacks of the traditional elitism that has been a great contributor to the demise of traditional media.
I expected these bloggers to be different than their professional counterparts. I was disappointed that they were not more open to different file formats when it came to the artist trying to get coverage through their blogs.
During the Q&A section I questioned all five panelists and asked them in a very frank manner if they saw a difference between themselves and traditional music writers. Patrick Duffy thought that the difference between him and the traditional journalists was that a traditional journalist would only cover mainstream acts in order to appease a larger audience whereas he would not do so. He would only cover indie artists with a smaller following. There seemed to be an assumption that this simple act made his work valuable. I’m not quite sure what the logic is behind that line of thinking. I find this to be a fallacy in all critics who think they know better than the generally public. Indie journalists tend to write off artists that have broken into the mainstream as being no longer worthy of their time and attention. It's elitism of the worst kind. To proove my point, Mr. Duffy called out the names of a couple of Columbus-based acts (his beat is the Columbus, Ohio music scene) that he does not cover simply because they are "big acts."
I will say that of all the panelists, Janet Timmons pretty much carried the whole panel if for no other reason than she talked loud enough for the room to hear her and actually has an inflection in her voice that made it interesting to the ear. Seriously, she had the most relevant and interesting things to say of all the panelists. This is ironic, being that of all the speakers she could be considered the only “traditional journalist” due to the fact that she has her own radio show in Nashville, Tennessee. This may explain why she presented so much better than the rest of the panel. She has professional experience and understands what it takes to get an audience to listen. The rest of the panelists, including the moderator, didn’t seem to be prepared, didn’t care about being there, and could care less about the audience that came to see them speak.
Final nail in the coffin: when one audience member mentioned the fact that the panel should have been discussing the overall industry and how bloggers have an impact on it, our friend Mr. Duffy replied with “I didn’t write that description.” The rest of the panelists nodded their heads in agreement. So, apparently the bloggers *are* in charge and they are going to talk about whatever they damn well please. Screw the description of the presentation they accepted a panel position on. ...and screw the audience who came expecting a discussion along those lines.
I suggest Mr. Duffy, Mr. Gage, Mr. Pearis, Mr. Peoples, and Miss Timmons, the next time you agree to speak on a panel at a conference, you should pay attention to what the topic is and cover that topic for the benefit of your host and the audience. That’s just good manners.
