If everybody is, then nobody is…

I love magazines.  I probably read at least 30 of ’em per month.  All kinds of topics, mainstream and indie, and way in the back of the current issue of “Nylon Guys” is an article about Samir “Mr. Magazine” Husni.  He’s earned his PhD in Magazine Journalism, and his observations on that industry are amazingly relevant to the music business.

There used to be 2,000 magazines in 1980 available for the general public.  Last year wholesalers distributed 9,400 magazines on the newsstands.  so you no longer are just interested in that magazine about pets, you are interested in the magazine about rabbits or hamsters or chickens — there’s a magazine for each one of them.  The fragmentation is much bigger.

This is what I keep telling my students:  “We feel now that we are so connected, yet what we are actually living in is what I call an isolated connectivity.  We are more isolated than ever before, yet we feel we are more connected than ever before.  Take social media:  say I have 500 friends on Facebook.  I can’t touch or feel any of them.  The touchy-feely aspect that you have with magazines or you have with people is disappearing and we are just depending on text messaging, mobile technology, Skype — you name it…Unless we humanize our media…we are going to be dead.

The same applies for all media.  We cannot live in isolation:  Human beings are not created to be isolated, to live alone, to stay alone.

But can you imagine a society in which each and every one of us thinks they are a journalist because they can tweet?  If everybody is a journalist, nobody is a journalist.

When you substitute the word “musician” or “manager” (or “brain surgeon”) for journalist, it starts to get scary.  The Internet has given a false sense of ability to anyone with a Macbook and a credit card.   Even worse, the folks who went to business school know this.  They’ve made millions preying upon a ready group of suckers who sang lead in their high school musicals, but a decade later they’re just bartenders working for tips wondering why fame and fortune hasn’t smiled on them.

Nonetheless, there are truly talented musicians and music professionals out there.  And for the industry to rebound, the gatekeepers, filters, and decider-ers need to figure out a way to spotlight all that is good rather than make a buck off the bad.