Not With The Band: What Is Really News?

I can’t believe what stands for music news today, when are we going to reach a saturation and realize we have to go backwards? There are so many outlets, so many blogs, websites, magazines which need the attention in an over-saturated market, that necessarily anything, yes about anything, passes for news.

Yesterday I was on Twitter and read two tweets by Kanye West who was simply asking for people to leave him alone until he finishes his album… okay not much to comment about, but today when I read NME’s headlines, there was: ‘Kanye West: ‘Don’t ask me for anything till after I’m finished with my album’ followed by a short paragraph and a picture of Kanye’s tweets reiterating the same thing… Really? This made the news? You mean I could have written an article about Kanye wanting to be left alone to finish his album? Is it professional journalism? And how many times do we need to know about this no-news item? If you Google the thing, you will find a few dozens of blogs and websites rehashing the same thing, a no-news item replicated over and over without bringing one bit of new information, is it where we are now? An incessant reposting of the same ‘information’ without any real content, may be to avoid writing about the real thing? Music?

I am certainly guilty of this too, although I don’t go as low as the previous example, Kanye moving his fingers over a keypad is not news, except if he shares some new tracks! Too often, some music celebrity’s lesser move is regarded as news whereas it is not, but when you are looking for something to write about every day, there is necessarily a constant demand for news-worthy information. This is a daily dilemma, should I write about Taylor Swift’s trademark story, or the new trailer for her 1989 World Tour film, or is it pointless? Should I write about Lady Gaga’s latest comment about the music industry or is it too obvious? Then you look around, don’t find anything valuable to write about, and you end up blogging about one of these celebrities’ news because you are too tired to write about anything else. Yes there is a lot of music released every week, not always inspiring so who cares when Adele has a new haircut?

This year, blogs and websites (us included) have talked way too much about Taylor Swift – I am really tired of Tay and her perfect-body-female squad. We have also talked way too much about Adele – she showed up later in the year, but since she sold way too many albums in a record time, she has been in the news every single day since the release of ‘25’. Miley Cyrus was excessively covered just because the stoned girl wore eccentric outfits and even some totally provocative ones … then there were the usual suspect, Kanye West of course, Drake, The Weeknd, Ed Sheeran, Lana Del Rey, Nicki Minaj, Beyonce, Rihanna,… Do we need 100 millions of websites rehashing the same information? No, but how did we get there and how do we go back?

Most of the time, we have even lost track of the source of the news, there’s so much reblogging that you have to track the original source, and does it matter anymore? Twitter and Tumblr have invented this culture of reblogging, it’s deeply coded in our DNA by now. When 24-hour news channels were invented, they started doing the same thing, broadcasting the same information over and over, and they are still doing it. So there’s probably no return and it is becoming harder and harder to distinguish a significant news from a Kanye West tweet.