Ah, I assume this is part of your response to the thread about Pitchfork's Weak Tea Top Fif-tea for the year. Good call! Lots of innovative music, all over the road, and lots more female musicians. Sweet! When I want to know the good music coming up in a few months, I listen to Triple J. KCRW and KCSN will play that stuff a couple months later, along with KEXP and WXPN. Soon enough I'll hear it in the pharmacy. In contrast, I'll listen to college radio if I want to hear something I never heard before or never conceived existed. KALX Berkeley, KSPC Claremont, my old home at the Harpur Radio Workshop, WZBC from Boston College, or the giant of the whelps and weirdos -- WFMU. Perhaps I shouldn't point out the giant elephant in the room: why do we need a replacement for Rolling Stone? Oh sure, RS is now the Tiger Beat for people that can't admit they're closer to retirement than rebellion. However it stopped writing interesting music reviews long before Lester Bangs died: it was the zine that funded research pieces for great journalism. Pitchfork is busy talking about increasingly mainstream music. However the NPR article you provided cut to the chase: here's a paragraph about a neat band, now listen here. Here's another few. Have a great day! Do we need album reviews longer than 100 words now that we can stream the good stuff right away? Not really. They're fun to write, but so are amazing regex tests. The links are more valuable than a second paragraph. We no longer read articles to build a list of purchases for a future trip to the record shop. No one needs to sell the sizzle as hard when the steak is already on the plate. Music journalism can focus on band interviews, studies in trends, and making weekly compilations instead of hard-fought annual ones.
The joys of working in college radio are numerous, but having the first exposure to this kind of music is at the top of my list. There are few things that beat the weekly music intake for physical copies that get mailed to us, and opening a package from a promo company and finding stuff that turns out to be incredible. Even while "belonging" to a station, I still listen to some of the ones you listed, such as WFMU, who is a big inspiration for me. I will say that while Pitchfork is talking about increasingly mainstream music, they still conduct some great interviews and have some really interesting music news articles. But their reviews and rankings are bland at this point. flagamuffin, Jagwar Ma is a great band, that's cool that you're giving them a listen! NPR music is much better than Pitchfork at this point if you want to discover new music. Not only that, but remember that discussion we had about top 50 lists? Well check out NPR Music's 50 Favorite Albums of 2013 if you haven't already. Not only are they not ranked numerically, but it covers a ridiculous range of music, from mainstream Indie Pop (Haim) to World music from a small country (Latvian Radio Choir).
I love physical music. It hurts me that I don't have physically the music collection I have digitally, and if I ever come into extreme riches I will immediately buy hard copies of albums until I can bathe in them. Mmmmmm I'm getting a weird feeling of tangible jealousy
I would love to buy more physical music. It's a high cost to acquire a good collection of music physically, unfortunately. It's interesting that my record collection is fairly dissimilar to my itunes library, and my somewhere growing 8-track and cassette tape collections are turning out the same way. I'm definitely going to miss the weekly intake when I'm off on co-op again in January.
I thought I was the only one listening to Triple J! By the way, Jplay is a good site to keep track of what's hot on Triple J. Because of the time zone difference I can only listen before 1pm or after 10pm for the better music (Midnight programme is usually less good) so I use Jplay to not miss everything.
I finally got to the end of the Pitchfork top 50 where they waxed emotional on downloading mbv illegally ten months ago -- "we all remember where we were." This was my response to that. Or something. KEXP is the one I tend to listen to, never heard of Triple J. Seems like everyone's got their own source these days, obviating Pitchfork completely unless you're one of those aforementioned people who likes to talk about Animal Collective at parties. Really prefer the taste of the people at NPR anyway -- almost done with this Jagwar Ma album, it's wonderful, going on my 2013 list for sure.