Lately, I’ve been thinking about something a stranger said to me last year outside a Porta-Potty at the Hopscotch Music Festival in Raleigh, N.C. It was 1 a.m., and I was caught between the hyperdrive antics of a music journalist at a music festival and the beacon-like pull of my hotel bed after a 14-hour day. In other words, I was in the perfect mindset to be assaulted by job anxiety.
“Oh, wow,” a voice called out from beside the shitter. “Is that a press badge? A music journalist! I thought you guys were extinct!”
The face that went with the voice was hard to make out, thrown into shadow by a trucker hat, but I saw that the woman was wearing an …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead T-shirt, with her wrist covered in multicolored bands, the hallmark of a festival pro.
“We’re still around,” I replied in a way that, for some reason, sounded like an apology. (Again, I was exhausted.) “As long as there’s music, we’ll show up to write about it.”
She laughed and moved to enter an adjacent Porta-Potty. Before slamming the blue plastic door shut, she offered one last observation: “Good! I miss when you guys were mean, though.”
I spent my walk back to the hotel and, frankly, large parts of 2025 thinking about that comment. I miss when you guys were mean. What the fuck did that mean? I felt like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, having an epic crash-out about someone calling me “funny.” What? I’m not mean enough? Am I just here to amuse you by trashing albums? I’m a journalist, not a hot-take clickbait machine!
Once I calmed down, I saw her point, to a degree. Music journalism in 2026 is, if I’m being kind, in flux. I think a lot about the global trends and how they trickle down to what I’m doing here in Vermont as the humble music editor of Seven Days. What is the goal of our music criticism? What influences drive our coverage decisions? What could the music section do better?
I’m not the only one asking these questions. There’s a reason they call us critics: Many music writers are critiquing the very industry they’ve helped create.
Music journalism isn’t dead.
Amelia Vandergast
But it is on life support.
“Music journalism isn’t dead,” Amelia Vandergast, chief editor at culture website A&R Factory, wrote last June. “But it is on life support, hooked up to drip-feeds of metrics and data, kept alive by vanity rather than values.”
That’s not some flashy, headline-grabbing sentiment but a statement backed up by plenty of recent disconcerting news. Music journalism, and criticism in particular, are in dire shape. Many of the big culturally relevant platforms — the Los Angeles Times, NPR, Vox Media and the Washington Post — have experienced significant layoffs in recent years. It’s not just legacy media, either: Universal Music Group, YouTube, SoundCloud, Spotify, TIDAL and Amazon Music have all slashed jobs. Overall, entertainment and media industries shed more than 17,000 employees in 2025, according to a study conducted by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a Chicago firm that tracks labor market trends. That number includes plenty of journalists. And that’s to say nothing of the barren wasteland that is modern-day freelance music writing.
With so many jobs and so much capital disappearing from the scene, there’s less pure coverage to be found. Just look at what happened to longtime online music magazine Pitchfork — the closest thing the 21st century got to the bygone works of critics such as Lester Bangs. Pitchfork was a swaggering, sometimes funny, sometimes cruel and highly critical voice on new music.
There was a time when some musicians and fans lamented how vicious Pitchfork’s reviews could get. Who could forget its 0.0 review of Australian band Jet, featuring a link to a video clip of a monkey pissing into its own mouth?
But in 2015, Pitchfork was acquired by Condé Nast. In 2024, the parent company folded the music outlet into men’s style magazine GQ, resulting in layoffs and hand-wringing over the future of music journalism.
Over the years, no-holds-barred music criticism has faded, replaced by what some call “poptimism.” That’s a trend in which outlets — perhaps reacting to decades of super-serious rock critics stroking their goatees and writing endless tomes about Radiohead — started to prioritize covering pop music. The motivation was best described by former New York Times music writer Kelefa Sanneh. In a 2004 essay, he wrote that listeners should “stop pretending that serious rock songs will last forever, as if anything could, and that shiny pop songs are inherently disposable.”
The downside of poptimism? A dulled critical edge when it comes to reviewing modern music, according to Sanneh, who returned to the topic last year to write a piece for theNew Yorker titled “How Music Criticism Lost Its Edge.” In it, Sanneh notes how middle-of-the-road album reviews have become. Outlets seem increasingly hesitant to give a bad review to the likes of Taylor Swift, Lil Nas X or any new album in general, leading many to wonder what the point of modern music criticism is.
Another side effect of poptimism: There are fewer clicks for new, unknown music. With so much of the discourse focused on either pop stars or nostalgia acts dragging their aging asses from amphitheater to amphitheater, there’s less bandwidth to shout out new indie artists.
Writer Steve Hyden, a cultural critic with Uproxx and former editor at the A.V. Club who has penned numerous books about bands and the music industry, addressed this subject brilliantly.
“Most readers will not click on reviews of artists they have never heard of, no matter how acclaimed they are,” he wrote on his Substack, Evil Speakers. Hyden pointed out that an indie act such as British art-rockers Still House Plants might get reviewed side by side with, say, a Beyoncé album, “but only one of those reviews will be widely shared on social media.”
That is a phenomenon with which I am all too familiar. Statistically, Seven Days’ album reviews are some of the least-read things on our website. Not only are the artists we review unknown on a national scale, they are also often unknown even in Vermont.
While clicks thankfully don’t dictate coverage decisions at Seven Days, they do raise questions for me and my intrepid crew of freelance music writers: Are we just shouting out local artists for creating a record — no mean feat — knowing they almost certainly will not make a dollar from their art, nor receive national attention? Or should we channel the greats, such as the Village Voice critic Robert Christgau, and eviscerate what we find lacking?
To be fair, Seven Days has a history of being down to get nasty, critically speaking. Former music editor Casey Rae famously broke up a band with a bad review, and I’ve called out more than a few albums as stinkers. And yes, in this tiny community, I still hear about those reviews to this day.
Where do we go from here? The industry is either changing or melting down, depending on whom you ask. Maybe writer Dan Brooks had a point when he wrote a piece for the website Defector titled “Culture Needs More Jerks.” Maybe we have all gotten too nice — or rather, too deferential.
I’m not so sure, though. Criticism isn’t really about telling readers that something is just great or total crap. I’m here to help you explore art. Maybe I like the exploration; maybe I don’t. But if I’m doing my job right, I’m opening doors to artists and ideas you might not have considered.
Toward the end of 2025, Seven Days cut down its review page. For years, we reliably reviewed two local albums a week; now we’ve reduced that to one — or, occasionally, a handful of mini reviews. The goal was twofold: to help keep our rising print costs down and to allow me to focus on chasing bigger stories. We’ve added a couple of new small features — New Release Radar and 7 Shows to Watch Out For — to keep up with music news.
While I received a little pushback on the changes, I actually expected more. Seven Days is one of the only local media outlets that regularly engages with and reviews the work of Vermont musicians (which is its own problem). It is vitally important to the health of our music community to maintain these spaces and give local artists the support their work deserves, which is why we still run album reviews, despite their low hit-count online.
Some of the best and most successful musicians to come out of the Green Mountains in decades are getting ready to drop new albums this year, including King Tuff, Robber Robber, Noah Kahan and Dwight + Nicole. It’s a big moment for Vermont music. How will we meet it?
I’ve got some ideas I’m planning on rolling out this year, but I’d love to hear from you, dear reader. Do you want more reviews? Do you think we’re too nice? Are there stories we’re missing? Email me at farnsworth@sevendaysvt.com.
In the meantime, my advice is to click links on the bands and artists you’ve never heard of. Embrace the mystery! We’re in a transformative period of the industry, but the social media-driven, critically handicapped form of music journalism that has been in vogue lately might not last much longer. As Vandergast so nicely put it, “People are growing tired of empty content. Readers can tell the difference between a headline and a howl of truth.”
Maybe I’m being a poptimist myself, but I agree. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Can I Kick It? Musings on the Future of Music Journalism”
This article appears in The Media Issue • 2026.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!