Thinking out loud about food and music and blogs

Spurred by this post of Dave’s! I’ve been thinking about this lately—why, when there are so many “personalities” and individual critics associated with music writing, have so few been able to establish online outposts specifically centered around their own personal music-related narratives? Why are most music writers still working in either the blog framework (the here’s an MP3, here’s a review, here’s a tour update thing, generally on the press-release grind even when it’s coupled with more substantive personal/journalistic writing) or the writing-for-more-traditional-outlets framework?

I was thinking about it specifically in regards to food blogs, with recipes kind of being like the MP3. In both cases, the writers blog about the item in question, discussing its origin and the usefulness of it and what tweaks they might recommend, referencing other things as a matter of comparison/contrast, etc. It’s a service. Readers appreciate it.

But also a huge part of the most successful food blogs that I know of is just the pure aesthetics—the photos, the writer’s voice, the stories they’re able to tell about the food they’re suggesting you make. I’ve read nearly every word of every post on Orangette over the last several years, same with Smitten Kitchen, but could count on my left hand the number of recipes I’ve made from their archives. And that’s just mostly because I’m not a great in the kitchen. I know excellent home cooks that love those sites, too, and it’s not just about recipes—it’s about taste and editorial curation and storytelling.

And many food bloggers (the ones I mentioned, plus, perhaps most notably, The Pioneer Woman) have been able to turn what they do into a full-time job, or at least a very dependable side-project. Molly from Orangette is writing her second book—not a cookbook, exactly, but a collection of essays and recipes. (I read the first one and loved it.) Deb from Smitten Kitchen, from what I know, does the blog full-time and is working on a cook book. I’m going off the top of my head here but I know many food bloggers have parlayed their success online into gigs writing for print media, too, or bigger outlets online, while still keeping up their own main project (which always seemed like an unspoken goal of the people I’ve known who started music blogs—that they’d incubate there for a while and then move along to something bigger/better). They become able, financially or otherwise, to support bigger projects, quit their jobs, to support their families, partly or entirely. 

I could be just blanking here, but I can’t think of any music writer who is better known for his or her own work (and I’m thinking long-form/narrative/personal/critical, primarily) on his or her own personal outpost than work for another conglomerate blog or website or print publication. Maybe Nitsuh, before he went to NY Magazine? Maybe Pitchfork Reviews Reviews? But I know plenty of readers, including other writers, who will follow music writers around and read whatever they write, wherever they write it. It’s just almost never at the writer’s own personally commandeered web space.

Is it just that the way we interact with food and music, as components of our lives and therefore things to tell and be told stories about, is so totally different that it’s just naturally given rise to two very different models for how those things are written about online? Or were food-writing and music-writing just such totally different beasts to begin with that of course their manifestations online would be totally different too? Or is it that the pace and expectations to keep up with the pace of music “news” cycle just kind of screws writers up in a way that food writers don’t have to worry about? (Although, really, wouldn’t you think depending on search hits for stuff like “apricot clafoutis” would be just as dodgy, or moreso, than depending on “Obscure Band X”?) Or is it just that no one in music writing land has really tried the “here I am, a person, writing about this piece of music in both a personally narrative and service-y way, on a regular basis, at this one place online where I also sell ads”? Do food writers just feel less constrained by some arbitrary, publicist-churned news cycle? Or is it more about the music industry, especially the independent music industry, being so shit that no one’s out there to buy ads on those kinds of sites (unlike food bloggers, which have the whole “lifestyle” industry, which is not suffering the same fate currently)?

Questions!