Does Kanye’s Twitter Mark the Death of Music Magazines? [Qotd]

There’s a captivating conversation happening over on the music internets today about technology and the state of music magazines. The idea: Kanye West is Tweeting so prolifically and Ustreaming so earnestly that he’s totally outmoded the normal magazine profile.

Of course, there’s no debate that the web has totally changed the manner we discover music. But now, with our favorite artists tweeting among us, revealing themselves 140 characters at a time, it sounds as if the net is changing the way in which we discover musicians, too.

When Kanye West-that ever-controversial pop enigma wrapped in a goofy light-up suit-signed up for Twitter a couple of weeks ago, he garnered thousands of followers in an issue of days (currently, he has over 800,000). And he deserves it! Because he’s with reference to the most efficient tweeter there is, offering up reliably hilarious musings on fashion -” I jog in Lanvin” – interior design -” What do I need to do to get a straightforward persian rug with cherub imagery uuuuugh” -and, most relevant for our purposes, his home theater:

In the midst of his tweeting-of which there were initially, like, a dozen a day-Kanye hosted his first Ustream chat, going online (with some difficulty) and responding to viewers’ questions on his album, his blog, and whatever else.

Today, over at Slate , Jonah Weiner published an ” all-access, totally non-exclusive interview” with the musician, and by non-exclusive he meant that it was a normal magazine profile-of which Weiner’s written very many, o.k.-with information culled entirely from Kanye’s personal internet output. At first of his piece/project, Weiner asked:

In the face of a mountainous info dump like West’s, isn’t the essential work of profiling-building from the raw material of everything someone says and does toward a more focused sense of who they’re-as relevant as ever?

On the Sound of the town blog at the Village Voice, Zach Baron thought that maybe Weiner was missing the point:

Artists don’t need magazines like Slate to convey their words to the public anymore; recently, they’d rather do it themselves, and the technology is at point where they may be able to. Where Weiner and Slate see a stream of knowledge desperate in ought to the mediation of knowledgeable, West sees a chance to skip the middleman.

And that’s explicitly what Kanye’s looking to do-to exploit technology to bypass the media middleman. After his mother’s death in 2007, or, more specifically, after some small flare-up during which he was possibly misquoted, Kanye typically stopped giving formal interviews altogether. His problem with them, he explained in a YouTube video, was:

You say what you are saying and then you definitely get paraphrased. I wanna get approval over the shit.

That’s just what Twitter affords artists: unmediated, unfiltered access to their fans, where they get final approval of everything they say, or type. And it’s not just Kanye, whose personality and the Twitter platform combine for a match made in overshare heaven-most artists at the present time might be found revealing themselves to their fans, without a publicist (maybe) or a magazine writer filtering them.

Yesterday, on her Twitter (and without the threat of Kanye West interrupting her), Taylor Swift reported that she was eating Fig Newtons when she heard her newest single come on the radio. I’m unsure if following @taylorswift13 would give me any great insights into Taylor Swift the artist, or what she means to the pop music landscape, but identical to her eating Fig Newtons and then getting super excited when she heard herself on the radio is only the kind of keyhole glimpse into her real life that magazine profiles often set out to capture.

As social media continues to rework from something people elect to do to something people do exactly, which you could bet that musicians, and all other artists for that matter, will continue to exploit the services as tools to promote themselves and, to the extent that they’re any different, their brands and wares. But the question now becomes, is this the sort of access we wish? Will we trust the artists to tell us their story, or is that better left to the professionals? [ Slate and Sound of the town ]

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