In Praise of Listings

At the end of July, the American musician, writer and storyteller Gabriel Kahane published an article in The Atlantic titled “A Love Letter to Music Listings”, in which he laments the loss of music listings in New York City. He describes the collapse of the ecosystem that once nurtured artistic discovery, with publications like Time Out, The Village Voice, and The New York Times providing detailed weekly guides. Gabriel is uncertain why listings no longer exist in the United States and pondered a solution in which performing arts institutions might work together on their own listings website. 

As the largest classical music listings and reviews site in the world, we feel well qualified to answer the question and explain why the US is so badly served by specialist cultural publications. Bachtrack publishes over 30,000 classical music concerts, opera and dance events every year. We have writers around the world and publish 150 reviews a month, 1,800 a year, over 25,000 in our existence, every one edited professionally in-house.

Mainstream newspapers across the US used to have music editors, writers who wrote previews, and published lots of reviews. Over the past 15 years, music editors have become rare, and music coverage has both shortened in length and frequency. As web analytics became more common, newspapers would have analysed the number of reads each of these pieces of content received, and the numbers would have been low, because classical music is a niche interest. It's much more productive to write about artists who are already well known. Kahane describes this as the “ouroboros of cultural journalism” in his article. 

They will have looked at the amount of relevant advertising dollars they receive from classical institutions and found it much lower than other sections, so they cut music coverage. And the listings which supported and went alongside the written content would have been an obvious section to axe too, saving large amounts of staff time. 

So now let's look online. 90% of advertising budgets are now spent online, so you might have expected listings sites to proliferate. Although it did start to happen in the 2010s, they couldn't really take off because the music industry didn't buy into supporting them. They were focusing instead on trying to find new audiences for classical music.

Whether orchestras, opera and dance companies choose to spend all their money on social media and big tech or whether they simply abrogate the responsibility by allocating their budget to a digital marketing agency that deals solely with those same tech names (because they are asked to prioritise reach above everything in the race to find new audiences), the result is the same. American cultural organisations are choosing to support big tech instead of the niche online magazines in their own industry, which they see as only talking to their existing pool of audience members.

They are the ouroboros.

Music journalists want to write about the people and music they're passionate about. They don't want to hash out yet another article on a big star name, cited by Kahane in his article. But they need to be paid for their contributions.

Magazines that provide listings, previews, reviews* and cover the industry for the real fans need advertising dollars to continue to exist. They can then afford to pay music journalists to write about more niche topics.

In Europe, Bachtrack has hundreds of clients who deeply appreciate the work we do to keep classical music visible and relevant. In the US, we have a few good clients, whose support we greatly value, who are keen to reach our extensive American audience and those who travel to the States for business or leisure and want to enjoy culture during their stay.

Listings and reviews sites have always relied on advertising to survive. That was the Time Out model too. Any country that doesn't support its cultural websites will eventually lose all its specialist writers and associated listings because no one should have to spend all their time without being paid. And if music promoters fail to grasp that, it's lights out.

*Bachtrack's independent authors are not paid for writing reviews other than a small quarterly thank you payment; we do, however, arrange press tickets for them. We never sell reviews, and reviews are never allocated because a customer has demanded it. The sales and editorial processes are independent. Read more about our business model here.