Welcome to the brave new world of music blogging


A recent post lamented the demise of two notable music blogs, Gavin Plumley's Entartete Musik and Pierre-Arnaud Dablemont's Journal. Now I find myself lamenting the demise of Norman Lebrecht's Slipped Disc, which has been replaced by the Sinfini clone seen above. Gone are the typos and bodged graphics that made Norm's old site so appealing. Replacing it is a slick and commendably transparent commercialism; for instance, as seen above, there is no attempt to hide that the banner advertising and editor's recommended CD come from the same record label. I have seen the future and it has slipped.

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Comments

Elaine Fine said…
Don't you think that Norman's blog was always about commercialism? From where I sit, in a household of "blog because you want to" bloggers (i.e. we don't do it for money) Slipped Disc seemed more of a gossip website that called itself a blog than a music blog.
5:57 pm
Pliable said…
Elaine, you are, of course, quite right. The sad thing is that the "blog because I want to" bloggers are becoming a threatened species, leaving the field wide open for the "blog because I have a commercial agenda to pursue" bloggers.

There is a technicl name for this disingenuous blend of editorial and advertising which Sinfini pioneered in classical music and which Norman Lebrecht has adopted: it is called 'native advertising' - http://www.theguardian.com/media-network-outbrain-partner-zone/native-advertising-quality-scalabilityhttps://digiday.com/publishers/native-ads-or-advertorials/
6:15 pm
Anonymous said…
Slipped Disc is to blogging what the Daily Mail is to journalism. Thank you, my dear Overgrown path, for being the voice of those who still care about integrity and quality.
9:22 pm
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