I suppose that in order to protect myself, I’m not going to mention many of the names of publications mentioned, nor am I going to state that all of my observations here are factual. Nevertheless, it should serve as an example of what many writers in the industry are facing these days. UPDATE: BUT I’M JUST GONNA SPILL THE BEANS LATER ON.
Brenocide summed it up perfectly in his satirical article “Why We Need To Stop Making Metal Music.” It wasn’t that he had a problem with it, but that his inbox just kept flooding with promotional materials every hour on the hour. It was like that for me too, until they finally decided to start giving several publicists the weekend off, so that my inbox could finally breathe. You may think, “Well, Grim Lord, you’ve got the best job in the world. You get to work with all these great bands and you get to interview them. Some of these guys are even legends.” Yeah, that’s true. I won’t deny that I do get some enjoyment out of this even into my eighth year, but regardless of all the amazing opportunities I’ve had come my way, there’s just one problem… I still work at Walmart. Not that I have a problem with Walmart, (who still seem to pay) a livable wage for my current living conditions, but this wasn’t the kind of life that I sought out for myself. First of all, I’ve written some major interviews in a few publications and have had my work published on several occasions. I’ve covered thousands of records, and that is no mere exaggeration. There are even times when I have to revisit the old blog, because I literally can’t believe that I was able to cover that much material in such a small amount of time, and so goddamned thoroughly. If you don’t believe me, check out the earlier work where I literally gave play-by-plays of every single moment of every song on a fucking album. Where did I even find the time to do that?
In any case, I’ve had quite a run in this industry. As we are expanding our content a bit beyond music, I’m not really sure how far we’ll go – but we seem to be getting more viewers than we have in years, and I’d consider that a good thing. That being said, the whole “self-sufficient” model that I had planned in my head never panned out quite the way that I wanted it to. There are many factors for this, one of which seems to be the clickbait model, which I’ve already discussed in my article involving Corey Taylor. Instead, I’m going to focus on the “volunteer work” and “exposure” illusions that people are being fed in this industry. Now, I know for a fact that there are a lot of young people who love to chime in about music, movies, games, books and other pieces of media and do not get paid for it. Some of them write very deep and thorough opinions of these pieces. Take Steam or Goodreads for example, where you will find some rather professional and well-structured opinions, in addition to Metacritic and other avenues. None of these writers may have made so much as a dime, but they felt the need to get their opinion firmly pressed and that’s all there was to it. Product reviews, whether good or bad, are marketing and we must always consider ourselves as marketers of a product. Though the difference between online marketing through product reviews and selling someone a product at the local Walmart, is that I’m actually being paid an hourly wage to recommend and sell a product – sometimes one that I know nothing about, nor have ever used in my life. Though when I’m penning a review for the internet, it is most certainly coming from experience. You’d think that anyone would make money for that, but they don’t. I’ve heard on some of the larger underground sites that they don’t pay people and would rather them consider this volunteer work in order to support the bands. Sure, I guess I could see that – but when does a volunteer become a professional writer? When does it get to the point where he or she can place “writer” on their resume? Is one expected to have a degree in journalism or some level of creative writing before they can consider themselves a part of this trade? I’ve covered events independently, never having stepped foot inside of a college classroom. I’ve worked with men and women who have decades of experience within this industry and don’t like to deal with amateurs. They don’t send me certain albums for my health, rather; they send me these albums because they know that should I cover the disc, I’m going to give it a strong, professional opinion. That opinion may not be the most well-worded, nor might it be essay length (though I always end up writing more than I thought) but it does come directly from my personal experience and opinion on a piece. Perhaps that’s why they like my work.
In the past, I’ve had friends come up to me and say, “Well, why don’t you ask them to pay you, or negotiate a price?” The problem with that, is that aside from tax issues on several sides of the gamut (because our government makes self-sufficiency so much fun) is the fact that there are always other people out there who could and will do it. Gladly, because it’s “the best job in the world!” So why wouldn’t they? Again, this is nothing against the great men and women that I work with in PR, I’ve heavily respected them for years and try to cover as much as I’m physically and mentally able to do at current, but the fact remains that there is no shortage of low hanging fruit primed and ready to do this job. Since releasing our album, I have been surprised at the number of websites and blogs that exist around the internet – more so than did when I first started this work almost a decade ago. I can almost assure readers that many of these sites are either bound to Google’s Ad$ense model or that they’re completely rogue volunteer pages that serve mainly to garner more press for acts in the scene. As far as larger magazines are concerned, they used to pay various sums and some still do – but many have decided that they either just don’t have enough in the writer’s budget, or that they would rather keep all that money generated by malware ads to themselves. In my case, it was the former. I completely understand why I stopped receiving payment for New Noise (Update: which I know longer write for) and that competition is strong and print costs are very high. They still run a print magazine, which is astonishing and quite difficult to do in this era. Though I cannot say as to why much larger sites, some which snowball my feed with articles about Metallica and Ghost every five minutes, aren’t paying their writers a dime. (Update: It wont be much longer before they’re using AI to generate their articles and I suspect some already have.)