Stop acting like you produce anything even approaching orignal content 90% of the time. Yeah, you.

The average music blogger?
Also, irony of ironies, this photo is
from  BusinessJournalism .org and
doesn't attibute the Flickr user the took it from.

So it bugs the hell out of me that every music blog jumped all over the news the LCD Soundsystem Shut Up And Play The Hits DVD (and Blu-ray!) was coming out in October.

Why did this upset me?

Because they all acted like it was breaking news when the movie's been on pre-sale at Amazon for a while (I bought it a week or so ago) which means all these sites either just got a press release about it, or one of them wrote about it and everyone else decided not to attribute in order to make it look like they were "breaking" news.

Pitiful.

We live in a time where many, many people--too many of them professionals willing to blur ethical lines--either completely forsake or obscure any form of attribution when they write something.

Now it's one thing when a local music blog steals something from a post of mine, or does a local round-up and does everything in their power to link to any post but mine even if mine was up a week earlier. In Chicago they're upstarts and I'm reasonably established. And many of them just want to throw a "fuck Tankboy" attitude which is totally cool with me. It's what the new guard does to the old guard! Jeebis, I hope they think they're better than me because then that means they have a fire in them to be one of the best, and I can respect that. (O.K., sidebar, the more I think of it the more this actually isn't cool, on the non-attribution front, because it's just bad form. Take pot shots at the old guard and try to tear them down but you gotta cite them when you're writing something you discovered through them.)

No, I'm talking about larger music sites that rarely write anything truly original and base most of their news on press releases or cannibalizing another site's post, merely writing it in their own snarky voice instead of the snarky voice of the site they stole it from. And JESUS CHRIST, REALLY? WRITING FROM A PRESS RELEASE? How about doing two seconds of research to give some context to what you're writing. Or, better yet, do what I did after seeing Shut Up And Play the Hits and go online to see if there's a release date.

Be smart. Be inquisitive. Be a writer, goddamn it.

Hey, another professional music blogger, maybe?
Also, another image from  another site
that doesn't attribute where they got it from!

Let's stay with the LCD Soundsystem DVD for a sec and work through that. We all know James Murphy is very careful about his image and plans everything he does. His retirement of the band threw everyone into a tizzy but no one ever really talks about (and still seem to be more than willing to look past for drama's sake) the fact Murphy said he was retiring  the physical band. That doesn't mean LCD Soundsystem as a recording entity is finished. But talk like that detracts from te drama of the moment so why parse words and point that out? And when Shut Up And Play The Hits came out much was made about how it would only appear in theaters for one night! Which led people to believe that would be the only time they could see it. Which led lazy music writers to parrot that faulty assumption ad nauseam. And even when the documentary aired a second, third and fourth time people still acted as if it was some finite audio visual resource. EVEN THOUGH IT WAS ALREADY ON PRE-SALE ON AMAZON.

Look, I'm glad nowadays everyone has access to being a content creator and has the power to exercise their voice and all of that, but fuck people, stop being so lazy about it in your search to constantly pump stuff out. People may think you're a trusted resource now but they will catch on, and you will go down. It might take a while, but it will happen.

So:
Research for context.
Attribute honestly and transparently.
Don't reblog press releases.
Ask questions before you write the exact same thing everyone else just did.

That's not the whole kitnkaboodle, but if you follow those basic tenets, and are willing to write lots of your own original content, you're on the road to being successful.

Please, I want you to be successful.