The music press took another round of major losses yesterday, and this one comes with a detail the last one didn’t.
Veeps reportedly laid off nearly the entire editorial staff of BrooklynVegan, Revolver, Alternative Press, and Goldmine on August 4. Pitchfork broke it. Staff emails are bouncing back, with the exception of BrooklynVegan founder Dave Levine. The people still there were reportedly told the publications would cease operations.
Veeps is owned by Live Nation.
Read that part again. Live Nation books the tours. Live Nation owns or operates a huge chunk of the rooms those tours play. Live Nation sells you the ticket, and then the fees on top of the ticket. And for the last year or two, through Veeps, Live Nation also owned four of the publications that covered those shows. Yesterday it turned them off.
I’m not going to pretend I know what conversations happened in that building. But you don’t need inside information to notice that the company promoting the concert had also bought the outlet reviewing it, and that the outlet is the part that just got cut.
This is the second time this year
In April, Sony, through The Orchard, cut nearly every full-time position at Metal Injection, MetalSucks, and Blast Beat Network. Frank Godla was left running all three properties essentially alone, with one freelancer apiece. Greg Kennelty was out after 13 years at Metal Injection. Andrew Martins, who most of you knew as Hesher Keenan, went with MetalSucks. Sony had bought all three of them in 2022.
Two different owners. Two different corners of the industry. Four months apart. Same playbook: acquire the outlet, sit on it, then decide the editorial was the expensive part.
And look at what these places actually were. Goldmine started in September 1974 out of Fraser, Michigan, as eight pages of record collector ads. Alternative Press launched in Cleveland in 1985. Revolver arrived in 2000 and went heavy the following year. BrooklynVegan has been running since 2004. That is 141 years of combined publishing, and all of those archives now sit on servers owned by companies with no editorial reason to keep paying for them. Nobody has said what happens to that. Nobody usually does.
Goldmine ran a feature looking back at its first 50 years in 2024. It got about two more.
What actually got killed
This is beyond disappointing. For a lot of us, for a long time, these publications were how we got our metal news.
The consolidation of these music news aggregators under giant corporations has completely killed the editorial voice that many of us relied on. Not just to understand metal news and tours and reviews, but to discover bands that are beyond talented and rarely ever get the break that is well deserved.
That last part is the one nobody is writing about today. Everyone is covering the job losses, and they should, because people lost their income yesterday. But the quieter casualty is the band that doesn’t get found now. There is no algorithm for a writer who heard a demo and decided it was worth three hundred words. That was a person. Those people are gone.
Where that leaves the rest of us
This is exactly the reason why I started Weapon K Media. And it’s hard. I won’t lie.
Sourcing content from press releases and handshake agreements with various promoters and record labels, so I can provide the appropriate information to help bands get discovered, help them grow, help people find information about shows and find unique new experiences, this is not easy to come by. Especially being a very small fish in a very large pond that is now seemingly run exclusively by large corporations. I am drowned out most of the time.
This is not meant to be a piece about me being sorry for myself and what I’ve started here. I actually really enjoy what I’ve started this year. It has been a lot of fun and I look forward to continuing to grow it. But the reality is that this is a side gig. I don’t get paid to do this. I don’t get special treatment from anybody. What I get is the opportunity to post about the thing I love, which is metal, and be able to share that.
Which is exactly why I feel terrible for the people who lost their jobs over this. Most of them almost certainly started out doing it as a passion project too, back before anybody was writing them a check for it. That sucks. There is no version of this where that doesn’t suck.
The independent stuff is still out there. Lambgoat, Blabbermouth, No Clean Singing, Invisible Oranges, Metal Insider, Toilet ov Hell, and a long tail of people running sites and newsletters out of their apartments for no money at all. Go read them. Go subscribe to them. The ones that survive this are going to be the ones nobody thought were worth buying.
Weapon K Media is going to continue to run and continue to grow.
I’m not going anywhere, and I’m not for sale.
Source: Pitchfork, via Lambgoat. April layoffs previously reported by Lambgoat.