Chuck Klosterman: preference

Transcript context

…Why did Spin magazine fail? Even I subscribed. Well, the first thing I would say is, it started, I think, in 1988 and was still going pretty well till 2006. It didn’t really fail. It had a long life. Why is it still not a factor in the way the music industry operates? Well, lots of reasons. One, magazines in general matter less. More significant, though, is the idea that when I was reading Spin as a college student, you would read about a band like Pavement, or you would read about a band like Teenage Fan Club, and those records weren’t even out yet. You would be reading this review of someone trying to describe what the music was, and if you would like it, and if it applied to you or whatever. Then you’d wait for the record and finally hear it, and you would’ve had this whole built-in superstructure in your mind over what this music was, and now you’re finally hearing it — whereas now it would be, you would hear about the band at the same time you heard it for the first time, and that kind of takes away the significance of a magazine like Spin. I read Spin because I thought it had the best writers about music, but I wouldn’t need people to write about music if I could instantly hear the song itself. So I think that’s part of it. What made Grantland so wonderful?…

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