By Stella Cooper

My friends are still sharing videos, no matter how messy, of pure summer festival carnage. Whether that’s in the shape of music, or campsite antics, it still delivers enough comical quality to give The Inbetweeners a run for its money.

Glastonbury was already three months ago, yet footage resurfaces of absolutely timeless moments that I still snort at. It’s easy to consume, like a mini-movie of your ‘hot girl summer’ forever archived in Instagram’s aesthetic. 

Not once this summer has anyone, whether it be Reading and Leeds, Boomtown or another festival, directed me to a written review. We all seem to be invested and obsessed in our very own content.  It’s unlikely that a music journalist could catch my mate chugging on a beer bong upside down with a Slowthai mosh pit in the background. How could 200 words cover the atmosphere at a headline set when you can live stream it, or later, gloss a filter on that ‘lit af’ rave?

The truth is, we are all hungry for experience – something we can film and share and talk about to elevate our own social platforms. It’s a shift that NME, once the UK’s largest music publication, have taken into consideration. Poor reader figures lead to the collapse of their weekly print magazine in 2018, even providing it for free could not save the go-to music bible of its time.

However, music journalism has gone through a redemptive year, take ‘Club NME,’  the newly relaunched gig residency where Dave Grohl recently popped down for a surprise performance. In addition to the electronic publication Mixmag, who host their own weekly ‘Lab’ series of A-list DJs. It gets new and old fans to see how the brand is evolving.

[NME’s] poor reader figures lead to the collapse of their weekly print magazine in 2018

A journalist only needs to send a video link for a Peggy Gou DJ set to Facebook, rather than write about it. These events may get more likes, shares and interest than a small print review of an unsigned artist ever would.

So where can music journalism go from here, will we all complacently sit in our underwhelming unpaid internships?

Surely, music journos should also be providing real music experiences, to stand apart from the minefield of print. Get those Insta freaks on your side.

Image Credit: URF Sussex

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