To actually contribute something on-topic, I have noticed that *good* music coverage is especially hard to find for older mid-level bands (the newer ones get covered plenty by Pitchfork, Perez, Brooklynvegan and all those other sites I'd rather not look at, but because of those sites and others, names of newer bands do get out there...). I do my best to keep tabs on the bands I've liked over the years at the Cock (How else would Shriekback's last 2 albums, both brilliant, get any coverage?), but at the risk of pissing people off, for a lot of those acts, the best press they get comes from the fact that people post their albums for free on Usenet and torrent sites. If their record's good, the people who download it will make a point of trying to catch them when they tour, and being that we're talking about a lot of "record geek" bands, they'll also probably buy a hard copy of the CD. The acts in question typically don't "work" the 'net like they should or find people who can, nor can they afford shelf space in book stores or Starbucks (which is where a lot of their over-30 audiences hear new music at this point). Plus, there's that problematic assumption that once you're over 30, you don't want to hear any loud, aggressive music, which doesn't affect the top-level bands like NIN that much (though, if Trent weren't putting out so much pro-downloading, pro-fan stuff in the press, I think he'd have lost his audience years ago), but for a band like Skinny Puppy, for instance, it's marketing death (not that anyone in the business has ever really known how to market Puppy who, like The Cure, should have been Grateful Dead kinda big by now). The book store/coffee house types have this fixation with quiet, earthy music that's really insulting at times to their core audience, no matter how much I like that new Aimee Mann record.
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