Can an independent music blog survive in America?

Ann-Derrick Gaillot Jun—29—2018 12:48PM EST

Thirteen years ago, writer and third-generation Angeleno Jeff Weiss got in on the early 2000s blogging boom, starting his blog Passion of the Weiss with a focus on Los Angeles music and culture. Today, the site, better known as POW, is one of the few independent music blogs to have survived the rise of online, corporate media. In just over a decade, it’s gained a reputation for unique incisive music criticism, particularly about hip-hop, and interviews with up-and-coming artists across the country.

Over the years, the blog has amassed a long list of bragging rights. As Weiss recently detailed in a Twitter thread, POW was one of the first outlets to cover then-burgeoning rapper Kendrick Lamar, the first outlet to interview then-unsigned rapper Kevin Gates, one of the only independent music blogs to interview Lil Wayne, and one of the only outlets anywhere to feature an interview with Frank Ocean. Also in that thread, Weiss announced that for the first time the all-volunteer blog would be appealing for recurring reader donations to keep the site alive. POW’s Patreon launched in June and, as of this writing, 104 people have signed on to support the much-beloved blog, meaning that one more independent music outlet may have a chance to survive.

In order to survive, expand the site, and start paying our writers, POW has launched a Patreon. Donations of any size are immensely appreciated. https://t.co/T5oOfTRXM1
— Otto Von Biz Markie (@Passionweiss) June 19, 2018

Weiss spoke to The Outline via phone from his hometown about the growth of POW, the death of alt-weeklies, and why independent music outlets are still crucial to journalism and music industries today.

What was the independent music blog landscape around the time you starting Passion of the Weiss in 2005?

It was incredibly exciting, such an open book. Most of the major online publications really didn’t have an online edition. There was a vacuum. All these blogs were just popping up everywhere, and everyone would be just arguing and linking. All these different people were coming together from all over the country bonding over esoteric music and breaking bands. You would be able to learn about old UGK rarities and screw tapes but also the new mp3 from a band like Voxtrot or Wolf Parade or something.

It was a really communal vibe, because there were only maybe like a couple hundred people that were doing it. It feels clean in hindsight compared to the branded content, sponsored, heavily more corporatized media world that we now inhabit. It can’t be stressed what a different world it was before social media. Maybe you’d find out about a band via another band’s MySpace page, but blogs were their own thing. It was a fertile creative discourse and a community of music lovers that loved discovery and sharing these kind of curios. And my blog really didn’t start as a rap blog. It literally started as me complaining about Los Angeles in the mid 2000s.

How did your goals for the blog change?

What the blog did that was so valuable was it obliterated the reality your parents had to know somebody or you had to go to a really good graduate journalism school to get a job. The blog liberated it, because everyone could read your half-baked ideas. I was working as a business journalist at the time, making no money, and I just was so fed up with it. I was 22, 23, I loved reading these blogs and I was like, Okay, I’m just gonna start doing this. I’d go to a lot of shows. Whatever band was getting buzz, I’d go to their show at The Echo or Spaceland in Silver Lake and Echo Park in L.A. I remember seeing Mobb Deep at the House of Blues and they were just terrible — it was the height of their G-Unit phase — so I wrote a long piece about that.

By the late 2000s I started to bring on other writers, and over the last eight or nine years it’s really turned into what I would call more like the modern version of a zine more than a blog. Tonally, it shifted to be hip-hop specific. But we had an instrumental grime columnist. He’s writing more about bass music in general now that instrumental grime’s heyday has kind of waned. We have a reggaeton columnist. We have a guy that covers just New York rap. We have someone that is covering just L.A. We’ve had a Bay Area columnist.

There’s just so much music out there now, especially with rap, that doesn’t necessarily get coverage. Until the ad market is not dependent on the amount of clicks you get, music discovery will never be a priority for places as much as it used to be. That’s never going to be their bread and butter, and that was always the bread and butter of blogs. Probably the premiere engine of music discovery now is Spotify’s Discover Weekly algorithm and that’s a little terrifying. It’s a pretty good algorithm, I’ll give it to the algorithm, but there’s a human touch that gets lost.

Gradually, I think the blog became kind of a farm system for websites. A lot of the writers have gone on to work at The New York Times, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, Vice, everywhere.

I like your comparison between blogs and zines. Zines have this obsessive, personal quality where people can go all out on something super niche. Do you feel like that’s something that’s been lost in online music journalism?

Definitely. It’s really hard for writers to experiment with finding [their] own voice. And if you if you’re writing exclusives for a big publication, you probably won’t get the chance, for valid reasons. As an editor my goal is to help them to find their own individual voices or be weird. I can’t tell you how many terrible weird posts I wrote on the blog that are now deleted. They were awful, but they were weird and sometimes they were funny.

There are very few places to do that [now]. There are very few places to write like an honest takedown of someone. But we didn’t like Coloring Book [by Chance the Rapper]. We probably had one of the only negative reviews. Not to say that we’re some kind of unvarnished truth tellers or anything; the blog is 99 percent positive. But we’re not connected, we don’t rely on ads, we’re not going to piss off an advertiser. We try to be honest. And I think a lot of publications [do], but there is something different when it’s just a small collective of writers. All these people have written for free, every single one of them.

Thankfully, the Patreon has raised enough money that we will start to pay writers in the fall. And I couldn’t be happier about it. My ideal has always been to try to make it be experimental and [an outlet where] no artist is too small. I’m not naive enough to think that tens of millions of people that want to read stuff like that but I do believe that like maybe 100,000, 200,000, 300,000 are really interested.

“Until the ad market is not dependent on the amount of clicks you get, music discovery will never be a priority for places as much as it used to be.”
— Jeff Weiss

How have you kept a volunteer-run music blog going for 13 years?

It’s been a loving sacrifice is probably the best way to describe it. There’ve been a lot of late nights where I’ll be drunk at 2 o’clock in the morning and go, Oh my god, I need to edit a blog post. I can’t tell you how many times that’ll happen. But I think there’s something valuable about things that are homemade. The Patreon makes me really happy because I can start paying writers and not lose money.

I’ve probably lost like tens of thousands over the years, if you really factor it in. The website has never had a big sponsor advertising or anything. When it first started there was a naive hope that the site would be able to make enough money off blog ads. We did for a while, maybe a hundred dollars a month here and there. There was a period where a musician here and there would take out an ad on the site. Eventually, there was a company called IndieClick. They worked with a bunch of big publishers and they hit me up. There was a period where we were making four or five hundred dollars a month on a good month. That, to me, was like a king’s ransom.

Eventually, about five years ago, they were like, We’re shifting our focus to only the biggest, biggest sites. And I think that’s probably emblematic of a deep return to the American capitalist system where the big fish win but the small fish get eaten. A lot of blogs have shut down. It’s wild to think of our original blogroll. None of those blogs even exist except for Aquarium Drunkard and Gorilla vs. Bear.

Why do you think Passion of the Weiss outlasted so many of them?

Probably stubbornness, refusal to quit. I didn’t necessarily start the site for altruistic means. I started the site to give myself a voice, then it became something else. In the last five years it became one of those things where it’s like, Alright am I going to pack it up? What am I going to do, because blogs are dead. If you really look right now, Instagram and YouTube is everything. The blogs are like No Jumper, Say Cheese, Anthony Fantano. The one consistent thing they have is there is no writing, and that’s a shift in our culture to a post-literate society. It’s not being melodramatic; that’s the reality. It became a thing where I felt like if I was gonna shut it down then I was also turning my back on a bunch of artists [for whom this] would be the only place I could get them covered.

@passionweiss I salute you once again
A post shared by Lucrative.mgm@gmail.com (@03greedo) on Mar 20, 2018 at 1:36pm PDT

I also saw on Twitter that you talked about stories that you could have sold to other outlets but chose to put on POW because it’s not connected to somebody profiting off of it.

Definitely. Drakeo and [03] Greedo I would say are the two. In terms of Drakeo, he was locked up. My initial interview with him was for my L.A. Weekly column about a year and a half ago. L.A. Weekly got bought by Trump-supporting crypto fascists, and I would rather die than write for them [now]. But [with my next story on POW] it was a local story, it mattered to L.A. I didn’t want to call up my editor and be like, Oh will you pay me like 250 dollars to let me interview this guy in jail?

And not to shit on anyone who did, but for a piece that’s heartfelt and sincere about rife inequities in the criminal justice system and the meaning [these artists] have to a specific region, it just felt so weird to put it anywhere but Passion of the Weiss. It’s one of those things where it’s like, why not just write about [an artist] for your site and give them their first break. First time 03 Greedo got mentioned was on the blog. Drakeo, the first time he got mentioned was on the blog. In journalism we’ve been watching certain sections of the food chain just get hacked away. Alt-weeklies are basically gone in any real meaningful sense. The Portland Mercury or The Stranger or The Chicago Reader are obviously still viable alt-weeklies. But The Village Voice has been basically hacked to pieces, L.A. Weekly was hacked to pieces. Creative Loafing was hacked to pieces. And who knows how long the other ones are going to last.

I can’t even tell you how many times when I first started, I’d find a rapper and be like, Oh nobody’s written about them. And you’d be like, oh wait, the Houston Press has written about them. Well, they’re not there anymore. It’s crazy. Two of the greatest capitals in hip-hop are Houston and Atlanta. They don’t have alt-weeklies. L.A., another crown jewel of hip-hop, no alt-weekly. New York, of course, no alt-weekly. And it’s all fucking financial mismanagement, lack of imagination, and corporate idiocy. I’ve watched that happen at so many levels. Now it’s kind of come back around where [blogs] no longer feel dated. It kind of just feels like an old [dive] bar or something. Now that we have a Patreon, I plan on doing it as long as I can. I want to make sure that the next generation of writers has a place to start [because] I’m so proud of the writers that have written for me. I’ve had some really amazing writers come through the site.

On the POW Patreon page it says that donations will help you keep from losing writers to bigger publications. Can you talk a little bit about that?

I can’t tell you how many writers we’ve had — at least a dozen — who if you can’t pay [they can’t write for us.] And I don’t blame them for a split second. If I can’t pay a writer, of course they can’t afford it. A lot of people become full-time writers and when you’re a full-time writer, as I am, you only have so much bandwidth. I could never afford to pay [them] a full salary, but I want to get it where we can pay like $50 for a post or even $100 for a post and maybe they will think about writing it for us rather than [somewhere else]. My dream would be for us to be able to make like $100,000 a year, $150,000 a year and I can spend that on hiring writers, paying them real living wages, and allowing them to write the stuff that they really want to write most and not have to worry about traffic. Hopefully it’ll allow us to pay writers even a little bit, which will allow them to contribute more work and then more traffic and eventually we can have a combination. Because I think that’s ultimately going to be the future of media is some combination of user and ad supported.

It’s also important for the site to keep on having new generations of writers and new blood coming. I think we’re on like our fourth or fifth generation of writers, which is really cool and exciting. They all have different perspectives. We’re trying to get more women writers and we’ve done, I think, a pretty good job for a blog that never paid. I think we’ve done a great great job of having people of color [write for us.] But it’s hard. We’ve had several women writers and they’ve all gone on to get paid gigs and we’ve lost them pretty quickly. So I’d love to be able to continue that kind of diversity of opinions, perspective, gender, and everything else, and being able to pay people will allow that.

How much did the L.A. Weekly takeover influence your decision to start the Patreon?

I don’t like asking people for money, but the L.A. Weekly thing made me realize now’s the time. It’s completely shaped my entire view of everything. I wrote for L.A. Weekly for a fraction of what I would be getting from other magazines, and I did it because it’s L.A., it was a print column, and it really just started to mean something for a lot of the rappers. 03 Greedo has a hit called “Rude” and he’s like, “Fuck your opinion, LA Weekly think that I’m that dude” and that is because of my L.A. Weekly column. That showed me there is value to it that goes beyond what you’re paid, which I always knew, but it solidified it.

Then, to see the ease with which sinister forces could buy up and completely massacre something you love, a media publication you grew up reading, and then to see it happen in Houston and Atlanta all in this six month stretch basically by bad actors. It completely completely changed the calculus for the way I look at everything and hopefully it does for other people, too.