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Get in TouchThe former EIC of URB Magazine talks about the heydays of music journalism and how creative industries are adapting to AI.
Over the past 25 years, Joshua Glazer has had a frontrow seat to the various twists and turns in the professional lives of the creative class. He was a freelance journalist for alt-weeklies in the late-90s before the bottom fell out on that market, and he later served as editor-in-chief for URB Magazine as it transitioned from a community and genre-focused publication to a national, trendsetting media brand. When URB went belly up during the transition from print to digital, he started his own creative services agency, Content Curious, where he is now trying to map out a path in a post-AI landscape. We recently caught up and discussed how he’s navigated the seemingly constant set of challenges for the creative class, and how he plans to survive and thrive in an increasingly uncertain terrain.
Like so many others, I started as a music journalist, originally in Detroit in the very late ‘90s. I think 1999 was when I had my first thing published in a classic alt-weekly – RIP to pretty much all the alt-weeklies. From there, I graduated to working at national publications, eventually moving to Los Angeles to be an editor at URB Magazine, where I rose up the ranks to become the editor-in-chief. I was there until 2010, which was when the last print version was published. We kind of kicked around online for another year or two, but like so many other publications, we didn't stick the landing going from print to digital.
After that I went and spent a couple of years overseas and came back to LA in 2015, which is when I launched Content Curious, a branding and content studio working with a lot of music clients. We also started to build out more of a business around working with tech companies, wellness brands, and some impact brands, with a focus originally on editorial content, [before] moving into UX content and gradually into more strategic branding work.
Yeah, I feel like I caught the very tail end of the music journalist fantasy. The week I started at URB, they put me on a plane to go to New York and hang out with Prefuse 73 for 48 hours for a cover story. A month or two later, I got to go to Berlin for a whirlwind trip for another piece. It really felt for a hot minute like the Almost Famous fantasy of the music journalist right at the time when the economics just stopped working for such things and print not-so-slowly was overtaken by digital. No matter how many ways you try to slice and dice it, the model for digital is quantity over quality, which means more small stuff and not the big story writing that I think a lot of us got into it for.
At the same time the notion of critical opinion was flattened in a lot of ways when everyone could just access everything themselves and inform their own opinions and share their opinions. Everyone became a critic at the same time.
In that regard I'm conscientious of my particular hybrid power. My dream job as a music magazine editor, saying what's cool, what's not, in a lot of ways that wasn't supplanted by platforms right away, it was supplanted by bloggers. Most of them didn't make money, but they did it ‘cause they wanted to do it.
That whole blog era of music, that was sort of the gap between [media and social platforms]. I think about tools like Hype Machine. There were a couple of years where Hype Machine was like, you don't need a music magazine anymore. You got a Hype Machine and a Hype Machine is going to aggregate it for you. As the quantity continued to grow and grow, Hype Machine could cover way more stuff than we ever could as more and more music came out.
I think AI is different. I think that the current model we have for creative services is [ending]. Meaningful commentary and criticism as a business model is so long gone. That's what we've been talking about up until now – the end of criticism and commentary as a product in and of itself – and it's not been viable for a very long time. And that’s fine.
I divide it in my head in three ways. There's creativity, which is producing the stuff. There is commentary and criticism, where people come to get your take on something. And then there's creative services, where you are producing media, visual, text, video, in the service of another function. Creative services is producing something as part of a funnel that goes from the consumer who wants something, and the seller who provides whatever that something is, and you're the stuff in the middle that makes them aware, helps them find what they want, gets them the solution they need and makes those connections.
I think that's the era we've been in for quite a while. Creative services is really what sustains the creative class. People with that skill set, people who were able to pivot from creativity and commentary to creative services have thrived in the digital era. And that is about to be interrupted. Not entirely, but I do think that the reality is that sometimes work is work, and even the creative stuff requires a certain degree of rote work that has to happen in the bottom.
I wish I did. I know for myself, I have already been making the transition from writing, from the actual creation of content into the strategy level. I've gotten very involved in seeing what these AI tools can actually do and helping my clients utilize those tools. Because it seems easy, but you very quickly hit the wall with AI. I think you're gonna see a lot of people rush into AI, and then either gonna discover the stuff's good enough, or the stuff's not good enough, or the stuff never really mattered. It wasn't what propelled the consumer to begin with.
Absolutely, and you have to. I've perpetually been the…I don't want to say the last guy on the sinking ship, but I've been through it a few times now. I had to make the transition from critic to creative services.
I do think that ultimately as long as brands want to keep their hands on the reins to one degree or another, I think there's going to be space for people who understand the art of the science of communication to do it.
My advice to anybody who's in this, and who had a comfortable living making words, is you got to go up a level if you want to survive, thrive, whatever. You have to go up a level and start thinking about why your words work and frame that in a way that people can understand and frame that in a way that the AI can understand.
You can reach out to Joshua for a free AI copy consultation here.
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