What is the Role of the Music Journalist today?

In the modern popular culture where music is part of every day life, the music journalist is incredibly important. From easy listening in your bedroom to heavy metal music in a rainy field in Donnington, music is an intricate part of your life whether you realize it or not. Virtually everyone will hear some form of music every day and this will be across a broad spectrum of mediums from live street music to the radio. This is brought to you by a range of people but the music that popular society is exposed to is decided almost solely by music journalists and to a certain extent bloggers. Traditionally the leading magazines of each genre will decide whether a band will make it and when leading to many bands not getting coverage no matter how hard they work. More recently, with the creation of social networking sites and sites such as ‘blogger.com’ it has been much easier to get coverage in places that would have been just impossible to without the help of a established magazine. Artists such as Arctic Monkeys and Lady Gaga made their own fame on MySpace and twitter or through other less conventional methods such as publicity stunts and free giveaways which left them being the ones being actively sought after by the magazines.