Of course, the Internet isn’t the sole supplier of information, and it, like all other platforms, has its shortcomings. Still, its impact has been vast, and without it, contemporary minds like the world’s busiest music nerd, The Needle Drop’s Anthony Fantano, wouldn’t have the stage, nor the audience for him to make the mark he has on the music world.
Like many who’ve tried their hand at music blogging, Fantano first cut his teeth through more traditional avenues of broadcasting before he eventually became the self-made human vault of musical knowledge that he is today.
“It all started in about 2007,” he recalls. “I started doing an independent music radio show at a local radio station. The particular station I was interning at had recently gone from an all classical station to a news and talk station, so they were repeating a lot of content. So I decided to put together a demo or two and I handed it to the general manager of the station, and they liked what I was doing.
“We started out doing it as a podcast,” he continues. “It then eventually got on the air. At its highest point it was running on twelve different radio stations. I started a blog within a year’s time where I was doing the music blog and the podcast. But I wasn’t really getting paid to do the radio show, I wasn’t making much money off the blog that I was running, I didn’t have a lot of prowess when it came to web design and I didn’t really have the money to pay someone else to put together a really cool website. So after about a year and a half of doing the podcast, this radio show and running the website, I decided to experiment and try doing music reviews and music recommendations on YouTube, because in that year and a half I was observing the blogosphere and various popular music websites, I really hadn’t seen anybody try to review music on camera, so I figured I’d be setting myself away from the pack in some kind of way.”
From that point, Fantano has gone on to become the self described ‘world’s busiest music nerd’, a title that surely enrages some rather busy music nerds around the globe. Although truthfully, it’s hard to take issue with the title. The Needle Drop examines, in detail, an awful lot of music from a vast selection of styles and genres, all while pioneering YouTube music journalism.
“I’ll try to make sure I listen through at least one or two new albums each day,” Fantano explains. “I get music from a lot different places. It’s definitely mainly keeping track of the output of a lot of different music labels that I happen to follow religiously. There’s so many labels that do stuff that I look for: Warp Records, Constellation Records, Temporary Residence, Limited, Ghostly Internation, Mellow Music Group, and also keeping track of artists that I know that have a lot of buzz about them that are still putting out notable releases, or that viewers are asking me to take notice of. There’s also music blogs that I follow. There are some metal blogs that I like to follow and some hip hop blogs that I like to follow too. Like I said, I get a lot of it from the Internet, but it also comes at me from all angles.”
Though the popularisation of the Internet has afforded Fantano the opportunity to listen to, talk about and recommend music as a career, in his mind it’s not entirely without its negatives. The contemporary music cycle is remarkably different from the way it was, and not necessarily for the better.
“In my career it’s had a lot of positive effects,” he says. “I can do this show and can work for myself, but the negatives are balanced by the positives. I was talking to my wife about this the other day, and we’re both old enough to have lived through points of mainstream music distribution, when record labels were in control of what was popular and what wasn’t. There were definitely headaches that came with that. At some point in America, labels tried to give us this idea that swing music was having a revival or some bullshit, and were putting out really awful faux-modern swing bands like the Cherry Poppin’ Daddys and so on and so forth.
“There were a lot of forced trends, but at least there was a certain level of talent required. Labels were at least putting time and funding into these artists so that they could mature and progress and make good music. Nowadays, there’s a lot of underground artists who get a ton of buzz really quickly when they don’t really have a lot of knowledge of experience when it comes to performance or songwriting, and not that they couldn’t get that, but the lack of money that they’re making, and the force with which they’re thrown into the limelight prevents them from getting the chance to mature, and by the time their next album cycle comes around a lot of their fans are really not interested in what they’re doing, or I should I say their supposed fans, who aren’t fans anymore and are now fans of whatever hot buzz indie artist is popular next.
“There are a lot of people that don’t seem to be ready for the rush of fandom that comes, and don’t really know how to act in the limelight. Without that PR and marketing and without knowing how you’re going to keep people interested into the future, that limelight fades really quickly, and that’s most definitely a negative. A lot of these artists don’t really get a second shot – as soon as people stop paying attention to them, they’re kaput.”
BY KEATS MULLIGAN
