DiS is the end…

The retrospectively hilarious thing about my time as albums editor of Drowned in Sound is that when it started I felt like I was coming in to help out as it wound down. Maybe I was. But the ‘glory days’ — which I essentially missed — actually only really lasted a few years, while the wind down lasted over a decade. That’s good going.

DiS had evolved from a music blog called The Last Resort that Sean Adams had founded in the late ’90s. It had grown massively during the great indie boom of the ’00s, which had culminated (as I understand it) in a deal with BSkyB to basically be its music site, but (as I understand etc) in the summer of 2008 BSkyB got cold feet and took up an option to back out, which pulled almost of DiS’s funding. An office of people was made redundant and there wouldn’t be another office. But this wasn’t entirely apparent to outsiders, and the digital infrastructure and reach of the site remained fairly massive, not least because of the popular forums.

In the summer of 2008 I was living in Bristol, in my fourth year at Metro and had resolved that I would soon ‘go freelance’. I wanted to do some longer form writing and had got in touch with DiS. I remember very little about the limited about of time I wrote for it before the BSkyB ‘incident’, or the period immediately after, but by the time I’d left Metro and gone backpacking at the start of 2009 I appear to have inveigled my way into what was left of the DiS ranks; sometime around my return and move to London in April (let’s call it ten years ago precisely) I was offered a sort-of-job: two day’s work a week as albums editor. I think I’d vaguely hoped there might be enough money for me to have an ‘actual’ job. But if I’d been given one it I suppose it would have paid an absolute pittance and I’d have just quit when I was hired by Time Out at the end of 2009 and that would have been that.

Instead I lurked around for a decade. At the beginning I poured a completely insane amount of time and effort into it, completely out of whack with what I was being paid, not because Sean was expecting me to, but because I didn’t have much better to do with my time and given I had DiS’s clout at my disposal it was just infinitely more fun to indulge that than trying to hustle up more freelance. I’d moved to London able to go to pretty much any festival or gig I wanted. I went on the Camden Crawl when it was popular and sat in some VIP room where I immediately saw Noel Fielding, which was very exciting in 2009. I went to a festival in Iceland, where I caught a fish, saw the northern lights, and our guide literally phoned the airport and had our international flight held for us after we came off the road on the drive back. I missed my flight to a festival in France, and they sorted it out. I went to Glastonbury. I went to Poland. I went to Holland. I went to ATP pretty much any weekend I wasn’t at another festival. I didn’t have any actual money but aside from that small point DiS was pretty much my dream job for a while, and certainly helped me get most of my rock journalist fantasies out of the way. It was amazing.

By the end I had far far far less time to commit, so I suppose in a weird way I had given myself a pay rise by incrementally ramping down the amount of actual work I was doing. But I think throughout I brought essentially the same thing to the table: I was organised enough to maintain a group of writers and get a steady stream of content out of them that kept the site fairly dynamic. I think DiS would probably have been just fine without me, but I’m proud that I recruited a lot of the new blood that sustained it over the years and proud that so many of those people went on to be ‘proper’ music journalists, and I’m proud of most of the ones who didn’t.

I slightly struggle to remember exactly what happened when and with whom, but I suppose for me the peak DiS era was maybe 2012-ish… Loosely when Cate, Luke and Gary were doing features, news and photos, Wendy doing singles, and Sean had much more time for the site. The rest of us were good at writing and logistics, but Sean was the ideas person, really — aside from being a really good writer, his instincts as a music journalist were superb. I’m sure he had some bad ideas, but I can’t remember them. I really loved the band takeover weeks we did — Grizzly Bear was a particular favourite, you should check it out — and when they stopped coming then I suppose that’s when you get the feeling DiS was running out of steam a bit. It was sort of ridiculous that a small group of very unfulltime people who barely ever saw each other should be able to run a successful music website in a way approximately equivalent to what it had been when it had a number of actual employees. But we pretty much did.

What changed? Quite a lot, slowly. Prosaically the big problem is that Facebook and Google have ruined web advertising for everyone. But I think you would struggle to look at the site in early 2019 and the site in, say, 2011 and conclude that there hadn’t been a decline in volume of articles published and site personality. We did some great stuff to commemorative the awful passing of our writer Dan Lucas in 2017… that’s about the last time I remember the site getting collectively stuck into something.

Most of the reason for that is that people drifted away, or were unable to put the same amount of time into it. I went part time at Time Out, then full time, then became a parent, twice. Sean became a band manager, then worked for 6Music. One member of staff became a successful musician. We stopped having a photos editor for reasons that I never fully understood (Gary left, somebody was lined up to replace him, but he wasn’t given a staff email..?). Several staff left and weren’t replaced, sometimes because of money. In the end it was just me and Derek Robertson doing features, and for the most part we kept it ticking over, but didn’t really have the time to give it a sense of direction. We didn’t necessarily feel we had the authority, either. Sean was generally the opposite of dictatorial (he’d sometimes express his displeasure if you slagged off somebody he liked) but I don’t think either me or Derek felt like we should simply be moulding DiS into a reflection of our own tastes, so it became ‘a bit of everything’, there was no real editorial policy.

I guess also for contributors and potential contributors, unpaid writing about indie music was becoming less appealing. Guitar-based indie was very popular at the end of the ’00s and much less popular just a few years later. And in 2009, there was still a sense that music was worth something: Spotify only launched in October 2008. When I started at DiS you were effectively being paid the price of a CD plus exclusive access to music. By 2019 you were not. And a couple of things unfortunately happened to strain relations with the writers: a fallout over their lack of input into the 2017 albums of the year list, and the publication of a very inappropriate review (my fault) a few months later. People still wanted to write, but it was less appealing, I think.

This isn’t a moan — I’m just trying to rationalise the end of something that was a part of my life for over a decade.

I actually don’t think it’s really the end for DiS: the open not-even-a-secret is that the forums account for much of the traffic; the divergence between them and the editorial content has been apparent for years, something underscored when they literally went on to different platforms. They will continue and I believe there is a plan to do some editorial via the medium of Medium (which I suppose I’ve used here not because I expect DiS to use it but because Sean’s impressed me that it’s a better platform that my dilapidated old Blogspot). I’m not sure I see how it’ll really regain a genuine sense of momentum unless Sean — or somebody he hands over to — can make the time to plan and execute some sort of (*voms*) content strategy. Even so, the idea that DiS has ‘ended’ is at the very least a bit complicated. There is a site and there is a lively social media presence (run by Sean) and I can imagine that he’s reasonably happy with this state of affairs — DiS is ‘his’ again, and is inherently aligned with his tastes (the fact it often wasn’t in its later years was clearly a bit of a headache for him).

I am, it should be clear, absolutely fine – I have a job writing about theatre. I would like to keep writing about music in some way, though I’m not sure exactly how I’ll do that. Maybe… pitch? Somewhat self-parodically, my main goal for now is to write something for someone on the twenty-fifth anniversary reissue of R.E.M.’s Monster, which is due in October. That’s it for now. DiS was a good thing and ten years after the golden age is pretty impressive. I think it is quite possible that in some form or other there may be ten more. But probably not with me.