Behind the Blogs: MOG Music Network

Welcome to version 2.0 of our series Behind the Blogs, in which we interview the bloggers and thinkers who are following the music business changes that affect us all.

Andrew Phillips has to keep a lot of people happy.

As the editor in chief of the MOG Music Network, Phillips is responsible for creating a daily stream of music news and content that will appeal to anybody and everybody interested in indie pop and/or hip hop.

That’s quite a challenge in and of itself, but when you consider the fact that Phillips and a “lean, mean team” of four other editors do this by skimming the cream off of the 1,300 music blogs that are in MOG’s network, it starts to look downright crazy. Especially when you consider that Phillips and his staff produce some original content of their own. “We’re doing big things,” Phillips says, not immodestly.

But what’s most interesting about MMN and its intriguing combination of professional and amateur content is that it gives the lie to the idea that one side has to win this raging Pros versus Fans criticism debate. We spoke with him about this very issue, and here’s what happened.

There’s this huge debate raging between experts and general consumers, over whose opinion is better, or more important; there’s going to be an anti-Chris Weingarten panel at SXSW in 2011! But you sit on both sides of the fence. You have pro curation, some pro content, but most of what MMN offers is sourced from amateur sites.
The fact that we’re on both sides of the fence is very intentional. As far as a grand, expert versus masses debate, I think there’s value in both things. I think that often, when these debates happen, it really shortchanges readers and users, and breaks them into two categories: big music nerd, and pop idiot who likes whatever. But because of the internet, and how much it’s opened things up, there are so many different kinds of music fans.

At MMN, and at MOG in general, we’re not so much interested in that old school, top-down kind of music criticism or journalism, where someone says, “I am the ultimate authority, I tell you what to like, I tell you what’s cool, I am the arbiter of cool.” That’s a very old idea, and there was some interest in, and validity to that, but nowadays it’s all about finding out what you like, as a listener, as a reader, and figuring out how to find other things you’re going to like. And so that’s why when I say we’re on both sides of the fence, and our primary focuses are indie pop and hip hop, that’s a pretty wide range, and the reason we’ve kept things open when a lot of places are going very niche is that we have faith that people aren’t so divided into such ridiculous micro-genres anymore, and they’re more interested in discovery and things we find approachable.

When we’re choosing what we want to syndicate and what we want to pull out from our aggregate feed, we say, “Who’s approachable? Who’s talking about music in a way that will get people interested in it?” And sometimes it’s a kid in a basement who’s got some insight into this really obscure artist or trend that nobody’s heard of, sometimes it’s one of our editors doing a very traditional Q&A with an artist. There’s just so many different types of readers and music listeners that you have to find ways to simultaneously cater to them. It’s not really about the music journalist or editor making people come to them.

The MOG iPhone app, a large part of MOG's unique offering

But how do you square divergent opinions? If there’s a record that’s very divisive – Vampire Weekend’s Contra, for example – and half your writers love it, and the other half hates it, how do you get involved? Do you step in and take on the traditional role of arbiter of taste? Do you present both sides and just let people decide for themselves?
It depends. That’s a case by case thing. If there’s an album that’s genuinely up for debate, we have done a roundup of different perspectives in the past. Often, in those cases when it’s something that’s really controversial or something there’s no consensus on, we’ll step in and take a hack at it, because we have amazing experts in pretty much every genre of music. We’ve got a really wide range of things we can cover, and there really isn’t much that’s out there that I’m not confident that someone in my team can go into, bear down on and come away with something smart. Sometimes we read the review and say, “This is a really well-made argument, and we agree,” and sometimes we read a negative review and half of my staff goes, “Right on, we agree,” but I go, “No, I love that album,” but we’ll run it anyway, because of majority rule.

That’s a long way of saying there’s no one way of doing it. We’re all huge music fans, and we’re going through scores of albums every week, and we have opinions too.

Prior to MMN, you worked at Earplug and Flavorpill, which was edited with a very specific audience in mind. But in MMN’s case, saying that your audience is “music fans” is a little bit like saying “food eaters.” It’s really not very specific at all. How do you conceive of your audience? Do you try to at all? Or do you just trust that the combined instincts of your editorial staff will assemble something that will appeal to a sufficiently broad base of people?
[laughs] Flavorpill and MOG are very different. It’s a much more niche-based site that’s focused on early taste-making and things like that. As far as how we think of our audience, because my department’s also involved in the music service, we sort of wear two hats. So what we’re talking about right now is only about half of what I do. That’s worth noting. The music service, I agree, is pretty open, and the idea is that there’s not a lot of judgment. There’s not a lot of stuff that we would say is outside the scopeof that, because at the end of the day it’s a portal of discovery for everybody. As far as MMN, when we were doing aggregation in a different way, we kind of had the same approach, …and we found that it was sort of unfocused. The audience wasn’t coming together in a very coherent way. So we decided that we would limit ourselves to indie pop and hip hop, but do it in a discriminating way. So like, if Lady Gaga trips, that’s not news. However, it Lady Gaga does something really interesting, even though I’m personally not a Lady Gaga fan, that’s something that is relevant and that people will care about.

As far as how we envision our audience, I think of the audience sort of as my best friend and my ex-girlfriend, who are people I know. One of them edits a book, and the other’s going to school, she’s getting her PhD. These are people who are culturally aware, who like music and who are interested in emerging things, but they’re not people who are necessarily the hardcore blog readers and who are sort of nerds about it.

And in the past, these kinds of people and these kinds of audiences were sort of served by radio, and that was it. Because if you’re somebody who only has five minutes or ten minutes a day to devote to new listening, your options in the 80s and 90s were to flip on the FM radio and that’s all that was available to you. For the most part, that was mainstream music, hence the perception that people were unsavvy or uncool, or people who liked pop music couldn’t like other things. And maybe, for a time, that was true, but now with the advent of the Internet, with aggregators and these kinds of technologies, you can spend ten minutes and discover the most obscure or weird or niche specific type of music in the world.

And don’t get me wrong, we’ve got lots of hardcore music nerds who are very much involved, but the real audience that’s not really being served by any other publication right now, are the people who say, “I do have an interest, and I do have ten minutes or fifteen minutes to do this, but I don’t know how to do it effectively because I’m not one of those people who’s spent their whole life trawling blogs and doing that kind of thing.” Our hope is that we can reach out to those people and make them care about music.

I think that’s a good way of articulating why those boundaries have started to collapse. One final question. Because of how much exposure MMN can offer the sites in your network, do MOG bloggers ever try to curry favor with you? Have you been offered bribes, sexual favors, other weird stuff like that?

[laughs] I wouldn’t say “bribes.” Obviously, we can’t talk every day with 1,300 people, but we do have very close relationships with a lot of our bloggers and we work with them, especially now that we’re doing it in this format, to give them a sense of what we’re looking for and what we need, and so far they’ve been very good about not overwhelming us. People seem to have an idea of what’s appropriate and what we want to work with them on. So it’s a pretty direct conversation, and sometimes there’s stuff we won’t run, or something that someone sends in that’s not right for the day or is maybe a little out of date, btu for the most part those conversations have gone really well and nobody’s felt the need to bribe me yet. [laughs] We’ll see.

At the end of the day, it should be us bribing them, because they’re the ones that are writing all this amazing stuff, and we get to use it, y’know?

Tagged as: behind the blogs, mog