Bookmarks: Some stuff to read on the internet - the pop papers

Nick Neyland takes space in Culture Now to consider the future of the music writer. In passing, he also suggests that the days of Lion Rock and Raggle-Taggle flat-pack genre creation are at an end:

The creation of new micro-genres has certainly waned since the music press was drained of its power, although it could be argued that it was relatively easy to corral a group of likeminded writers to push new concepts onto the music world back then. A small batch of tastemakers, experiencing relatively minor competition from other outlets, could dream up daft concepts over a few beers at lunchtime and then easily foist them onto a large group of avid readers (how else to explain the ill-fated Romo revival of the mid 1990s?). A vast quantity of writers, all competing with hundreds of other music websites and publications, are going to find it much harder to coalesce ideas about genre and other grandiose concepts.