I’m about to take them off my RSS feed and my blog roll, but I did want to get one final kick in at the Maura-less Idolator. Two, actually. The first comes from Sasha Frere-Jones, who nailed the situation perfectly the other day when he said Maura had been replaced with “two iPhone apps that crash every hour.”
The other is in reaction to a post by the apps themselves. In a news piece on Nielsen Soundscan’s ranking of the best selling albums of the year and the decade, they make the usual comment about declining album sales, which they finish with “thanks in no small part to the advent of illegal downloading.” Now, I realize that as an all-pop-all-the-time site, they need to spend some time shilling for the major labels, but does that mean they have to be lap dogs for the RIAA, as well? Did they not notice how heavily most critical best of the decade lists are weighted toward the first few years of the oughts (Pitchfork’s top ten of the decade includes only one album made after 2004)? Albums stopped selling because more albums sucked, dimwits. I’ve long been amazed by the fact that the record industry, and therefore too many people who write about the record industry, refuses to make the connection between musical quality and sales. But that sort of thought is beyond the new management of Idolator—who are, after all, paid not to think.
So, goodbye Idolator. You’ve turned into that old house in the middle of the block that used to have really cool, creative people living in it, but is now full of crackheads. Let’s hope somebody bulldozes the place before the addiction spreads.
