The Pop Corporation

It’s tough out here in these music criticism streets. If you have staff that need paying, you need to get the clicks in so the ad revenue, revenues. Is writing reviews about up-and-coming artists who might be future superstars going to cut it? Well, you have to wait ’til they become famous, and then link back to your old story to point out that you were there, maaaan.

And even in that instance, the bigger publications with better SEO wranglers will scupper you with their bait pieces when that time comes. You’re sat here trying to get people to read your thoughts about an artist everyone’s made their mind up about already, and you won’t lower yourself to write 15 consecutive pieces about the NFL player they’re dating or how they’re an environmental terrorist, or whatever it is.

So what do you do? Do you accept your fate and just keep plugging away? Doing it for the culture, yeah? What a laugh. What a notion it is, in 2024, to try and make some headway based on a model that last worked in the ’80s, when there was no internet and no shills masquerading as ‘influencers’.

The NME have slightly pivoted to interspersing their indie output with a lot of stuff about K Pop. Fair enough – there’s loads of K Pop fans in the UK and Europe, and of course, with pop culture absolutely bursting out there, some international traffic won’t go amiss, right? We’re now writing in a global landscape now, and besides, most bands when you tag them in a review on Instagram won’t even share it on their page, because they’re just too cool for that these days.

Well, the NME have done a quick piece – of no note really in the scheme of things, and just a little thing to drag some traffic their way and keep the shareholders happy when they look at a graph later in the year – about Wordle. Click here. We’re not joking. What’s the headline? It’s the very Search Engine Optimisation friendly:

Today’s Wordle answer and hints for #976 on February 20

The piece starts with some fluff about what you’re actually reading. Think of it as something like the old days, when someone would pad out a gig review by talking about the weather outside, like “it was a blustery Autumnal evening in London, but inside the Hammersmith Apollo, it was positively tropical as the band prepared to take the stage…“. You know the score. We’ve read it a million times.

It reads: It stay be several years old, but the wildly popular word game has managed to keep players hooked on their phone screens since 2021.

It’s for good reason that the game’s popularity hasn’t dwindled: it’s free to play and boasts a simple concept for a fun and engaging puzzle game that doesn’t take too much time. To play, you’re given six tries to work out each day’s answer, with each try providing another hint until you solve (or guess) your way into getting the right answer.

There’s a bit more filler before they get to giving you a clue about the answer to today’s Wordle.

1. This word is a noun and a verb
2. It refers to a person or thing that is equal to another in quality or strength
3. Begins with ‘M’

That’s literally some copy, lifted from the pages of the NME, formerly the New Musical Express like KFC used to be Kentucky Fried Chicken. Now, it might seem like this is all poking and jabbing at the NME, but really, it’s not. It just shows you how weird the world of journalism is now. Once, in some previous golden period, we were all buying copies of our favourite magazines and there was financial investment into the things we liked to consume.

This has obviously changed.

In recent weeks, Rolling Stone magazine has resorted to sharing little more than photos of Sidney Sweeney in a figure hugging red dress, with barely a comment. It’s just ‘look, here’s a hot young actress to look at’. Not too long ago, ‘Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?‘ was a fine piece on the pages of Rolling Stone, but that was 2011 – things have changed considerably since then.

The NME’s strapline is: The world’s defining voice in music and pop culture: breaking what’s new and what’s next since 1952. And we believe that the people in the offices of the NME still strive for that, but exist in a landscape where Google’s algorithm rewarded their Wordle piece a spot on their latest news feed for ‘music news’, rather than, say, the recent longer form piece ‘Kaeto: surrealist artist bringing a punk spirit to modern trip-hop’.

With subscription fatigue hitting a high, and piracy becoming more prevalent for young, broke people, what are established music and pop culture supposed to do? Can’t ask for money, can’t wrangle Google without writing SEO fluff. These are unusual times, especially given the merging of Pitchfork with GQ, which saw thinkpieces galore writing about writing, rather than writing about new music. Again, SEO bait, rather than championing small artists who need the promo.

We’re certainly not smart enough to work out a solution for whatever happens next, but y’know, we can still do it for the culture we guess, because the culture is still out there, even if it’s increasingly difficult to find the sign posts for it.