What makes for good music journalism?

General Discussion
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i swear this is more than a transparent plug for my own works, tho it is partly that.

But what makes for good interviews, content, features etc in y’alls’ opinion?
Or in other words, why do you like magazines like Cure, Vijutoke, Club.Zy, etc etc?
i don’t imagine it’s ONLY bc of the pictures - tho having those well arranged in 300+ dpi has got to be a part of it~

are there any magazines that consistently run good, engaging content?
what kinds of things that an artist/band could talk about are interesting to you?
are there any particular features in some publication, physical or digital, that stand out in your mind? so far i can only think of the killing Kyo with a pebble one lolol

me personally, i got a few take free magazines as handouts when i bought CDs, and i bought this compilation book by Arena 37C of all their features of ナイトメア - for me it’s an incredibly valuable time capsule of my fav band & their style changes throughout almost ten years
i bought it imagining one day i’d understand Japanese well enough to practice translating the interviews myself… but that day has yet to come, so for the most part it’s ended up to me a photobook with well set but nonetheless entirely unintelligible text.

as far as the plug - i’m trying to start up my own Take Free magazine, to promote the bands on my label, a la BP Mag & such.
i’m wondering how long-running magazines keep their works fresh & compelling, & would appreciate any advice in that direction~
also! i understand at least a few members of this site also run their own publications, & i would very much be down to check out what you do if you’d want to link to it!~

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What an interview makes an interview good is actually the answer of the artist. You can have a damn good question but if that question doesn’t really get answered well, then the interview has a bad feeling afterwards anyway.

However how to do you even get the attention of people to read an interview? The main factor is that the band has an interesting band photo, which makes people curious about who they are.

And back in the days most of us bought magazines because of band photos. People scanned them and we collected them like crazy.

Club.Zy is kinda Vijutoke they work together with lots of content.
Cure was good because they focused on lesser known acts too and had just fun other features inside their magazine.(However they are gone now, because well they liked to future well known bands too much and lots of other features which were interesting are gone too)
Just check the cures out until vol. 60 or so. They are still interesting.

I would say, just publish things others don’t, but it’s hard if you don’t live in Japan.

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I have plenty of ideas but I’ll start with one for now: actually having interesting topics! You can write all the interviews you want but I won’t read it if I get the impression that the article isn’t a good use of my time.

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The thing is with interviews, sometimes you have interesting questions to ask… but then bands are like “We cannot answer those questions at all”…

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