Addicted to Noise

» see addictedtonoise.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Michael Goldberg spent a decade at Rolling Stone, from 1983 to 1993, as a senior writer and West Coast music editor. In 1994 he left, put $5,000 in with the programmer Jon Luini, and published the first issue of Addicted to Noise on 1 december 1994. The web was about eighteen months old as a public thing. Nobody had established what music writing looked like on it, so ATN just did the thing Goldberg already knew how to do, at length, and put it on a server.

The one genuine first belongs to the reviews. Addicted to Noise was the first online magazine to run audio samples alongside new album reviews, which sounds trivial now and was not then. Print criticism had spent forty years describing sound in adjectives because it had no other option. ATN could describe the record and then let you hear thirty seconds of it in the same window. That is the entire argument for music journalism moving online, made in 1994 by people who had to build the plumbing themselves.

The masthead was better than the medium deserved. Dave Marsh and Greil Marcus both wrote for it, as did Ed Ward. Joey Ramone and Lenny Kaye turned up as guest columnists. The interview list over six years ran to R.E.M., Neil Young, Patti Smith, Sonic Youth, Tom Waits, Lou Reed, Metallica, Eminem and Prince. Frank Kozik, the poster artist, drew the logo: originally a coat of arms built out of two syringes, later redrawn with two guitars instead, which tells you something about who was making decisions by the end.

Turkey got a dial-up modem into my house in 1998, four years into ATN's life, and American rock criticism was not what I went looking for with it. My music habit ran through mp3 files and later through internet cafes, not through long-form reviews in a second language. The paradox is that ATN's founding insight, that the writing should come with the sound attached, is exactly the thing my generation got instead of the writing.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

Addicted to Noise arrived at the moment when a record label's entire web presence might be one page with a tour date on it. A monthly issue with real bylines and working audio was, briefly, the most serious music publication that existed online, and it had that position more or less to itself for two years. Rolling Stone did not have a comparable site. Spin did not. The competition was other people's homepages.

Goldberg's other bet was that the magazine could be daily as well as monthly. ATN ran news alongside the issues, which is now the standard shape of every music site on the internet and was then a novelty, because a print magazine physically cannot do it. That daily feed got good enough that MTV and NME started using it as a source, which is a strange position for a two-man operation to be in and probably explains why somebody eventually bought it.

~ what got buried with it ~

In 1997 Paradigm Music Entertainment bought both Addicted to Noise and SonicNet. Paradigm was then absorbed by TCI Music, and TCI Music was acquired by Viacom in 1999 and folded into MTVi, MTV's online operation. In three years the magazine went from two founders to a line on a media conglomerate's org chart, and nothing about the journalism changed until the ownership caught up with it.

Goldberg stayed. He was made a Senior Vice President at SonicNet and served as editor in chief of both properties until june 2000. The final issue of Addicted to Noise went out on 3 july 2000, a few weeks after he left. MTV kept SonicNet, which was the bigger brand and the one with the streaming audio business attached, and had no obvious use for a critics' magazine that a competitor had built.

~ the long tail ~

The people survived it. Jon Luini had been doing internet audio since before the web and kept doing it. Goldberg co-founded another indie music site, Neumu, in 2001, then consulted for ARTISTdirect and MOG, then wrote books. In november 2022 BackBeat Books published Addicted To Noise: The Music Writings of Michael Goldberg, which is the magazine's name reattached to a physical object twenty-two years after the website carrying it went dark.

What did not survive is the economics. ATN proved you could put serious criticism on the web and it proved you could not easily be paid for it, and both of those results held. Every music publication that followed either sold to somebody bigger or died, usually in that order. The syringes on the original logo were a joke about addiction. The version with guitars was drawn once the magazine had owners who would rather it were not.

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