Planet Sound

» see teletext.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Planet Sound started in 1997 on Teletext Ltd's service, reachable through ITV and Channel 4, and it took its name from the Pixies track "Planet of Sound". Stephen Eastwood edited it first. John Earls took over in 2001 and stayed until the last page, long enough that most readers thought of the magazine and the editor as the same thing. It had an ancestor in Blue Suede Views, the music section on ORACLE in the 1980s, where a teenage Earls had his first reviews printed.

The format was news every publishing day and reviews every week, with best-of-year rankings for albums and singles each december. None of it could carry a photograph or a scroll bar. A review had to survive being one screen of blocky characters that arrived when the carousel brought it round and vanished again on its own schedule. What that produced was writing with the fat cut out of it, because there was no room for any.

The reputation went well past the medium. Original Planet Sound copy was reprinted by the BBC and NME, and picked up by Uncut and Drowned in Sound. It reviewed demos sent in by unsigned bands and gave The Twilight Sad the first review they ever got. Maximo Park and Hope of the States both had early coverage there. Meanwhile the magazine's own website was left unattended after may 1998 and did not properly return until may 2007, which tells you where the company thought the audience was.

This was a British object that needed a British signal, so I have only the other half of the story. Music discovery for me in the same window ran through internet cafes in turkey between 2002 and 2005, mp3 files pulled down inside a paid session with the artist names misspelled by whoever had ripped them. Nobody had chosen those tracks and there was nothing to write back to. Planet Sound's whole value was the opposite of that: a named person picked the records, put his name at the top of the page, and let readers argue with him in print.

~ the dossier ~

~ the void ~

The letters page was called The Void and the people who wrote in called themselves Voiders. That is a small detail with a lot of weight behind it, because teletext had no reply channel. You could not comment on anything or reach anyone in real time. Getting your words on that page meant sending them in and waiting to see whether an editor thought they were worth the space, and the community that formed around it was shaped entirely by that filter.

Musicians read it too. When the final edition went out, Paul Heaton and Nicky Wire both wrote tributes into it. James Graham of The Twilight Sad said afterwards that he read Planet Sound every day and that a lot of people his age found their favorite bands there. Writing at that length, on that grid, for a decade, is not a format anyone would pick on purpose, and it still ended up being where several bands were first taken seriously.

~ the switch-off ~

Ofcom set the ending up in january 2009 by reporting that after 2014 there might be no justification left for a public service teletext license. DMGT read the room and announced on 16 july 2009 that Teletext would stop broadcasting nearly everything except its holiday business. Planet Sound readers were told the magazine would run to january 2010.

It did not get that long. The switch-off was pulled forward to 14 december 2009 on Sky and 15 december on every other platform, so the last Planet Sound went out on a monday about six weeks before the date its audience had been given. The Guardian called it a true one-off and a warm haven of musical discussion, which reads like an obituary because by the time it was printed it was one.

~ the long tail ~

Earls set up a record label called WET Records and carried on writing criticism elsewhere. Planet Sound turns up in every retrospective list of what people miss about teletext, usually with someone claiming it was more trustworthy than the printed music press it was competing against, which sounds like sentiment until you remember the BBC was quoting it.

There is a coda that says more about the ending than any of the tributes. Teletext kept its license after it stopped putting out editorial, and on 27 may 2010 Ofcom fined the company £225,000 for shutting down part of a service it was still licensed to provide. The regulator punished them for killing Planet Sound early. The company paid the fine and formally closed the whole operation on 28 june 2012.

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