After Spex

Spex closed in 2018. It was a German music magazine—the kind of publication that shaped what people in this country thought mattered in music and film, even if nobody actually subscribed. Prestigious in that niche, influential way. By the end of the year it was done anyway: circulation tanked, advertisers moved to digital, the whole print infrastructure collapsed the way everyone said it would. But music magazines had a weirder problem than just being printed on paper.

For years, if you wanted to know what albums or films were worth your time, you read critics. Or you didn’t read them yourself, but you knew they existed—people thinking seriously about music, making arguments for what was good and strange. Then streaming happened. Spotify, Apple Music, the algorithm ecosystem. Instead of trusting someone who understood the medium, people started letting the machine decide. You like this? Here’s ten more. It learns your taste and feeds it back to you, the perfect closed loop. Why read a music magazine when a recommendation engine can just show you more of what you already love?

Max Dax, who edited Spex, sat down with a couple of other people—an academic named Thomas Hecken and a journalist named Daniel Koch, who edited Intro—to talk about whether pop criticism had basically died. The easy answer is yes. The machines won. But somewhere in that conversation it gets messier. Maybe the problem isn’t that algorithms are bad at recommending music; they’re actually good at it. Maybe the real loss is something else: discovering something you wouldn’t have found on your own, an editor making an argument for something strange and new. The closed loop of personalization kills that.

Or maybe not. Maybe Bandcamp still has it, where weird music gets made and people actually search for the unexpected. Maybe we’re not less curious, just getting our curiosity fed differently now. Maybe the magazine era never survives the economics anyway, and I’m romanticizing something already doomed for other reasons entirely.