What Died When Spex Died
2018 was when German music journalism gave up the ghost. Not all at once, but in quick enough succession to feel like a punchline. Melodie & Rhythmus went first, then Intro and Groove, and then in December came the one that actually hurt: Spex, which had been running since 1980 and for most of that time occupied the specific cultural role of telling readers what to think about music in ways that occasionally made them furious. Few read it, fewer understood it, and it shaped the conversation anyway. That’s the paradox of good criticism—its influence always exceeds its circulation.
The causes were the usual suspects: declining print runs, a dwindling subscriber base, advertisers who’d already moved their money to Instagram. But music magazines had a problem that film magazines didn’t face quite as directly: streaming. Because at some point in the last decade, the question of what to listen to stopped being something you asked a person and started being something you asked an algorithm. You liked this song? Here’s another. You skipped that one? Noted. Here’s a playlist. The algorithm has no opinions, no context, no memory of what a record meant in 1994 or why it mattered that this one came out on this label in that city. It just keeps feeding you the next thing, optimizing for time-on-platform rather than taste.
Around the time of Spex’s closure, Max Dax—who’d been its editor-in-chief—sat down with Daniel Koch, who’d run Intro, and a pop theorist named Thomas Hecken for a conversation on SWR2 about whether pop criticism was actually dead or just displaced. What emerged was something like a reluctant mea culpa: that a criticism which had made itself deliberately difficult, which wore its own obscurity as a badge of honor, had perhaps taught its readers to distrust expertise rather than value it. That the magazines had become too comfortable being misunderstood.
I don’t fully buy that version of events. The structural problem is simpler and less flattering: we trained a generation to expect content for free, and then we were surprised when no one would pay for the writers who produced it. The Spotify recommendation engine didn’t kill music journalism because it was better at criticism. It killed it because it was free and frictionless and required nothing from the listener except passive presence. Discovering a record through an algorithm feels like finding cash in an old jacket. Discovering it through a piece of writing—a real piece, one that tells you something about the world the music came from—feels like someone handing you something they made. Different experience entirely.
I still think about Bandcamp as the place where some version of the older culture survived—not in the criticism but in the infrastructure. You can still spend three hours going deeper into some subgenre you didn’t know existed, following a chain of related artists and labels, which is exactly the experience that used to require twelve issues of a magazine. The prose is gone. But the sense of discovery, of a culture with actual texture, is still there if you want it.
What Spex provided, at its best, was permission: to take music seriously, to connect a three-minute pop song to a political moment or a philosophical problem, to say that the way a record is produced is as meaningful as what it says. I’m not sure who’s providing that permission now. Maybe no one needs to. Maybe the audience that wanted it finds its tribe through substacks and podcasts and other means. But something about the specific object—the magazine, the paper, the cover, the sequence of pieces that added up to an argument—is just gone. I miss it the way you miss a kind of restaurant that doesn’t exist anymore.