This week, alternative rock’s bible, SPIN magazine, announced that it would eliminate the standard short album review from the magazine (and web site) in order to “reinvent the album review.” 21 staffers and freelancers will assess 1,500 albums over the course of the year, exclusively via single 140-character posts on Twitter.
If Tweets replace blurbs will people start believing there’s nothing more to say? We wanted to test whether 140 characters could substitute for, say, 200 words. So our critic, Ann Powers, performed what we’re dubbing a “magic capsule” test: she picked two of the nine tweets @SPINReviews has published so far and let them marinate in the watery environment of her brain to see what they’d look like as conventional short reviews.—Jacob Ganz
via Are 140-Character Reviews The Future Of Music Criticism?
