NP: The Grammys

This post from Andrew Sullivan about the future of publishing struck me, because parts of it look very, very familiar. The music business started down this same path years ago, and still hasn't sorted itself out. The notion of a level playing field is a bit of a mirage, because writers outside of the most prominent aren't going to be able to "build their own brands" without help. Before he got on his long tail and free jags, I think Chris Anderson wrote some really important stuff about the need for filters in this brave new world when everyone is a writer or a musician, because 99% of all of this self-publishing is, let's face it, utter crap.

The question is, who or what are those filters? No one ever seemed to step up in the music world, but I remember a guy from the Knitting Factory saying they wanted to be one at SXSW five or six years ago, and they would have been a great filter. In the blogging world, I think entities like the Huffington Post and The Daily Beast are really interesting, because they're definitely playing the role of a record label or a publisher, in that they're both brands and aggregators, and from the latter, they ascribe an image of quality to their individual bloggers.

Now, that may work for blogs where it didn't for online music because blogs are a new form. So the question is, will traditional publishing look more like blog publishing or online music? And between the three of them, will a real workable model emerge?